EOTO Com Tech - Printing Press

 

When researching the printing press, it amazed me how far the innovation truly has come from a time when there was no electricity to a time where electricity is everywhere. In its earliest forms, the printing press was just individual blocks of wood letters dipped in ink and then pressed on paper. The letters weren't even molded pressed together which made it more tedious and longer to print books. So this makes it crazy to think that when the printing press went from individual blocks to printing whole words, that was a very progressive innovation similar to how we went from analog to digital video (VCR to DVD) in modern times. This makes me realize how much electricity has made inventions so much more efficient and the most common example of this is the light bulb. Before light bulbs were invented, and even before kerosene lamps, people would have to go around and light each candle lamp individually. With the discovery of electricity the efficiency of bringing light into a room was as easy as flipping a switch. It also is interesting how certain inventions take things from being a luxury to an everyday item. This was the case with books being a luxury before and even sometimes after the invention of the printing press. Because it took so long to make just one book, only books like the bible were printed and were given to very rich people and religious institutions because they were seen as "high up." Originally the presses were operated by hand but after the invention of steam pistons, they could be operated that way. This simple innovation from hand to steam shows again just how something we might have overlooked because it didn't seem big enough, turned out to be one of the biggest industrial innovations ever. 

The invention of the printing press also led to a major social change since more people had access to books now and could educate themselves. An education was also not considered a luxury since more people, especially of lower classes, were starting to learn more and become just as knowledgable as upper class people. Because of this upper class people became very upset at the fact that the latin language was starting to decline because books and other literature were starting to be printed in other languages and fonts. Latin which was mostly a reading language anyway heavily declined which made it a lot less valuable. On the other hand, books became readily available to people across the world in hundreds of languages because the more people that learned how to read the more people could produce more books.

Overall, I think it is interesting how an invention so simple, and what we might have thought of as trivial, paved the way for what we know as modern digital and laser printing. The same thing applies to inventions like the iPhone, a device that didn't even have a copy and paste function when it was first released. Now it can take better or equally as good quality pictures as a professional camera. The next time an invention comes out that may seem trivial or destined to not go anywhere, remember the printing press was just pieces of wood and steel and now it has turned into a very complex computer that can print pages in seconds!