The most important screws EVER MADE!

so how was it that a screw a single physical screw completely changed all of europe and eventually the world records are sketchy but around 1440 a german political refugee probably born with his father's last name genslich or translated from german goosemeat was living in strasbourg in what is now france at the time books were rare and pricey as they were copied by scribes who had to write out each letter by hand it might take a year or more to copy a single book so a tremendous profit could be made if one could figure out how to speed up copying type after recently suffering a large business failure our man goose meat was looking for some quick money and he started experimenting with how to make copying type much more efficient he was a goldsmith familiar with working with metal so he had some ideas woodcuts were already pretty well known in europe as a way to copy images a pretty standard process had evolved by the 15th century a trained printer would take a piece of wood transfer a drawing to the surface carve the image out roll ink onto the raised parts and then press a piece of paper against it to make sure the ink transferred from wood to paper the printer rubbed down the back of the piece of paper with a piece of bone vigorously and it wasn't a lot of fun and was pretty slow and wood cuts are slow to make and they wear out relatively quickly so while better than copying everything by hand they are far from a perfect solution and yeah we totally faked that movable type where each letter is an individual piece that could be rearranged as needed was an obvious place to start chinese and korean printers had already been using movable type in their printing process for over 500 years eastern movable type printing started with wood and then later porcelain type and then moving on to various kinds of metals it's also known some sporadic attempts at movable type in europe have been tried by the 15th century but no one had really cracked it satisfactorily and it's quite possible our man hair goose meat knew of at least some of these efforts and as a goldsmith he was familiar with many techniques in casting with metals now about 10 years later in 1450 mr goosemeat who had by now had the good sense to switch to his mother's last name gutenberg or good mountain had moved back to his native city of mainz in what is now germany he had been working on and reasonably perfected a series of inventions which we now collectively call the printing press while the printing press had already been mostly invented in faraway land centuries earlier and while even europeans had previously been muddling around with the idea no one had put all the pieces together quite like gutenberg he also had the advantage of the chinese invention of paper it finally made its way to europe so now there was something relatively cheap to print on as well rather than the very expensive animal skins and common use previously his press was a modified version of something everyone at the time was familiar with the wine press and believe me everyone was familiar with the wine press we talked a lot about those in the previous episode and could exert maximum amounts of pressure with minimal effort and like in the wine presses in the printing press a screw was key to multiplying the downward force of the platen to squeeze the paper against the inked letters the movable type making sure the inked letters made even solid contact with the paper and transferred the ink all you needed to do was pull a long lever and the full power of the screw will be brought to bear on the paper the screw's multiplied force allow you to press a relatively large area an entire page very quickly with a lot of force making nice crisp well-inked letters just like perfect handwriting i've read estimates around 70 pounds per square inch or 5 kilograms per square centimeter once the type was inked with the large inking balls it took just a second or two to press an entire page of a book something that would take a scribe writing by hand a good part of a day think about that after a printer arranged the movable type in the tray it could be printed in a few seconds and reprinted over and over again perfectly most of amongst day reduced to a second because of the screw and that's just the beginning while i'm sure the sound of the screw in gutenberg's press when he pulled the lever to imprint the first page of his first commercial printing project was just a small squeak but that squeak has multiplied billions of times over cascading down through the centuries to us shaking europe to its foundations and we can clearly still see the impacts today in many many ways all around us the world is shaped in ways that i believe can be traced directly back to the printing press as i explained in an earlier video the very name of this youtube channel machine thinking is all about how machines change the way we think the ways we connect fundamentally influencing our individual lives but also shaping the world in deep ways in other words one lens to look through as we are the collective impact of the machines and tools available to us in our interactions with them our interactions with our tools shape us just as much as we shape our tools and i want to suggest that no other machine has impacted you more or reformatted our minds our culture our lives more than the printing press so much so this is the first of two videos just on the printing press to just start to touch on the breadth to which we've been shaped by it and the immeasurable chain reactions it kicked off for better and worse so even though gutenberg's contributions were a fairly small leap largely built on other technologies that existed before him the impact is profound enough that in my opinion the screw the very physical screw at the center of gutenberg's press is the most important