Printing press is a machine that uses inked plates to reproduce images or text on paper. Before the printing press, books were expensive treasures, and monks labored for years copying each one by hand. The printing press changed history by making written knowledge cheap and accessible.
The Chinese developed woodblock printing around A.D. 600. It involved rubbing impressions from carved images onto paper. The Chinese and Koreans later adapted this technique for type.
Around 1436, a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg experimented with movable type. In movable type, letters and other symbols are carved or stamped on individual plates. The plates can be fairly readily arranged and rearranged to form words and sentences. Gutenberg set letters one by one into wooden frames, applied ink, and pressed paper onto the letters. Scholars do not know if Gutenberg knew about movable type being used in Asia or if he came up with the idea independently. But movable type proved more practical for printing European languages. Only a few plates were needed to represent the letters of European alphabets, compared to the thousands of symbols used in Asian languages. Around 1450, Gutenberg began printing nearly 200 Bibles. About 50 survive today. Soon, people set up printing shops across France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. By 1500, millions of books had been printed.
In 1798, a German named Alois Senefelder invented a printing process, called lithography, that improved illustration detail. The offset printing press, developed in 1905 by an American named Ira Rubel, printed images from a soft rubber cylinder instead of flat plates.
Loading the player...Printing press in operation
Some modern printing presses are huge machines that copy tens of thousands of pages per hour onto continuous rolls of paper. The rolls are automatically cut into pages and put in correct order.
For more information on printing, see Printing and its list of related articles. See also Gutenberg, Johannes .
