The Mysterious Medieval Inventor Who Changed The World | Machine That Made Us | Absolute History

i'm alice loxton and i present documentaries over on history hit tv if you're passionate about all things history sign up to history hit tv it's like netflix but just for history we've got hours of ad-free documentaries about all aspects of the past you can get a huge discount from history hit tv make sure you check out the details below and use the code absolute history all one word when you sign up now on with the show [Music] i've always been rather fond of books in fact i think they're just about the most important things we've ever created the building blocks of our civilization so when someone suggested a journey in search of the genius who invented the printing press i jumped to the chance my lord is this it this is it this was the man who launched the first media revolution and opened the door to the modern age but his story is shrouded in mystery so to get closer to him we also decided to stage an experiment and build our own medieval printing press so beautiful that meant getting to grips with the tools and technology of the 15th century [Applause] and actually making some of the ingredients with my own bare hands this takes me back to the archer school where i was always done to head as it turned out that was the most revealing bit of all i feel connected to somehow just by doing this so here it is then the slightly more hands-on than i expected story of johannes gutenberg and his marvellous machine [Music] well if you're anything like as old as me you may well remember this the john bull printing outfit made in england this was where i got my first experience of how printing works really and simple as it is these little rubber bits here tell you all you need to know about printing with movable type you've got ink there it is i'm going to get my fingers dirty already there are lots of different letters and you can rearrange them in any way you want onto one of these which i think is called a form and then when you print out it's exactly the same every time you can have hundreds thousands millions of pages that are identical and there we are of course the point about it being movable type is that i can move these letters into any order make another word not unlike scrabble so i'm going to mess around what am i going to get there we are so how is it it took mankind so long to bring together these simple elements into one machine that could make books the breakthrough was made by a man called johannes gutenberg more than 500 years ago his printing machine was the most revolutionary advance in technology since the invention of the wheel and we're still living with its consequences today as you can see here in the basement of the british library where they hold a copy of every book published in english you know there are 14 miles of shelves here there are another eight miles added every year as three million new books come on stream in british and above me all the readers demanding their books have little idea that there's this labyrinth of shelves here it was the invention of the printing press which started all this making mass production of books possible for the first time in history within a few years there were millions of them in circulation and as they traveled they carried their precious cargo of new ideas or theories philosophy or propaganda to every part of europe and beyond sowing the seeds for that great cultural blossoming we call the renaissance the fruit of gutenberg's work can be seen all around us but it's more important than that for everything that our culture and our civilization depends on starts with gutenberg's invention and this was his calling card one of the first and finest books created using his new machine to the modern eye the gutenberg bible opens a window onto a vanished world of monks and monasteries but when it first appeared in the 1450s it was viewed not as a reminder of the past but as a signpost to the future glittering proof that a new information age was dawning in europe fueled by the power of the printed word i want to find out how and why gutenberg invented his machine to answer the how question i'm planning a unique experiment [Music] and here's the laboratory where it's all going to happen oh this workshop in the heart of england may not look very high tech that's because the job i have in mind requires 15th century materials and techniques and a man who spent a lifetime investigating the first printing pioneers step forward alan may so this is where you're going to attempt to build a printing press is that right that's the idea yes but not any old press i want a fully operational gutenberg style one there aren't any surviving machines from this early period and no one's ever discovered an illustration of what they looked like so alan has his work cut out well essentially this is uncharted territory it's a detective story if you like it the earliest illustration of a printing press is the dance macabre 1499. that's about 50 years after gutenberg started his printing isn't it and things evolved pretty quickly that's right i think that this early period was actually quite revolutionary there were things changing all the time it took off rather like the internet has yeah it really went warmth yes allen reckons that gutenberg's press did share some family traits with later machines all printing presses up to about 1800 have a central part which pushes down onto the type this is a piston and platen assembly and the other thing that is required in any press of this sort is that you have some means of transporting the printing surface and the paper under that flap right so you've got a sliding bit moving along here and then you've got a flat clatton you call it coming down there and black press is down but there's one