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Johannes Gutenberg: The Father of Mass Communication

It's the dawn of a new era, the closing of the medieval and the birth of the European Renaissance. Western Europe's borders are stabilizing, famines and plagues are becoming less frequent, the Vikings have stopped raiding and the Norsemen have settled down, the powers of the Eastern Europe were holding the barbarian hordes from the east and the Muslim hordes from the south at bay, the Roman Church begrudgingly accepted the Orthodox church's separation, and a general sense of the need for a codified law was sweeping the nations. With many of the burdens of the past couple of 100 years since the fall of the Roman Empire finally starting ease, room was made among all levels of society for other pursuits; artists and musicians found paying patrons, and the church and other's felt comfortable to open up their libraries to expand education and scholarly pursuits.

In this opportune time enter a German blacksmith and goldsmith from the city of Mainz: Johannes Gutenberg, the man that would invent the movable type printing press and forever revolutionize communication and the written word. From a young age he was involved in the family business, and while his father did do some blacksmith work and his mother was a cloth merchant, the main occupation of the family was moneymaking, literally. His family, long ago, had obtained patronage of the bishops of Mainz who commissioned the family shop to be the regions Ecclesiastic Mint. The Catholic Church for some time produced its own money; since the church was present in all nations across Europe, each with its own currency, the church decided it needed a universal currency for trade between members of the clergy and the varies churches, cathedrals, abbeys, monasteries, and nunneries dotting all nations, to make their internal book keeping simpler. The weight, imprint, and exchange rate with other various nations currencies were all determined by the Pope and his cardinals back in Rome. Also, the Catholic Church by this time, had taken a page from the Templar book, and created its own banking system to accommodate travelers. An individual who did not want to carry around  large sacks of coins on a long journey could deposit the money with a church at his starting location and receive a chet or note of the amount. When they arrived at their location they could turn in the chet to the local diocese to receive that money back, minus a small administrative fee. The Knights Templar had developed this system and service during the crusades for those making the long and arduous journey to the holy land and back, but the church saw the benefit of this practice across the whole of Christendom.

Examples of Ecclesiastical coin

Providing such services for powerful patrons such as minting money for bishops has its perks, but also comes with potential pitfalls. The good times came to end for a teenage Johannes when a peasant uprising targeted the patricians of the city, including the current bishop. To avoid being made themselves targets of the rioters and being caught up in the chaos, the family moved to Strasbourg, to live with members of Johannes's mother's family. While there he attended the University of Erfurt (its most famous alum, Martin Luther, would arrive nearly a century later) were he developed a love for reading and advocated for wider literacy. But one of the major obstacles of literacy was the fact that material was in short supply; books and other material were are rarity as everything was hand written and painstakingly copied by hand, mostly by a small population of monks locked away in monstrosities. This problem would be one of the driving forces to Johannes later thought process.

Erfurt University, still open today

In 1437 Johannes joined the Strasbourg militia as their official goldsmith, and though it did not pay much he made money and connections on the side teaching many members of the militia who were young 2nd or 3rd born sons of noble houses the art of gem polishing and jewel crafting. It was during this time he started to experiment with different metals in which to eventually craft his movable type. After, he engaged in several failed business ventures (and cons), including trying to sell refurbished and polished metal mirrors he and his partners claimed were holy relics of Charlemagne's that converted sunlight into holy light. With money running low and investors growing impatient with his failures Gutenberg decided to go all in on his on again off again pet project of movable type printing. He asked his brother-in-law for a loan and locked himself away for four years in a private workshop back in his home town of Mainz.

Printing in itself was nothing new. Works of art made from woodcarving or copper engravings were already being used as templates for printing using a procedure called intaglio. Intaglio printing consisted of covering the entire template in ink and then wiping off the surface ink, the remaining ink being trapped with in the etched/cut grooves. The template is then pressed over a piece of paper or parchment, the ink inside the groves transferring on to the material. While it was impractical to make whole plates for each page one document (the number of full plates would have been a waste of storage space and template material), many artists started selling multiple copies of their work in this way. One of the most successful at this time in and around Germany was a man whose name is forgotten, but historians call The Master of Cards (for his many unique playing card prints). He joined Gutenberg in his workshop, advising him on printing techniques and materials.

