Printing press, invention

For several centuries, the development of the alphabet affected most people indirectly in the cultures where it was used. Written language was difficult to master its utilization was often reserved for scribes, philosophers, and priests. The invention of the printing press and movable type made reading a common skill and, according to Marshall McLuhan... 

Man did not give up war, nor did he find a peaceful use for black powder until the 1600 s. Then, for the first time in Hungary, black powder was used for mining. Tenny L. Davis credits black powder as one of the three inventions responsible for ending the Middle Ages [1]. (The other two were the printing press and the discovery of the New World.) The first... 

Until recently, the essential elements in printing were a printing plate coated with a printing ink, which was transferred to paper by or in a printing press. A recent process, ink-jet printing, invented by Richard G. Sweet in 1971, removes the need for a printing plate or a press. 

Whether Latin or vernacular, this medieval alchemical corpus was becoming increasingly available to sixteenth-century Europeans. Texts certainly continued to circulate in manuscript even a century after the invention of the printing press indeed, until the middle of the sixteenth century, it is likely that most alchemical texts remained in manuscript form (and this is especially true if one takes into account recipe books).23 When Sommering recommended Sternhals s Ritter Krieg to Julius, for example, he could only have had a manuscript in mind, since this fifteenth-century text would not be available in print for another two decades. Nevertheless, from the middle of the sixteenth century onward printers seem to have discovered a healthy market for alchemical texts, particularly those that dealt with medicine and the transmutation of metals, since they issued sixteenth-century editions of older treatises attributed (both pseudonymously and authentically) to authorities such as Raymond Lull and Bernhard of Treviso.24... 

Theories now were becoming public rather than private they were disseminated more widely by the relatively newly invented printing press. Confidence in the new scientific method was now increasing rapidly many of the new theories (e.g. Newton s theories of 1666-1687) were confirmed by experiments. In particular, the new experiments and observations were showing decisively that the current theories were superior to those of the ancients—Aristotle s physics (that bodies move only if they are being pushed) was wrong, and Ptolemy s maps clearly had been in error. 

The invention of the Gutenberg printing press in 1452 helped spread which theory ... 

True paper was invented in China by a court official, Gai Lun, in the year 105. Cai Lun found that by treating cotton rags in a certain way, the material would break down into a mushy mass of fibers. When more water was added, the mixture could be pressed and dried into a thin, hard sheet that could be used for writing. This true paper became popular because it was much lighter than bamboo mats and less expensive than silk, both of which were used as writing materials at the time. Gai s method of making paper eventually made its way to Europe, where it became the material of choice for use with the printing press in the fifteenth century. Industrialization and mechanization since that time have led to the modern paper industry and to the thousands of types and forms of paper that are a basic commodity of modern society. 

Paper made from cellulose fibers was invented in China in the year 105. The method of making paper was a closely guarded secret for centuries. Control of paper manufacturing in Renaissance Italy was a source of great economic and political power, much like paper money is in modern times. Civilization likely would not exist in its present form without the invention of paper and the printing press, both of which enabled mass communication and literacy. 

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