THE INVENTION OF PRINTING

                       THE INVENTION OF PRINTING

JOHANNES GUTENBERG PRINTING

 

 

MACHINE

Printing is the making of lots of copies of the same document using movable characters or letters. Before the idea of printing, everything published needed to be written by hand. Letters, newspapers and even books had to be copied by hand. Soon, everyone realized that handwriting took long way. They felt the necessity of making copying work faster and thus the printing press was invented. The earliest printing books were produced using wooden blocks with letters carved on them. The blocks would be dipped in ink and then pressed onto the paper.

Printing was hard at first because everyone had to print things letter by letter, but it was an improvement from writing with hands. In 1450, Johannes Gutenberg of Germany invented the first printing press. He used metal moulds and alloys. Each metal mould had a single letter, number or other character raised upon it to make words, lines and pages. Ink was applied on the metal moulds. The frame was them pressed on paper to get the impression. Once a book was printed, the moulds could be reset and reused to print another book. At that time, only black ink was used.