individual screw ever made i mean you can trace back the history of some of our most disruptive changes back to that individual screw what the screw in gutenberg's press did was in a way industrialized the printing press and by doing so vastly increased the reproduction of knowledge amongst scribe might be lucky to reproduce 200 lines of text in a day doing all that lettering by hand and that would add up to maybe two or three pages if they kept the candles burning and even hand pressing would cut pages with your piece of bone that might yield only about 40 pages a day but in this transformative moment all of that changed a two-man team working as screw-driven printing press could produce upwards of a staggering 3 500 pages of beautiful crisp print a day with this incredible increase in efficiency it's estimated the cost of printing dropped more than 99 percent and not too long after gutenberg invented the printing press despite him trying to keep the technology secret to preserve his profits within a few years the word was out and there were printing presses in workshops all over europe each of them potentially pumping out those thousands of pages a day some have called the spread of the printing press one of the great moments in capitalism as companies all over europe and later far beyond made significant capital investment into presses and then started to compete with each other in the huge gold rush that was to come perhaps no technology has spread so far so fast with such an immense impact up to that time because this solved so many problems that everybody had reducing the production cost by 99 in any industry would be disruptive but when that massive reduction is in mass communication as it was here the ripple effects go through every single part of society as waves of new information flow everywhere and in turn disrupt industries and social structures that required keeping a tight hold on information previously before the press only a few had books the wealthy and the powerful mostly aristocrats in the church and in all of europe those handmade books carefully copied and illuminated by scribes probably numbered in the relatively low thousands but i've read estimates that within 50 years of the introduction of the printing press there were upwards of 20 million books printed in europe with this revolutionary and pretty radical reduction in printing costs now combined with a frenzy of printing that soon followed you had a tremendous increase of available information and knowledge and that was a recipe for major change and disruption with the printing press you can print a lot of different things let's focus on one of them for a second the humble book and let's consider it not as a physical object per se but instead as a piece of technology in some senses no different than a hammer or a steam engine and just like those tools books left huge wakes of change behind them so you can think of a book as a kind of distributed replicated memory that can travel through time but also space when you read a book you can read the exact thoughts that someone put to paper hundreds of years before you and know that you are indeed reading those same exact thoughts because we trust that a book on our shelf doesn't change others are able to get access to these books and read the very same words and while interpretations of a book may vary you know that everyone that has that book is starting from the same place so books can create a shared cultural foundation that is not fragile easily changed or erased and across large areas a book is a snapshot in time of what is happening at that moment in a particular location sometimes what an author doesn't write about is as important as what they do so in a way books are almost a form of time travel as we are spoken to directly by voices from the past for example if i'm curious about what was going on in the machining world around 1910 i can pull off the shelf my copy of modern machine shop practice there's hundreds and hundreds of pages across two volumes that can show me exactly what was going on then and what was state of the art in this case everything a machinist would need to know across a mind-numbing number of subjects all fully illustrated in exceptional detail like in this section on the absolute most modern lathes books can also spread very complex ideas very rapidly and with great accuracy across great distances when a new book or pamphlet would travel to another town sometimes they would be replicated by local printers multiplying the spread of ideas this will become very important in the next episode on the printing press and screws where the disruption from fast moving ideas will be taken up by many printers setting off an incredible chain reaction books can travel but also a book can bring you along on travels while an oral tradition of course there were many great storytellers and epic poems through the ages some based on myth others in real locations or about events or others like children's stories which gave people a completely different perspective on what humans were up to but the length and complexity of a book allowed for a detailed rich description of faraway lands peoples in deeds that wasn't possible before in the same way so people started to get a greater idea of what the world was like beyond their town or village in far-off lands or from the viewpoint of rabbits books also started to change our language or rather freeze and standardize it in the western world before books much of what was written down was in latin the language of the educated but now books were starting to be printed in local languages and at great volume remember those capitalistic printers i mentioned a few moments ago they wanted to sell the most amount of books possible so they printed in the local languages and not in latin and of course languages and usage change over time but