Examples of the Master of Cards print work

In 1450, the movable type printing press was complete and the first work printed was a German poem Gutenberg used as a showcase to try and attract investment. This new kind of press allowed for the creation of temporary templates, made up of pieces instead of one solid piece of wood or metal. The most notable and innovative of these pieces was the creation of the moveable type, the individual letters or common words that can be moved around and arranged into any configuration on the template. A moneylender named Fust and his son-in-law took note and provided Gutenberg the funds to open up a new print shop and the construction of two of Gutenberg's presses. 1452 the shop opened for business. The main profitable production was that of textbooks and Latin premiers, but the big money was in printing indulgences on behalf the local churches. 

With his involvement with the church once again, came the resurfacing of his old ideals of bringing literacy to the masses. But such an endeavor would require more financial backing from Fust who was reluctant as the shop was not turning out as much profit as he initially hoped. Faust would need to be influenced by an outside force. Gutenberg saw the opportunity in city of Frankfurt: Archbishop Aeneas (who later in life would become Pope Pius II), was a Papal Legate, there to negotiate a marriage between the German Emperor Fredrick III and the Princess Eleonore of Portugal.  Gutenberg came up with a proposal to receive official church blessing for his project, that what better tool to teach people to read then the Holy Bible which the church could distribute to their flocks:

"It is a press, certainly, but a press from which shall flow in inexhaustible streams.Through it, God will spread His Word. A spring of truth shall flow from it: like a new star it shall scatter the darkness of ignorance, and cause a light heretofore unknown to shine amongst men. Religious truth is captive in a small number of little manuscripts which guard the common treasures, instead of expanding them. Let us break the seal which binds these holy things; let us give wings to truth that it may fly with the Word, no longer prepared at vast expense, but multitudes everlastingly by a machine which never wearies to every soul which enters life."

With the Archbishops blessing and promises to act as distributor in hand he convinced Fust to loan him more money for his great project, and set one of his two presses to exclusively print what would later be known as the Gutenberg Bibles. The bibles were 1,286 pages of paper or vellum with Latin translation of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament written in various font types and ink combinations. And while some art and stylizing was printed, margins were left wide for additional, more personalized artistic accessory, including the rubrication (The oversized and stylized first letter of a new chapter). One copy in particular which now sits in Princeton University, was designed with the help of Gutenberg's old friend Master of Cards. Of the estimated 180 Gutenberg Bibles made, only 49 are known to still exist.

The church made good on its promise and sold the bibles as fast as the were completed with editions not only across Germany and France, the base of Catholic power, but as far off as England, Sweden, and Hungary. The Church was more then pleased with this new way to spread the word of god.

"All that has been written to me about that marvelous man seen at Frankfurt [sic] is true. I have not seen complete Bibles but only a number of quires of various books of the Bible. The script was very neat and legible, not at all difficult to follow—your grace would be able to read it without effort, and indeed without glasses." Letter from Archbishop Aenaes to lead Vatican Judge and Administrator Cardinal Carvajal

 And while the Church and those that bought the bibles, mostly lesser nobles and members of the up and coming merchant class, did use the book to spread the literacy of Latin, the expense and distribution of the books was not adding up for Fust. He sued Gutenberg and the Archbishop, in 1455, on accusations of misappropriations of funds and wanted his full investment back. Archbishop was dropped from the case, as any profits the Church made from the sales usually went on to directly fund the next one. The onus was put straight on Gutenberg who admitted that he may have mislead Fust about the profitability of the bible project, and that to him it was never about the money. The court gave the workshop and presses to Fust as compensation. He lived most of the rest of his life skating on the edge of poverty, at one point even being exiled from his home during a power struggle between powerful church magnates, he himself caught up as a pawn. But in 1465, Gutenberg, now an old man, was recognized for his achievements by the Church and given an annual stipend of money, grain, and wine, and made a member of the court of Archbishop Adolph Von Nassau as an advisor. He died in 1468 and was buried in a Franciscan church, which later was destroyed and the grave-site lost.

Gutenberg's contribution to society is unmistakable and his press is one of the cornerstone inventions of our technological rise. He is recognized by nearly every scholar and historian as one of the key figures in cultural development, and one of the Renaissance Era's greatest men. The Vatican Library, one of the greatest repositories of knowledge and written works in the world, credits him as an honorary founder. Gutenberg's press has lead to a vast and almost innumerable increase in the distribution/dissemination of knowledge and the spread of literacy among the middle classes. Countless have paid their respects to the man that made mass communication a conceivable concept. The great American writer/satirist Mark Twain once wrote of him:

"What the world is today, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source, but we are bound to bring him homage, … for the bad that his colossal invention has brought about is overshadowed a thousand times by the good with which mankind has been favored."