History of Printing

HISTORY OF PRINTING

Printing, judged by some to be the most important discovery in the history of man.

Chinese first printed by constructing pillars or seals with raised relief. By covering the relief with ink and pressing wet paper to the pillars or seals they achieved a printed copy.

The wood block appeared by the 6th century.

Wood Block Printing
-The original text was handwritten in ink on a sheet of fine paper.
-The inked text side was pressed to the wood block, coated with a rice paste that retained the ink of the text.
-An engraver then cut away the areas without ink so the text was in relief and in reverse revealing a wood block ready for printing.

The first known book printed by the wood block technique was the Diamond Sutra beginning in 932, a collection of Chinese classics in 130 volumes.

Around 1041- 48 a Chinese alchemist named Pi Sheng appears to have conceived of
movable type
made of an amalgam of clay and glue hardened by baking. He composed texts by placing the types side by side on an iron plate coated with a mixture of resin, wax, and paper ash. Gently heating this plate and then letting the plate cool solidified the type. Once the impression had been made, the type could be detached by reheating the plate. It would thus appear that Pi Sheng had found an overall solution to the many problems of typography: the manufacture, the assembling, and the recovery of reusable type.

In 1313 Wang Chen instructed a craftsman to carve more than 60,000 characters on movable wooden blocks so that a treatise on the history of technology could be published.

Korea, under rule by King Htai Tjong, in 1403, created the first set of 100,000 pieces of type cast in bronze.

Johann Gensfleish Gutenberg (1397? - 1468)
He is considered the inventor of the mobile characters for the press - the Typography. In 1442, he printed the first copy in the original printing press - a piece of paper with eleven lines.
Gutenberg began printing the famous "forty four lines Bible" in 1450. As far as we can determine, he was printing almost 300 sheets every day.

The Stanhope printing press, made entirely of iron, was built in the late 19th century, introducing a a new printing technique called Lithography.

In 1811, Frederick Koenig constructed the first rotary printing press and introduced, definitively, the key mechanism in press reproduction. All the other developments in printing speed are caused by this invention.

Meanwhile, the new typesetter machines like Linotype, Typograph or Monotype threaten manual typesetting secular work. The offset system, invented in earlier 20th century, starts to be adopted only after Second World War, and replaces the typographic traditional way of printing. In the meantime, computerized and telecommunications systems are quickly adopted by pressmen and printers.

1st Century AD

1041- 48 AD
2nd century AD

Writing, a graphical representation of language.

Alphabet - (alfabetum) from the Latin.
The two first syllables are from the Greek alphabet

The concept of writing

1. ideographic writing - pictorial symbols representing objects or ideas

2. phonetic writing - the symbols represent sounds

"Alfa" and "Beta".