
Gutenberg’s moving type propelled Europe towards the scientific revolution - imartin2k
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/03/19/gutenbergs-moving-type-propelled-europe-towards-the-scientific-revolution/
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Merrill
It was actually the development of cheap paper that propelled the use of
Gutenberg's movable type. So long as either writing or printing was done on
very expensive parchment and vellum made from animal hides, there was not much
economic advantage from movable type because print runs on a very expensive
medium would be short. The cost of materials dominated the labor costs.

About 1350 the price of paper began to fall exponentially in England and
Holland. This made movable type economic almost 100 years later.

See Figure 5 on page 10 of "Prices and the Growth of the European Knowledge
Economy, 1200-2007" [https://www.diva-
portal.org/smash/get/diva2:384596/FULLTEXT0...](https://www.diva-
portal.org/smash/get/diva2:384596/FULLTEXT01.pdf)

The Moore's Law of paper prices was to printing as the Moore's Law of silicon
integrated circuits is to the internet.

~~~
chmod775
Radical idea: Could it be that both cheap paper and Gutenberg's invention
contributed directly?

~~~
nonbel
It wasn't either of those things. It was only possible due to the development
of novel ink:
[https://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/ink.html](https://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/ink.html)

~~~
jacobush
I'd argue type and ink were an integral invention.

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zachguo
Ironically this important piece of technology invented in China 400 years
before Gutenberg flourished in the West while made negligible impact in China.

The trajectory of history was so carelessly determined by a tiny factor,
different choices in writing system. Manufacturing a printing machine for
dozens of alphabets was much cheaper than making one for tens of thousands of
characters.

~~~
thaumasiotes
For this thesis, you need to show that movable type in specific, rather than
printing in general, was necessary and sufficient for the scientific
revolution. China made extensive use of printing, for things like important
philosophical works and also for things like recreational plays and novels.

And while the West used movable type, it often seems not to have bothered to
exploit the movability of the type. From the introduction to my reprint of
Smyth's 1920 _A Greek Grammar for Colleges_ :

> When the Department of Classics of Harvard University acquired the plates to
> _A Greek Grammar for Colleges_ by Herbert Weir Smyth (1920), the decision
> was promptly reached that this excellent and detailed treatise should again
> appear in print.

> There is in fact scarcely any sector of Greek Grammar which has not marked
> progress as a result of extensive research or else based upon ingenious
> combinations of existing data.

> If a revision of Smyth was therefore from many points of view a desideratum,
> it was clear that a complete revision would be an extremely complex task,
> and also, because of the difficulty and expense of making alterations in the
> plates, a very costly one. Many of the texts cited by Smyth have since been
> re-edited; some of his citations would undoubtedly prove to be in conflict
> with the readings of our best current texts. Yet it would be a vast and
> perhaps profitless undertaking to verify all the citations, make alterations
> where necessary, and change the commentary to the extent required.

> As it turned out, even the much less ambitious revision of Smyth as
> originally conceived has not been possible, largely because of financial
> considerations. Accordingly, it is necessary to list here exactly in what
> respects the present revision of Smyth -- which might more modestly be
> termed a corrected reprint -- differs from its predecessor.

> Some changes have been made in the historical comparative part of the work,
> particularly in Smyth's original introduction and here and there in his
> original Part I (Letters, Sounds, Syllables, Accent). A very few changes,
> again bearing on historical linguistics, have been introduced in Part II
> (Inflection). Prof. Sterling Dow has contributed a valuable revision of
> paragraphs 348 on the Greek system of notation and 350 d on dating.

> In addition, lists of corrigenda have been supplied by several scholars, and
> these have been silently inserted wherever appropriate.

> Perhaps one caveat is in order. The student unfamiliar with the
> reconstruction of assumed intermediary forms may sometimes be puzzled by
> Smyth's use of such forms with no indication that the actually occurred or
> else are purely hypothetical. It would have been tempting to mark all the
> non-existent reconstructions with the now traditional asterisk as is
> customary in works on historical linguistics.

> One important lacuna in Smyth must be pointed out since it has not been
> filled: there is no section on prosody.

So Harvard came into possession of the undestroyed plates for printing a
classic work, and wanted to update it with the last 40 years of research in
the field. But that was cost-prohibitive. They couldn't even adjust the
notation, since that would have required re-setting much of the book. They
_could_ insert whole pages, and they could make changes to a small number of
individual pages -- and both of those things would have been true if the book
had been block-printed originally instead of being set with movable type.

