History of Printing
For four thousand years after the invention of writing
in Iraq, all writing was done by hand, a character at a time. When people
needed a copy of a book, they had to pay a scribe to copy it out for
them by hand. Of course this made books very expensive, and only the
richest people could have them.
Wong Jei's block-printed scroll, 868 AD
Then a faster method was invented: printing. Somebody in Tang
Dynasty China, about 650 AD, had the idea
of carving wooden blocks with a page of text, then inking it and pressing
paper on the block to print a page. The oldest printed scroll we know
of - some Buddhist sayings - comes from north-west China, and it was printed about 700 AD.
The scroll shown here, which was printed in 868 AD, is also a Buddhist
holy text, like the Bible is for Christians.
People in China who were Buddhists believed that copying out these
texts would bring you merit, like good luck. This scroll was printed
by a man called Wong Jei, for his parents.
Chinese moveable type
This scroll was block printed - the whole page carved together -
but by the 1000's AD an alchemist named Pi Sheng in China had invented
the more flexible system of moveable type - carving each Chinese
character separately on small fired clay
blocks and arranging them to make words, so that the same blocks could
be re-used to make many different texts.
Gutenberg Bible
About five hundred years later, people all across Europe and Asia began to use moveable type made out of
metal, which worked better than the old clay type. In Europe, in the 1400's AD, Gutenberg used moveable metal type made from a mixture of lead, tin, and antimony to print a Christian Bible. Probably
printers in Europe had seen Chinese block printing through trade across
West Asia, but they seem to have come up with the idea of moveable type
on their own. They had, however, learned about rag
paper from China (through the Islamic
Empire) - you couldn't print onto parchment
or papyrus, so they couldn't
invent printing until they learned about paper.
Here's a video of a man making a 17-color woodblock print
Papyrus
Parchment
Paper
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