the book really started to bring standards to spelling and grammar and of course a book itself would eventually become the definitive source the dictionary if you've ever wondered why language has many quirks and irregularities the press may be to blame as little bits and parts were frozen by the printing press and we're not sure but it's also entirely possible gutenberg had a hand in printing the earliest editions of the catholic on a latin dictionary which had been written out by hand for a couple of centuries before i mean you can see the problem a printmaker would have right without a dictionary how do you really know how to arrange the letters in your printing press printing also changed our numbers it wasn't that long before the printing press was invented that europe started to move away from the old numbering system the clunky roman numerals that were no good at all for advanced mathematics and instead quickly popularized the digits we know today 0 through 9 the arabic hindu numerals as we now know them which were great for math and relatively quickly became the standard thanks to help from the printing press finally europe could start to catch up to the advanced mathematics of the middle east north africa and asia and it wasn't just the culture of new digits and mathematics that books started to spread the printing press was invented right as one of the most important western cultural movements ever started to get underway the renaissance starting in italy this was a so-called cultural reawakening rediscovering the art architecture science literature philosophy and so much more of a classical period which had happened many of hundreds of years before but were largely forgotten during the rigid and comparatively culturally stilted time since the fall of the western roman empire here from around 1500 we see some renaissance era figures enthusiastically learning euclid's elements an ancient treatise from nearly 2 000 years ago in addition to the renewed interest in old ideas many new ideas and inventions from the east on math sciences medicine astronomy and more were flooding in these discoveries or in some cases rediscoveries combined with the printing press vastly multiplied their impact and relatively quickly spread those ideas across europe some say this period is the birth of modernity and i'm inclined to agree it was here the kinds of knowledge that started to spread set the stage for the scientific revolution and enlightenment eras that would happen over the next several hundred years which set us on course for our modern world so it wasn't just that the printing press had a huge impact on making new ideas popular but also it had a big hand in reproducing knowledge largely lost in the west at the same time making a new industry of printers a ton of cash while they were cranking out enormous amounts of books in local languages all the while starting to standardize spelling grammar numbers and more okay it's great that i tell you that some books had a big impact but what about some of these books that actually did well there are many examples but here's three that i would love to share with you there will be links in the description to all of these books and so much more so be sure to take a look there so there were many books that greatly condensed knowledge and were a huge encyclopedia of a lifetime of experience you didn't have to go find someone with a particular set of knowledge if someone wrote a book about it and just told you everything you need to know on the subject the first is from 1556 in germany where a book was published called day ray metallica or on the nature of metals this book was the absolute state of the art in mining refining and smelting metals it was highly influential for over a hundred years after it was published it was published with seemingly hundreds of illustrations as well so many in fact the waiting for the woodcuts delayed the publication until after the author's death the germans at the time were the unchallenged leaders in mining so this kind of knowledge was incredibly valuable rather than spending a lifetime learning the best way to do it or trying to hunt down someone who did know it if you could ever find them at all now you can just read a book and have everything you need to know and this is what the book did it started to take secretive knowledge that was held by a few people or trade guilds and started to make it a commodity available to anyone who could get their hands on the book daybreak metallica was published in german and also in latin the language of most educated people at the time so nearly anyone of a certain class in europe could read it regardless of the local language interestingly long after it was no longer useful in 1912 for fun dave metallica was translated into english by a mining engineer and his geologist wife who happened to also be a famous latinist that mining engineer was a certain herbert hoover who in 1929 would go on to become 31st president of the united states another book that was published in paris a little later in 1588 the various and ingenious machines of captain augustine vermelli is a spectacular collection of hundreds of machines for a very wide variety of tasks no less than 110 water raising machines 21 grain mills 10 cranes seven machines for dragging heavy objects one of which i put in the last video machines for digging earth and so much more and then because he was an italian living in france full descriptions published in both languages in case somehow the very beautifully drawn pictures didn't tell you everything you needed to know the book had a great effect on the rapid evolving field of mechanical engineering and its impact would ripple through generations of engineers and it's here we see our friend from the previous video the water screw turning up in many devices remember screws this is a video about