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Johannes Gutenberg Research Paper

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The life of Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of the movable type printing press has had an intensive impact on our society. Although he lived over half a millennium ago, we have seen his actions of bringing literacy to the public increase exponentially in influence over the years. In order to truly appreciate and understand his actions and the sacrifices he made to pursue this dream, one must first understand the circumstances of the incredible journey which he experienced between his birth and death.
Gutenberg was born in the year 1398 in the town of Mainz, Germany. As he grew, his family was generally well off and could afford certain luxuries which other families could not. In fact, his parents were patricians of Mainz. This meant that …show more content…
When he was young, there were only the manuscripts, which were painstakingly created by hand through the tireless efforts of monks. This long and tedious process caused the price of these manuscripts to be ridiculously high compared to the average family income of the time. Also, only a couple thousand copies could be produced each year. An incredible innovation came while Gutenberg was still young, known as the fixed type printing press. This new method of printing allowed print workers to carve by hand each page of a book into a block of wood. From here, the block could be reused continuously to print that page as many times as needed. This dramatically reduced the errors that had been common in manuscripts, and created a uniform type for each page. However, this was inefficient as it still required a ridiculous amount of time to be spent carving away all of the wood around the letters for each and every page of the book. Still, this new technology allowed mass production to begin. This improvement over the manuscript method was widely welcomed and increased literacy and access to books for the public, although it did this in a very small way. These books were still extremely expensive and widely unobtainable for a vast majority of the public (Duke

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