The Gutenberg Printing Press

The first overtures towards printing that began around roughly 800 AD, in China, where early printing techniques involving chiseling an entire page of text into a wood block backwards, applying ink, and printing pages by pressing them against the block. Around 971 AD, printers in Zhejiang, China, produced a print of a vast Buddhist canon called the Tripitaka with these carved woodblocks, using 130,000 blocks (one for each page).

In 1436 Johaness Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, began designing a machine capable of producing pages of text at an incredible speed. By 1440 Gutenberg had established the basics of his printing press including the use of a mobile, reusable set of type. In 1454 Gutenberg put his press to commercial use. The following year he printed his famous 42-line Bible.