screws from gutenberg's screw driven printing press we now get not only the water screw but the screw is a worm drive as well like we talked about the last video these are now being replicated as fast as the screw driven printing press could print the books the idea of the screw and all of its uses are printed and set far and wide if people didn't know about them before they sure knew about them now there's literally dozens of places where screws show up in this book and not just screws of course but every kind of gear pulley lever waterwheel any simple machine you can think of is employed in this book and seemingly has a device to solve pretty much any problem a 16th century engineer would face you may already be familiar with one of the images in this book rimelli's famous book wheel brumelli may have been running into a relatively new problem having too many books with his book wheel romelli could switch between several books quickly and this was especially useful in this time because books were often large and very heavy until very recently though having too many books was a problem very few people would ever face often humorously dubbed the first tabbed browser romelli's design allowed for eight books to be opened at once allowing for easy cross-checking between sources a clever planetary gear system in this side kept the books aligned and upright as it went around these were actually really built and over a dozen are known to survive from hundreds of years ago stick around at the end for more fun with rameli's book wheel this last example shows how ideas can really travel through time thanks to the book it starts in ancient roman times first century bc with a roman engineer named vitruvius who wrote a multi-volume work collectively known as de architectura or on architecture among many things it covers domestic and civic architecture very heavily influenced by the ideals of perfect proportion utility beauty and human-centered design favored by the greeks and romans we can still see these ideas and ruins from many many centuries ago and just because i know you're here to talk about screws vitruvius also discusses at length a highly efficient eight-bladed water screw not bad for 2000 years ago thankfully the architect tour was faithfully copied many times by hand and thanks to the printing press it was finally printed widely in 1496 and then reprinted many times in the years to come adding illustrations as additions went on while it would have a profound effect on many architects of the renaissance period and beyond perhaps none are more famous than palladio platio designed many homes and churches in italy that were incredibly influential that incorporated many of vitruvius ideas and then of course mixed in some of his own he then wrote a collection of four books on architecture called amazingly the four books of architecture published in 1570. his style would go on to be so widely copied you may know it by its name palladian architecture those four books on architecture a couple hundred years later would find great influence with a certain thomas jefferson who would go absolutely bananas for the ideas calling palladio's work his bible on architecture he went so far as to base his famous home monticello on those ideas he would go on to design the school he founded the university of virginia in this style of architecture as well directly basing some of the buildings on palladio's work in italy and many others on these design principles this in turn influenced many buildings in washington dc like the white house or the supreme court the capitol building itself plus countless courthouses city halls public libraries private homes in towns all across north america the impact was so profound that in 2010 on the 500th anniversary of palladia's birth the u.s congress passed a resolution praising palladio for his impact on american architecture if you're like me you probably have some buildings in your city heavily influenced by these designs that traveled a few thousand years through time in books to get to us you might also have a stamping of a palladian design in your pocket speaking of the university of virginia it's home to the rare book school which has a tremendous number of courses on everything about ancient manuscripts and books if old books are your thing check them out they're also the owners of the 1966 film the making of a renaissance book which we are enjoying clips from with their kind permission the film shows all of the steps in making the movable type and then printing pages if you want a complete overview of how an early screw driven printing shop worked this is excellent and highly recommended like everything else i'll link to it in the description so i'd like you to look at the computer or phone you're watching this on and think about them a little differently for a moment they're both not a book and yet all books at once let me show you what i mean you can on them either for free or for a relatively small amount of money get instant access to nearly any book ever previously written how awesome is that project gutenberg gutenberg.org has a large selection of books which are out of copyright and freely available over 60 000 including some of the most enduring classics ever written archive.org and its sister openlibrary.org are sites with out of copyright books as well and more recent copyrighted books that you can check out online for a limited time just like your local library and the books available on those sites number in the millions much of the research in many of the images i've shown you in other videos originated and out of copyright books that i found there this includes david metallica vermelli palladio's books and more even just in this video so i've been an enthusiastic supporter of archive.org over the years and i encourage you to support them as well but what's even