SPEAKER_00: 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.
SPEAKER_02: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford The Gutenberg printing press, invented in the 1440s by Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith
SPEAKER_01: from Mainz in Germany, is widely considered to be one of humanity's defining inventions. Gutenberg figured out how to make large quantities of durable metal type, and how to fix that type, firmly enough to print hundreds of copies of a page, yet flexibly enough that the type could then be reused to print an entirely different page. Gutenberg's famous Bibles were objects beautiful enough to rival the calligraphy of the monks. Actually you can quibble with Gutenberg's place in history. He wasn't the first to invent a movable type press. It was originally developed in China. Even as Gutenberg was inventing in Germany, Koreans were ditching their entire method of writing to make printing easier, cutting tens of thousands of characters down to just 28. It's often said that Gutenberg single-handedly created mass literacy, but that's not true either. Literacy was common six or seven hundred years earlier in the Abbasid Caliphate, spanning the Middle East and North Africa. Still, the Gutenberg press changed the world. It led to Europe's reformation, science, the newspaper, the novel, the school textbook and much else. But it couldn't have done so without another invention, just as essential, but much more often overlooked. Paper. Paper was another Chinese idea, just over 2,000 years ago. At first they used it for wrapping precious objects, but they began to write on it. It was lighter than bamboo and cheaper than silk. Soon the Arabic world embraced it. But Christians in Europe didn't do so until much later. Paper came to Germany just a few decades before Gutenberg's press. What took so long? For centuries, Europeans just didn't need the stuff. They had parchment, which is made of animal skin. Parchment was pricey. A parchment bible required the skins of 250 sheep. