SPEAKER_01: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising. OK, we've had a problem here.
SPEAKER_03: I knew we were in deep, deep trouble.
SPEAKER_02: I literally got on my knees and prayed. 13 minutes to the moon, season two, coming soon.
SPEAKER_03: 50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford.
SPEAKER_02: On Christmas Day 1438, one Andreas Dritzain, a prosperous citizen of the city of Strasbourg, died of the plague. It was not an unusual fate at the time, but Dritzain's death triggered a court case that continues to intrigue to this day. Dritzain had been in a partnership to make, well, exactly what isn't clear. And despite his substantial income, the costs of the mysterious project meant that Dritzain was up to his ears in debt. After Dritzain's death, his irascible brothers sued his partners. The court documents that survive tell of a secret art, and Dritzain's partners were clearly concerned that this secret art might be copied. The court case was settled, and the senior partner continued to spend money in pursuit of his adventure and art. His name? Johannes Gensfleisch Zolladen Zum Gutenberg. Gutenberg, of course, was working on the printing press. Or, more precisely, on an entire system that would allow durable metal type to be mass produced, flexibly rearranged, and used to print out hundreds of copies of a book in a matter of days. At the centre of Gutenberg's system was a method of mass producing the metal type. This was essential. A single page of text would require about 3,000 letter forms. It would be impossibly time consuming to carve them all by hand. Gutenberg was a goldsmith, well versed in the precise craft of carving punches for coins. So, he and his associates intricately carved a punch for each letter out of hard metal, with the letter form sticking up in relief, easier than carving a grooved letter form. The punch would then stamp out a matrix with a letter depressed into it. Finally, the matrix would be clamped into a hand-held mould, molten alloy poured in, and the metal type itself would emerge, cooling rapidly and ready to use. If the type wore out, Gutenberg could easily make more. Once the type was firmly fixed in a frame, Gutenberg could brush on the oil-based ink that he had developed, firmly press slightly damp paper onto the metal, and admire the results. And what results? Gutenberg tested his machine by printing a 28-page school book, but quickly moved to a prestige project, a magnificent edition of the Bible in Latin. The Pinae Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, saw some of Gutenberg's Bible in 1455. Piccolomini praised him, a marvellous man, and noted the type was so clear it could
SPEAKER_00: be read without glasses, and that all copies had been sold.
SPEAKER_02: But while we continue to admire the beauty of those Bibles today, what was revolutionary was not the beauty or clarity, but the economics. Since Gutenberg made it possible to mass produce writing, the price of books collapsed. The extent of this change would be hard to exaggerate. For several centuries before Gutenberg, the price of a manuscript, a handwritten book, hovered around six months' wages. Before long, it was closer to six days' wages, and by the early 1600s, six hours' wages. The output of printed material began to soar. More books were printed in the first century after the printing press than had been hand-copied in the entire pre-Gutenberg history of Europe. That was just the beginning. The printing business was a new kind of business. For centuries, skilled trades such as weaving had been organised by guilds, which controlled who could perform the trade and how they could perform it. But printers operated outside the guild system, as for-profit firms. Merchant bankers would supply the considerable upfront investment needed to make a printing press and to typeset a book. It was hard to be a printer without going into debt. Those merchants would also organise the distribution of the product, since there were no bookshops. It was a tough business. To print an illustrated Bible, the product beloved of the early printers, was a vast undertaking. Many printers didn't survive the cutthroat competition. Venice, the centre of the early industry, had 12 printers in 1469. Just three years later, nine of them were gone. Eventually, printers figured out that it was more profitable to produce a shorter, simpler product with a lower price tag and a longer print run. Grammar books were popular, the very thing that Gutenberg had first printed to test out his system. So were pre-packaged papal indulgences. Both were reliable revenue sources. Then there were short religious polemics, such as Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, which, so the story goes, he nailed to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517. As the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein points out, there was nothing particularly unusual about a professor of theology like Martin Luther engaging in religious argument with a Catholic church. And church doors were a traditional place for publicity. No, what was unusual was the speed with which the printing press disseminated the rebellious ideas of Luther and his followers. Wittenberg became a one industry town filled with printers. Martin Luther produced a German translation of the New Testament, which was widely printed. He described printing as God's highest and
SPEAKER_00: extremist act of grace, whereby the business of the gospel is driven forward. But the pamphlets
SPEAKER_02: that were circulated were often anything but graceful. They were packed with vicious caricatures, for example, portraying the Pope with a wolf's head. Catholic loyalists responded with their own counter propaganda. The religious flame war filled the pockets of the printers, sparked the reformation and the birth of the Protestant church, and ultimately led to the catastrophe of the Thirty Years War. A revolutionary new technology rewards inflammatory rhetoric? Who would have thought it? Modern internet trolls argue that conflict brings attention and attention brings influence. But any German living through the 17th century could have attested that this was not a new idea. And what of the man who started it all? According to the British Library, Johannes Gutenberg was the man of the millennium. And there are few others whom one could nominate for such an honour with a straight face. But even the man of the millennium struggled to make money from the printing press. Like many of the printers who followed in his footsteps, he was eager to print those glorious, ruinously expensive Bibles. And Gutenberg, remember, had been accumulating debt since his partnership with Andreas Dritzane 17 years previously. In 1455, the same year that the future Pope had raved about his work, he fought yet another court case with yet another business partner. This time he lost ownership of his own printing press. If only he'd stuck to printing grammar books.
SPEAKER_03: An important work for us was John Mann's The Gutenberg Revolution. For a full list of our sources please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50things.
SPEAKER_04: What is the world health really doing in case this coronavirus finds its way into Africa?
SPEAKER_04: This is Jacqui Leonard from the BBC's Global News Podcast. And in response to concerns about the spread of the virus, we've put together an episode in which our own BBC panel of experts answers questions from listeners around the world. From Tokyo in Japan. From Nigeria. From China. From the state of Arizona, the United States.
SPEAKER_01: In Bavaria, Germany. To find it, just search for Global News Podcast
SPEAKER_04: wherever you get your podcasts and look for the special episode released on the 2nd of March. Is this something that's going to be around for a very long time?
SPEAKER_04: That's the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
