The printing press was invented in 1440 by German inventor Johannes Guttenberg, and his version of the press has been the principal method of standard printing since then until the very end of the twentieth century. The printing press worked by transferring letters and images by contact with inked surfaces onto a sheet of paper or paper-like material which was fed into it. This device was great for making multiple copies of the same printed text, which is how we get millions of newspapers every day.
Before the printing press came about, everything that was read in the UK and Europe was either written by hand and distributed or carved into wooden blocks and distributed—but even then; the only people who were fully literate were a small section of the nobility and the clergy. Also, these methods were laborious, time-consuming and expensive. With the printing press came a mass distribution of books, leading to an overall literate society as we know it—making the printing press one of the greatest and most effective inventions of all time.
In today’s society, the printing press has been revolutionised and modernised to fit with the technological age. In the 1970s, computers were integrated into the printing industry. A computer can now assemble and arrange two thousand letters to be printed in two seconds as opposed to the hour it took in the fifteenth century—which means that more words are printed every second than it took Guttenberg’s workers to print in a year.
Not only do we still have newspapers in our society, but we also have major reinventions of printing such as digital printing, colour printing and personal printing. Many households have a digital printer that they use with their personal computers—making the old jobs of author, editor and compositor into one simple role when printing a piece of work. Newspapers are now available online and on mobile phones for current affairs on-the-go, but the printing press and professional digital printing industries still remain strong.
There are so many ways to get the news these days by either scrolling down a phone, surfing the web on a laptop or even going to the shop to buy a broadsheet. However, none of these would have happened so successfully if it weren’t for Guttenberg’s revolutionary printing press invention. With its modernised application, his vision was a distribution idea that is unlikely to die out with time.