crucial difference between gutenberg's original and later so-called common presses such as the one this model is based on to print on a press like this they put two pages of type on this stone here right very heavy stone about 100 weight goodness and then the process of printing was a double process you wound in for the first page right you're just there and operated the lever because you've made the plan go down you then release it partly and widen into the next page the print again hence the term two pull press forensic analysis of gutenberg's original bible reveals that he only printed one page at a time in other words his was a one pull press that will influence the size and design of alan's experimental machine which is already starting to take shape in another corner of the workshop so here we go now what if you pass me the mallet and chisel oh lord yes here we go woodwork was never my strongest subject at school but no one seems to have told alan that the trick is to not use the whole width of the chisel right to use as just about a third of the so that that enables you to steer it better to be shallow than too steep so if it's too shallow you just you just tear it down by hand okay right have a go oh my goodness you might regret this i don't want to ruin it no oh i say right about your third there like that that way come on courage that's pretty good oh wow it's very pleasing it's a nice feeling isn't it it is i get the feeling of trying to reveal a fossil coming out of a rock yes it is that wasn't too deep no yeah it's fine it's it's an extraordinary um it's an extraordinary thing that you create something like a mechanical part literally out of your hands well there you are well that's true just uh finish that off for me about you big when alan's finished the press i want to print a replica page of the original gutenberg bible that means i'll also need to track down some other ingredients including movable type and 15th century paper but first i have a journey to make i'll be traveling through the silicon valley of medieval europe to explore the places where gutenberg and his team developed the machine which shaped the modern world my first port of call is mainz on the banks of the rhine in western germany this was gutenberg's birthplace and the city where he spent his childhood but despite first appearances only a few traces of the medieval city that gutenberg grew up in still survive this is the birth house of gutenberg a chemistry oh yes you can read it here stands gutenberg's birth house and gutenberg is the name of his family no actually the name of his family was gens fleisch against fleischer yeah which means meat gooseberry when we say who wants to run around with the name of goose meat in his life just around the corner is the church where he was probably baptized well part of it at least mainz was heavily bombed in the second world war so the medieval remains of some christophers are now bolstered by some post-war concrete think of a printer you think of fonts and this must be a 7000 point font but it's terrific to see and there's a plaque to him well it tells johannes gutenberg yeah now i wanted something i wanted to talk to you about actually mainz the city of mainz proclaimed in the year 2000 that it was his 600th anniversary so they think he was born in 1400 well that was decided on publicly actually 1900 when they made already the same fuss about this centennial at this time and then they decided gutenberg was born 1400 but the exact date is somewhere between 1397 and 1404. well i have to say i slightly agree with the city of mainz i think 1400 is a good year to describe his birth not because it's a round number but because it's actually the year that jeffrey chaucer died in england so it was the end of one one age if you like the age of the medieval writer and the beginning of a new age the early renaissance there's very little evidence about gutenberg's early years in mainz we know his mother owned some land and that his father was a merchant whose work brought him into contact with the city's goldsmiths expert metalworkers with skills which gutenberg would later find very useful and it's likely that he studied at university so he'd have come into contact with books unlike most of his contemporaries but that's about as far as it goes it's like catching the occasional glimpse of a figure in a crowd only to watch him melt away a few moments later and even when you finally come face to face with the great man you can't be sure you're looking at the real mr gutenberg so whether or not gutenberg had three hands like this one here whether or not he looked like david tennant as doctor who or whether or not he had a beard shaped like a fish stuck to his face one thing's certain we don't actually know what johannes gutenberg looked like at all and that gives us great scope perhaps he looked like you or me unlikely he would have been burnt if you look like me no one knows exactly when the elusive gutenberg first dreamed of building his printing machine [Music] but this was a revolutionary idea in the handmade world of the 15th century we're so used to living with printed matter every day of our lives from the cereal package in the morning to the book at bedtime that it might perhaps be rather hard to imagine what the world was like before printing so we have to come somewhere like here this monastery coaster aberbach in a village just a few miles from mainz where gutenberg grew up and this is where not the printed word but the written word was king [Music] ah dr schneider hello hi what a pleasure to meet you it's one of a bee here in a monastic setting i'm trying to get a picture of what life was like around the time of gutenberg how books were produced in the scriptorium i think they're called yeah this is a rather fine room this is in fact the chapter house where they would read the chapters of the bible and they'd all sit round on the benches so a scriptorium presumably was a different kind of room to this yes what sort of what sort of thing would you expect to find in the scribes room scriptoriums were smaller rooms than this because they needed heat in these rooms and because you need warm fingers to ride and to hold the feather and to do all this fine work with your hands and they needed light they needed windows in the summer and in the winter they needed um candles yeah yeah do we have any idea of the character and personality of some of these scrubs very seldom sometimes we have at the end of such bibles or other manuscripts small texts where the scribes tell how hard they work where yeah yeah it was very cold it was they had to sit always in the same position and they get um cramps and stiffness yeah yeah and it was cold and it was dark and their eyes were tired and they write this down hand-copied bibles were rare and expensive commodities far beyond the reach of ordinary mortals and even the best scribes made mistakes a printing machine would allow the creation of exact copies and lots of them whilst some church leaders feared anything that might break their near monopoly on learning others recognized that a common and universally accepted version of the bible might be a powerful weapon in the battle to preserve christian unity but the church was just one potential market for printed books beyond the cloister new universities were springing up across europe so it's attempting to assume that gutenberg aside from his technical interest i saw an entrepreneurial yeah yeah it was a mixture of three things i i think he was an engineer um about the technical things um he was merchant um and he was was an intellectual he had studied um and at the university and he knew that many people needed books with demand for books growing all the time anyone who could devise a machine for making them could hope to make a fortune and growing up in the heartland of the german wine industry gutenberg didn't have far to look for inspiration [Music] are rather noble structures and i think if poor old allen back in england is trying to build a press he's going to find it rather useful to see what these originals were like these contraptions are wine presses alan may thinks that gutenberg's press evolved from machines like these oh that's very artistic very good yes for gutenberg this must have been a very common sight he grew up in an area one of the biggest wine growing areas of the world i wonder if there was an actual moment though when he was sitting next to one of these or watching some grapes being pressed and saw the spindle sending the thing down and thought ah that's what i need just this big frame with a spindle presses like these may have started guttenberg's creative juices running but to turn such a basic piece of engineering into a precision machine would be a tall order and that was only part of the challenge he faced the whole project would take years of experiment and it would cost a fortune but money didn't grow on trees in 15th century mines i think it was a city of past glory it had been very influential and very rich in the medieval times but then in the 14th century it came down a little bit the plague was there two times and the black death yes and the city didn't have the richness anymore but it had been politically very influential the archbishop had been the elector and uh was the primus interpares as we might say of the electors and so it was an important city in any case in a sense what i'm getting from you is that mainz was a city of the past and what gutenberg needed was a city to look to the future yes i think so for a budding entrepreneur like gutenberg mainz was no place to start a business he would have been in his early 30s when he packed his bags and set sail down the rhine two days to the south was the city where his experiments in printing would first begin at alan may's workshop in england our own printing experiments already in full swing allen's invited his fellow printing expert martin andrews along to show him work in progress i'm pleased to see that my holiday snaps turned up allen's also finished carving this hefty wooden thread which generates the pressure needed to print but the thread needs a counter thread to guide it on its downward journey and it has to be cut by hand into the head of the press sounds tricky to me but alan has a plan it's an amazing contraption i mean the idea came from a guy called hero of alexander in something like ad 64. this ingenious device uses these wooden pegs to guide the thread on its journey meanwhile a set of cutters at the other end carve the counter thread through this solid wooden block i'm careful to tap this not on the sharp edge so in fact using the real thread itself to cut its equivalent part that's the elegant part of it actually it's pushed loads and loads of sawdust ahead of it look it's cutting something but there's only one way to find out if the thread and the counter thread are a perfect match ah that changes the whole perspective didn't seem to take that out one can see how it's all working oh my goodness there she goes excellent i think that's a pretty good job i do and i've never seen anything quite like it so i mean i'm convinced i think it works i'm convinced too but it's clearly a bit more to do i'm following the gutenberg trail down the rhine from mainz to strasbourg when gutenberg arrived here in the early 1430s this was a bustling city with trading links across europe and beyond that made it a far more promising business base than the bankrupt city of his birth [Music] and towering above the commercial center was the great cathedral itself [Music] of course when gutenberg got here the cathedral hadn't been finished and this huge tower and spire weren't quite completed as you can see there's still some work going on to this very day it's worth thinking about the fact that at this time the only investments that human beings ever seem to make were really in their future in other words in the afterlife by participating in the building of these enormous structures they were assuring their place in heaven but around about the time of gutenberg we started to see the rise of a merchant class who really believed in investing the idea of their future on earth venture capitalists and such people were to prove very useful to gutenberg [Music] the cathedral was more than the spiritual heart of the city it also became a focal point for its deal makers and money men prototype capitalists with the cash gutenberg needed to fund his work by the late 1430s it struck up a partnership with three of them and was ready to start work in earnest [Music] and if he ever wanted to remind himself that his big idea was a good one he only had to take a stroll through the streets nearby [Music] rue de freya the street of the brothers that tells us something about this area we're right beside the cathedral which is the ecclesiastical heart of an ecclesiastical city at the heart of an ecclesiastical empire the holy roman empire but we're thinking of it in terms of something like the city of london in other words the center of the entire system that runs the world at the moment for us it's finance for them it was the church it was the church that generated all the paperwork all the legal documentation all the printed services everything in fact that gutenberg might have spotted needed reproduction needed a new technology and so we turn into this frankly less than pre-possessing street but not the title street of the writers shrivashdu gas it's in this street in strasbourg that gutenberg must have seen the scribes bustling around itself importantly with great sheaves of paper under their arms and calluses on their inky fingers and you must have thought well you may believe you've got a job for life but i know better because one day one day you're all going to be replaced replaced by a vulgar machine he employed a carpenter called suspect to work on his new invention no one knows what it looked like so alan mays pieced together other clues to design our machine he knows that gutenberg printed one page at a time whereas later press is printed too in quick succession maybe that's why this prototype looks rather unusual to an expert eye let me have a quick look and see what's actually going on here because it it is unconventional because i'm the first thing that what surprises me is that we've got all the weight in the framework here and normally on a two-pull press you'd have actually a framework out here which is a making this more rigid but also taking the weight of the stone and the yeah the gear that means it can actually don't need it never because you only need to go that way never have to go farther than that when the press is in use it never has to go beyond beyond the cheeks it is unconventional it may be unorthodox but alan thinks he's found support for his design in an unlikely source this illustration of a press was drawn by albrecht durer 60 years after gutenberg first printed it's the only drawing i know of where the feet of the press come forward from the cheeks that's what mine are doing now and this has got a substantial structure at the front which you have yeah which the common press never has it just has a little little leg a little leg okay so i'm wondering well this is an obsolete press that that jurors got hold of and we're looking at the product which is actually 50 years old perfectly prepared to be broad-minded whether the other authorities in the world will agree with you i don't know but if alan's right this is a major discovery could this be a snapshot of an early gutenberg press gutenberg's team was growing besides the carpenters aspect he'd recruited other craftsmen from the strasbourg guilds and set them to work at his new premises not in the city itself but in a hamlet downstream far away from the prying eyes of potential competitors why the secrecy why was it necessary there were a number of people working in this area trying to solve this problem if only they could come up with a printed printed word for the church they would be have their fortunes made so he had to keep it as a secret otherwise everybody else would be doing it whilst they worked in secret on the printing press they needed a second revenue stream to keep the wolf from the door lo and behold fate brought to gutenberg a brilliant idea this was the creation of mirrors for pilgrims coming to the pilgrimage why was arkhan important arkhan was important because there was a cathedral there and in the cathedral were relics directly descending from christ supposedly and they were on display every four years and pilgrims would come from all over europe to uh to see the relics and receive the rays of healing that emanated from them and eventually there were so many pilgrims that they couldn't all get close to the relics so the idea came into existence that there should be some way of capturing these rays and the rays were captured by a concave metal mirror which would be held up so that it was some sort of a satellite dish capturing radiation local makers could not keep up with the demand gutenberg's idea was that if he could mix his metal right he could use the presses that were in development to print out errors which could be sold to the pilgrims at arkham it looked like a surefire winner but in 15th century europe there was one thing which could usually be relied on to scupper the best laid business plan black death strikes again and the pilgrimage is put off right they would postpone a pilgrimage yes for the play could not i mean it would be a real disaster if you had a hundred thousand people all gather together and you've got to play so that means that all the investors have been hoping for the money to come back yeah we're gonna have to yes one of the partners died the the partnership began to collapse leaving gutenberg not exactly in the lurch but struggling this setback would have deterred a lesser man but by now gutenberg must have been completely possessed by his plan so the work continued so gutenberg island and there's a statue of him with the fish on his face again no one knows exactly where his workshop was but it must have been somewhere near here he had chosen a secluded base to protect himself from the threat of industrial espionage but there was another reason for being close to the water because gutenberg was playing with fire do you remember my john bull printing set and those rubber pieces of type gutenberg's plan would only succeed if he could devise a system for mass producing individual letters which could be set and reset in any order he went to the guild of goldsmiths and found a man called hands done together they made the crucial technical breakthrough which made gutenberg's brilliant idea a practical proposition so this is a type foundry this created this table is believe it or not a complete foundry right i've asked stan to help me make a piece of type a single letter e which i can use in our grand printing experiment for the sake of authenticity i want my letter to match the dimensions of the original font used in the guttenberg bible first we have to make a punch a master copy of the letter we want to reproduce after we've transferred its outline onto the tip of this steel bar it has to be carved by hand using a file a very sharp file you do maybe a punch day two punches a day so in order to do the full set of type that gutenberg needed for his bible how much work was that well there are at least 270 characters perhaps more so you know given that a lot of holidays i would imagine close to the better part of a year yeah so if you were one of those people that invested in this new technology you'd be getting rather impatient you'd be saying no mr gutenberg you really need eight different e's yeah and the reason he needed different ones was obviously because it was a very elegant and harmonious look he was after he wanted absolutely top quality so he wanted some just slightly wider some that was slightly narrower so that he could always have justified lines correct without trailing white space and sort of ugly you know bad compositing things this is a smoke proof a way of checking that our punch is an accurate copy of the letter we want to replicate it looks spot on now how clever is that so here we have it it's hand carved and grooved and shaved and emirated and rasped and shaped and hardened and tempered and now that is the key that unlocks the technology that changes the world the punch beautiful and we made it but what's the next stage well we have to strike a matrix with that strike a matrix yeah we're going to hammer that punch straight into that piece of copper so we'll leave an impress of the letter shape absolutely the experts can't agree about how exactly gutenberg cast letters from his molds but stan's theory is the most commonly accepted one he thinks he invented something like this ingenious device this tool in front of us is the single unique element of gutenberg's invention this is a tight mold and it's made of two two halves and these two halves mate together to form a cavity in which the type will be formed with the matrix at the bottom that's right that's where the pressure's moved yes and so these two halves are beautifully fitted and because they make either a narrow or a wide opening by placing this matrix beneath the mold which we've carefully formed and closing the mold on the matrix and using the spring to keep it in place that's what this sort of thing is now there's a hollow inside of this mold that's the shape of the letter we're going to form okay isn't that neat and it's quite a unique part of the invention there was nothing else like this before uh so we're going to pour molten metal here lead tin and antimony straight away in there and it hardens instantly it's already hard yeah so we take the spring out of the way we release the matrix by pressing on it we pry the mold open and there's a piece of type oh my god isn't that marvelous so which bit is the time well there's the face we formed and it's an exact duplicate yeah and if you look at the punch we have here yeah you'll see that that punch is replicated on the face yes it's identical to the type back to its it's back to its form see that neat it's more than neat it's revolutionary because now we can make as many ease as we want quickly and cheaply i wonder how many it takes to print a full bible look what i did i made an e well these how they seem like the components of the greatest revolution in humankind since the invention of fire yet you could argue they certainly are and one of the reasons is that they're identical it's an extraordinary thing such ingenuity using arts and crafts that have been known for some hundreds of years but adding to it this unique little device that just enabled printers all over europe to start spreading the word i've had great reports about allen's progress with the press so i've returned to base to help him put together the finished article if you've ever had a traumatic experience with a self-assembly wardrobe now might be a good time to make a cup of tea it's like there's cereal packets slot a into tab b or whatever it is that's right i'm going to get to it i feel like atlas will give you a variety through the whole box over there that's much more sensible right now you use your mallet yeah don't do that stephen you hold it you don't kick it i suppose alan really no one has done anything like this for 500 years that's absolutely right on this sort of press that's it let's look good honestly i would never have made a boy scout hopeless you see what i love about this is that on the one hand it's desperately simple and on the other hand there all these little cunning things that i would never thought of in 100 years and i love when alan showed me that he was doing this double thread you think okay i'll follow my finger around here and it'll go behind and surely it'll come out here but now it comes out there because it's a double thread and the other one goes that way and it's quite complicated it screws my head quite literally he's not sure that this is exactly what glutenberg would have had but it looks right and so often that's the secret of this kind of engineering and designing if it looks right feels right then it is right it's a most satisfactory object it's hard for anything else wouldn't it be fun to have one in one's bedroom you could convert it with a little wash hand basin or something or maybe even have the mirror here at adjustable height i'm getting slightly mad now because i'm so fond of it the one thing i of course can't wait to see is how it actually prints i'm starting to share the sense of excitement gutenberg must have felt when he was finally ready to start printing by the late 1440s he'd moved on from strasbourg which had recently been terrorized by a marauding band of french mercenaries called the armagnacs perhaps they were the reason that he decided to head home to mainz as usual money was tight so he borrowed some cash from a relative this house was used as security for the loan and he struck up a partnership with a new investor called johan fust it was a deal he would later regret but it did give him the cash injection he needed to set his press running he didn't start with the bible far too ambitious he road tested the new technology on modest print jobs like this latin grammar book i'm a belmont bassem about i'm a bummer i remember that to show the church that his invention presented an opportunity and not a threat he also printed documents like this papal indulgence indulgence is this wonderful catholic way of raising money weren't they it sort of reminds me of um today if you journey in an airplane or something or have a very um fuel inefficient car you can you can offset your carbon can't you you can you can you can pay money to a company that offsets your carbon it forgives you your carbon sins and this is a bit like the same idea you offset your sins don't you it must have been marvelous for them to have gutenberg's new technology because before that of course each one will be hand written by a scribe and it's not just a quick voucher it's a lot of lines so it was a very good way of gutenberg showing off his new technology yes i think it shows also that the church really was very interested in printing that they did not consider it a black art as it is said in german they were interested because they saw all those advantages brought to them with church support for his magnum opus there was just one more issue to resolve [Music] most high-end books in those days were written not on paper but on something called vellum and what was vellum made out of it was made out of those little fellows those pretty brown round-eyed calves they yielded their skins just as they yielded the rest of themselves for veal chops to the tables of the mighty gutenberg who was determined that his bible was to be nothing if not the highest possible quality thought that he would print every bible on the finest vellum but either he or his business partners did some serious mathematical modelling as it would now be called and they quickly realized that actually only a few could be done in development because a little herd like this well you wouldn't be out of the old testament you've got those two there we'll call them genesis we'll call that fellow there exodus you've got deuteronomy over there leviticus it would take 140 calves to provide enough vellum for just a single copy of the bible for a print run of 180 which is what he planned gutenberg would have needed a staggering 25 000 of the poor creatures that's an awful lot of veal chops in anyone's book there are therefore a few gutenberg bibles extend in the world which are printed on vellum but most are printed on paper without a system for mass producing paper gutenberg's invention would have been dead in the water [Music] but although the chinese had first invented the stuff twelve hundred years earlier it was still a new commodity in the west this mill at basel in switzerland was set up at almost exactly the same time as gutenberg was working on his machine and they still make paper here the old-fashioned way not from wood pulp but from cloth rags that's unsatisfying first the rags are mashed to a fine pulp a water wheel provides the power to drive these hefty hammers once it's reached the right consistency the pulp is transferred to a huge vat which is where the fun really starts this is going to be our paper it seems extraordinary that these are the bits of cut up linen that have been pounded away and they've turned into this pulp okay so you i better keep stirring yes yes all right looks and strawberry what do you feel is the heating the water is a little bit warm because it's organic matter and it's breaking down no because it's a little bit easier oh it's working with warm water and the warm water goes quicker down from the right the sieve safe so this this is what now happens okay yes let's do it let's make paper we go in like this turn it and come up shake it a little bit so the water goes down and the fiber rests so we are ready for the next would it be all right if i could make some paper yes i'll just you'll have to take over my job and now should we swap places yes this is very exciting um okay yeah i'm gonna do that very nice it could be sweet horrible feeling it takes me back to the art room at school where i was always done ahead right so just the other side the other side oh oops this one no no like this oh i see light so you mean yeah first of all i've already i'll show you something ah yeah but there's someone already should we get rid of that that's all right okay ready to start down turning come on this side and this piece here that way too oh yeah it's got a few white bits in but it's not bad some paper for you renee amazing and is it ready to take the deck off there it is this is probably it's always the second that goes bad this is a magical process it's rather like panning for gold isn't it and perhaps that's not a bad analogy paper was light gold in medieval times it was unbelievably valuable and although it's quite a time consuming process it's a lot less time consuming than making vellum from calfskin let's say i've rather enjoyed this i feel connected to glutenberg somehow just by doing this that's good how do you know when it's ready because the ripples stop yes now it's okay oh that's not so good hang on okay not quite so good that one no oh well you put it back yeah put it back should we put it back and just turn it off turning it yeah like so nope nope oh i thought maybe it would go oh no it doesn't work like so yes oh dear i ruined the place oh i see it's better screwed up to make paper fit for printing is a fine art the raw materials need to be mixed to perfection to produce the right texture and absorbency for gutenberg this was the final crucial ingredient which made printing the bible a viable business proposition so beautiful my very own piece of paper and first of course it has to be dried doesn't it but i do hope uh adam will be satisfied with that how could he not be that's worthy of the finest prince's art the great day's arrived it's been five months since alan first got together his plans and designed his printing press it's now built paper's been made in basel i've cast the type personally nothing can stop us from printing a page of gutenberg text this must be how the great man felt himself before we start printing i have a little confession to make it took stan and me the best part of a day to make just one individual letter e to produce all the type needed to print a full bible probably took gutenberg's team around a year and frankly i don't have his time or his patience so i've cheated this package has come from the states it's a replica page of type set to the exact measurements of the gutenberg original and thankfully nothing's been damaged in transit so this is this is perfect isn't it we can we can print from this absolutely well almost surely there's room for my little e somewhere on the page oh it's going to go in that's so exciting let's try that now what word is that can you read that okay l-e-g-e-s yes that's great you know i have to confess i had my doubts about whether or not alan would be able to bring off the construction of a printing press in the time we'd given him and whether in fact there was enough known about printing then to be able to produce something that could actually work and come up with a reasonable facsimile of something that gutenberg could have done i have to say all my doubts been cast aside by the brilliance of the work he's done and all three of the experts through there giggling like children that the excitement of what they've all created together i'm going to see now some real printing can happen right it's the moment of truth let's see how it fits [Music] okay all right here we oh go goodness wait for the creek [Music] good luck everybody here we go well there's an impression there martin i can see it indeed yeah yeah wow oh my god that is congratulations everybody the inking is superb martin the alignment is fantastic right and that in particular stands out as being yeah it's the best one i am very very pleased with that i think that's starkly i think it was extraordinary anyway let's do some more well that's the proof of a printing press is being able to do more as we print the normal procedure would be that the pull the puller your puller okay okay it takes the sheet off yeah and it gives it a cursory regards but he's got to get really ready for the next prince right while the inker while he's away from the press the inker is going to be inky up again for him right so it's a real assembly line and when he comes off the inking he checks the quality of the print that you've just done right he's not proofreading that's all no he's looking to say that the impression is what everything's printing up right and then i'm going to character that's right okay [Music] done with my brisket yes chimpander tim pan that's it now we all hold on to the press now that's him [Music] it's nice isn't it it's super too close yeah there you go pretty good yeah no i think actually that's better guttenberg's first edition of the bible ran to 180 copies each containing more than 1200 pages which had to be set inked and printed very nice and that was just the black and white work after they'd left the press each page was hand decorated by an illuminator before the whole thing was bound together to make a finished book [Music] this is the miracle they're identical each one of these wonderful pages and that had never been seen before in the history of the world our experiments nearly finished but for gutenberg this was just the beginning of a monumental two-year print run but what a beginning it was [Music] the first copies of gutenberg's bible were displayed at the frankfurt trade fair in 1454 and they caused a sensation today fewer than 50 of those original books are still in existence one of the