It is not obvious to me that Western printing with movable type offered all
that much advantage over Chinese block printing, leaving the logistics of the
writing system aside. Movable type made it easier to destroy works that didn't
sell well, because their materials could be cannibalized for new works. But it
didn't make it easier to reprint works that were in demand, and it didn't make
it much easier to produce works originally -- most of the work is in the
arranging, not the materials cost.

~~~
zachguo
I was talking about movable type rather than printing in general.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type)

Edit:

And an example in 1920 doesn't really apply to the early days of movable type.
There's a big difference between pre and post industrial revolution.

BTW in early 20th century, China entered its own Enlightenment because of
shattered state control and those efficient printing machines Western
colonials brought in.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Yes, I know. Check out the very first sentence of my comment:

> For this thesis, you need to show that movable type in specific, rather than
> printing in general, was necessary and sufficient for the scientific
> revolution.

My whole point is that movable type doesn't offer much in the way of
civilizational advantages compared to block printing, so it's very odd to
attribute Europe's success to its writing system. I agree that it makes sense
to attribute the choice of movable type over block printing to the writing
system. But saying that this choice "determined the trajectory of history"
seems like a stretch. Movable type vs. block printing is a choice of no great
consequence.

~~~
zachguo
I updated my previous comment before you posted this.

The link between the Renaissance and moving type is quite uncontroversial. The
impact of democratization of the press is hard to underestimate.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> I updated my previous comment before you posted this.

No, you didn't.

> The link between the Renaissance and moving type is quite uncontroversial.
> The impact of democratization of the press is hard to underestimate.

You seem to be vacillating between "printing" and "movable type". The link
between the Renaissance and printing is uncontroversial.

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bb101
If you're interested in topics such as these, I can highly recommend reading
Ian Mortimer's Centuries of Change [1]. The moving type features heavily, as
do clocks and looking glasses (mirrors).

One memorable example: thanks to moving type, women could publish views that
were, at the time, at odds with views in a male-dominated society. Previously
such manuscripts, being few in number, would have been easily destroyed or
restricted, whereas distribution of printed books became harder to control.

Books also reduced the stranglehold of education held by the clergy, with
women and common folk learning how to read and educating themselves with the
help of the printed book. The Bible was the best-seller at the time --
Mortimer quips that it was one of the world's first "self help" books.

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20493659-centuries-of-
ch...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20493659-centuries-of-change)

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_rpd
This is an incredibly uncontroversial thesis, but the article provides lots of
supporting statistics and graphs.

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nabla9
You can see the economic and political differences increasing in when you map
the locations of the prints and look what happens within next 100 years when
the number of printed books and pamphlets increases.

Scotland had eight printers by 1700, Russia had two and there were heavy
controls for what could be printed. Within 100 years Scotland became a center
for engineering, and many famous self taught inventors came from Scotland.

~~~
phreeza
Scotland probably also had a lot more bagpipes. A fact like this is not enough
to draw conclusions from.

~~~
paganel
You generally need a printing press to become a good engineer, because unless
you’re the new Leonardo you kind of need to read what other engineers and
knowledgeable people have done before you trying out new stuff. A bag-pipe has
almost nothing to do with becoming an engineer.

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k__
I'm coming from Gernsheim were they told us that, in fact, Peter Schöffer was
responsible to making Gutenbergs invention usable for the masses.

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skookumchuck
Each sparked a revolution in technology:

1\. speaking

2\. writing

3\. printing press

4\. telecommunications

5\. internet

Wonder what the next one will be!

~~~
randomsearch
Brain interfaces.

~~~
Roritharr
Imagine the speed and intensity of the Facebook/YouTube/Twitter/Reddit
comments section once you take out the necessity to type.

~~~
aswanson
Sounds very close to a definition of hell.

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devoply
So why Europe and not the East Asia?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_As...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia)

I personally like the theory that it was constant war and conflict which
propelled the scientific revolution. The need to compete and outdo others
which went hand in hand with the industrial revolution and the politics and
economics of the time that led to the french revolution.

~~~
zachguo
Because it's much cheaper to build a printing machine for alphabets. Cheap
transmission of information caused a grassroot intellectual explosion, i.e.
the Enlightenment. While in China only the ruling class could afford a
printing machine for tens of thousands of characters.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Huh? In China they just didn't bother with movable type. They _printed_
everything, using wood block printing. (Instead of assembling each page from
sorts, carve each page into the surface of a wooden block.) The _press_ looks
exactly the same.

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mci
Tangent: While I get the gist of Figure 1, expressing historical prices in
"daily wages" that disregard the place and the profession strikes me as sloppy
[1].

[1] [https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/earnings-in-
pol...](https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/earnings-in-poland/)

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sctb
A different but very related paper, “How the medium shapes the message:
Printing and the rise of the arts and sciences ”:
[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0205771).

