The Printing Press

Posted by Lorri Brown Mar 22, 2007

We live in an age of technological advance so amazing that sometimes I can scarce believe there was life before the internet. I am one of the lucky people. I grew up with only three TV stations, and the only mail was via the United States post office. We did have a microwave when I was growing up, one of the earliest people to have one in our small Maine town. My mother was staunch believer that a woman’s place was definitely not in the kitchen, so the less time spent there, the better. I will be able to entertain my grandchildren with tales about the good ole’ days, before Google, email and satellite TV.

Just so we understand each other, I am not that old. I’m only thirty. However, in the three decades I’ve been alive, our world has transformed in many areas. For instance, we have gone from rotary phones to push button phones- to cordless phones- to cell phones. In the music department we have gone from records- to 8-tracks- to cassette tapes (I still have my Debbie Gibson tape as a sweet memento of the Eighties) to CD’s- to MP3 files to IPods. Frankly if music grows any smaller, I am not going to be able to find it.

The technology improvement list goes on and on. Laptops, MySpace, GPS. However, there is one technological advancement that outweighs them all in importance. One invention so powerful, so life altering, it puts even the microwave to shame.

In the sixteenth century, a little German printer by the name of Johannes Gutenberg devised a way to mass produce books. Mass production meant nearly everyone could afford books. Bill Gates may have revolutionized the twentieth century with his computers, but if Gutenberg, the subject of this weeks article, hadn’t made books available to all people, not just the very wealthy the world would be a very different place.