This is a printing press. Historians argue that a printing press is one of the most revolutionary inventions in human history. With it you could spread knowledge and ideas like never before.
Something that is often overlooked. is its economic impact on the world. And it also provides a great historical parallel to the emergence of the internet.
It can even teach us about how future information technology innovations could impact the world. impact the world. The so called movable type printing press was not named the movable type because it was easy to move, it was actually really heavy.
It got that name because this type of printing press uses movable blocks, usually with letters on them, that you could construct documents with. The movable type printing press was developed by Johannes Gutenberg and his business partners in Maine. Germany around 1450. Printing started off as a for-profit enterprise for them. Their printing press could have taken inspiration from earlier ones from China but a small number of alphabetic characters needed for European languages was an important factor that made it more successful and gave it ability to have a faster spread in European countries than it had in China. with its thousands of unique characters.
Having the movable blocks made of metal made them more durable and the lettering became more uniform, which opened the door for the wonderful world of typography and fonts. The printing press may be regarded as one of the key factors fostering the renaissance due to its effectiveness. Its use spread around the globe.
But that spread didn't happen instantly. The key innovation in printing, the process of how to make the metal blocks was kept a trade secret by Gutenberg and his business partners. The first known blueprint of how to make the movable type printing press first came out almost a century after it was first introduced. So for a long time they were the main producers of Europe's printing presses. They had a printing press monopoly.
Because they were not being produced very quickly and they were difficult to transport, it took time for it to spread outwards. What you could see from this slow adoption of the printing press was that the cities that got the printing press saw much higher economic growth than the cities that did not. Cities that adopted the printing press lowered their cost of written material such as books, which led to some growth. Now it was not only the elite and the rich who could afford books, but so could the poor.
The printing press also spawned the newspaper industry we know today, but the printing press also gave rise to a lot more growth than that. Cities that adopted the printing press also experienced what is called positive spillovers in both human capital accumulation and technological change. Meaning that more people moved to the cities and technologies got more advanced in those cities. Similar spillover effects can be seen with the spread of the internet in countries today. The printing press attracted paper mills, students, translators and schools to the cities it spread to.
It also created new jobs. for the people handling the printers and made it much cheaper to transmit ideas over distances. Before the industrial era, commerce and trading was a more important source of wealth and income than industrial production. This new printed media played an important role in helping traders to become better. For example, the printing presses produced a stream of math textbooks used by students preparing for careers in business.
The first known of these mathematical textbooks is the Treviso Arithmetic from 1478. This one and hundreds of similar texts helped students become better at calculating exchange rates, profit shares and interest rates. It helped spread literacy and cutting edge business practices such as bookkeeping. It also advanced professions such as merchants, lawyers, officials, doctors and teachers. All of this together meant that cities with printing presses experienced a huge amount of economic growth and it became one of the greatest revolutions in information technology. European cities became centers for ideas and business practices that drove their transition into our modern economic growth.