finest is held here at girtingham in germany you know what i'm genuinely tingling with excitement about coming close to a guttenberg bible having only seen one through glass and having examined so much about its means of production having discovered just how important it was and what a symbol it is of everything the modern age stands for the idea of actually touching one or being through cotton gloves is giving me goose flesh cannot believe this [Music] you know i've i've looked at them through glass and i've read about them and to be so close is an extraordinary feeling you want to have a look please this is actually um oh it's a remark by jacob of the famous brothers yeah when he was a librarian in getting in a gutenberg bible a gutenberg bible and he says from history at night of the highest rarity yes yeah thank you and this is the first page of the first volume do you know what's interesting is that although the illumination and decoration and the you call that rubrication don't worry right than the red letters literally well they're very beautiful it is the typeface that really draws the eye isn't it yes it's i mean people have said that it's even at the start of this new technology that is also an example of perfection yes and the general view is that it's so much more beautiful than it need to have been that is very true he was clearly a very driven perfectionist yes he uses what the scribes in the monasteries also used to used abbreviations that was the only way to create this this right margin as clean as it is now there's a little hole here yeah somebody must have ah what for that vandal plundered this in i don't know when this happened you see the illumination went up the page and somebody needed a model right for an illumination so they cut it out and put it next to his manuscript and and painted it of this model which is unfortunate [Music] well naturally i feel very privileged to be able to leave through this unbelievably rare and important object a gutenberg bible in my hands i'm wearing white gloves i'm terrified of breathing water vapor on it and yet you know the odd the odd thing is that it doesn't feel like something that is going to be crumbling to dust if i turn the pages too fast it feels very solid and robust and after all it was made to be used more than once a day i mean if it was bought by a monastery i guess it would have been used for all the offices of the day and it was it was a solid object a bible was a a thing that uh the thing that people expected to turn to all the time and it isn't a fragile little thing like a like an ornament it's a it's a useful object and the extraordinary thing about this is that although there were only 100 or so of these made only 12 of these in existence on vellum you know that aside from the eliminations every page is the same and that was really the most remarkable breakthrough wasn't it that somebody in a monastery in germany somebody in a palace in florence somebody in a in a private house in amsterdam could turn to the same page number the same word would begin at the top end at the end they were looking at mass production for the first time and although they were very rich those who could afford it they were nothing like as rich as those who could afford ones that had been made by scribes hand written i can't believe i'm here looking at it [Music] i'd like to report a happy ending for the man who created this extraordinary book but it didn't turn out quite like that do you remember mr fust the dragon who bankrolled the printing of the bible soon after the presses started running he asked gutenberg to repay the money he'd borrowed gutenberg didn't have the cash so he was forced to hand over all his printing equipment instead [Music] it had taken him almost a lifetime to build his machine now so soon after it had been completed it was snatched from gutenberg's grasp [Music] my journey ends here in the village of eltville a few miles outside mainz gutenberg had family roots here and his friends helped him get back on his feet and even to set up a new printing workshop but he never enjoyed the riches which his invention earned for his former business partner frust well gutenberg finally got the recognition he deserved up in the castle there the elector called him a night and gave him a pension and when he died the world knew that he had funded the modern art of printing but it's not that really that has brought me here it's the thought of what went on after gutenberg's death the replication of printing across europe at such a speed an unimaginable speed for that time from zero books to 20 million in just 50 years gutenberg's technology spread across europe like a benign virus it gave new ideas a ticket to ride and kick-started the renaissance for the next 500 years his method of printing was used to make books everywhere his was the machine that made us and that art the art of movable type printing defines us it's our civilization more than anything else i can imagine a modern world without cars i can imagine one without telephones or computers but i cannot begin to imagine a society anything like the one we have that doesn't have the printed word [Applause]

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 194,786

Keywords: 15th century, Absolute History, cultural development, cultural revolution, educational advancements, educational entertainment, educational revolution, evolution of printing, historical documentaries, historical innovations, historical inventions, industrial revolution, information revolution, knowledge sharing, learning about history, printing history, printing press, printing technology, storytelling through history, technological advancement, technological progressions

Id: Bzkg425E8E0

Length: 58min 57sec (3537 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021