more amazing is now that phone or computer you have is a printing press itself able to effortlessly arrange infinite movable type as you click on the keyboard and then instantly publish worldwide whatever you can come up with maybe to millions of people for practically zero cost the people who over 500 years ago made their own metal type and then carefully arranged letter by letter in the press inked it and then printed each individual page by hand with a mechanical advantage of the screws in their press shirley thought they were hot stuff by radically reducing the price of printing but that's absolutely nothing compared to what you have at your fingertips and so getting back to gutenberg given the insane impact he had upon the world and the fortunes that were made with the printing press he made a ton of money off his press right sadly no after a couple years working on what he would now be famously known for his gutenberg bible he was unable to sell enough quickly enough and his creditors successfully sued him and as far as we know took back his present tooling a document we have describing the judgment doesn't say exactly what happened gutenberg was financially ruined again and for years lived in near poverty while others reaped the enormous rewards of the press we're not completely sure but there's some evidence he was able to have another print shop and resume printing but it's unclear if he was financially successful later in life as the press took off all over europe he was recognized for his accomplishments and given enough of a pension to live reasonably comfortably and he died around the age of 70. eventually the screw-driven printing press would be replaced by other technologies though it would take a few centuries before those were the primary source of printed pages by then the gutenberg style of press would have already completely reformatted europe through waves of change language culture arts numbers industry you name it and there's still more to come so the next time you pick up a book or type out a text or write an email give a nod to gutenberg and that screw at the center of his press in the next video on screws we will continue our journey with the printing press while it's hard to believe we have just started to talk about some of the biggest disruptions the screw driven printing press would bring so the next stop on your journey is to subscribe hit the thumbs up and bell buttons if you haven't already it really does help keep me going i'd love to know your favorite books and the ones that have touched you the most what are your favorites and why which ones would you recommend to other people if they're available on gutenberg.org or archive.org link to them in the comments but i'm going to end this a little differently today so please stick around for a moment i know many of you and definitely myself included are frustrated with how long it takes me to publish content this kind of content requires a huge amount of time and effort which is why most video production companies have given it up i spend most of my evenings and weekends working on these so it's not for lack of effort or time invested to get right down to it today i'm launching a patreon for the purpose of having the means to hire more people to help me there's a huge number of skills involved and effort in doing this and i thought after i did it a bunch of times maybe i get faster but the reality is there's just a lot that could be done in parallel and surely there's parts other people can do better than me i really want to focus on the part of the arc where i add the most benefit and get these out the door faster i'm adding some really cool rewards probably the biggest being a video each month talking about the video i just launched or what i've been working on behind the scenes footage or other stuff like that i've already posted one for this episode it's sort of like a director's commentary but also like you got a few beers in me and i just wouldn't shut up about this stuff over about 45 minutes completely unscripted in it i cover a ton of really interesting stuff that i didn't have time for in this video it frustrates me that i have to cut so much but here i get a chance to tell you about those weird things you don't often hear about like more about gutenberg's business failures or what might have inspired him to invent the printing press or what was unusual about the ink that he used or how about that efficient eight-bladed water screw that vitruvius described we also talked a lot more about the knowledge coming in from the east literacy rates in the ancient world and why benjamin franklin was so grossed out as an early printer and much more detail about the casting immovable type and so much more at some levels i'm also throwing in a blender file of ramelli's book wheel for you to use in your personal projects plus i also thought it would be super cool to have a 3d printable version of her mellie's book wheel so yeah i made one of those as well while i'm excited at the prospect of having more help i'm also really excited the prospect of building a community around people that want to learn and understand our world through the lens of our machines by far my favorite part of what i've got out of this crazy adventure is the people i've become connected with and i know some really awesome people are gonna turn up too like maybe you have a look and see if it's right for you no worries if it's not all the main content will still be free in public please consider joining to help keep me going and as always thanks for watching i'll see you next time

Channel: Machine Thinking

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Id: 4ZEHNbmz_9A

Length: 26min 48sec (1608 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/23inhouse]

I’d feel more confident about the content if the narrator just used the persons real name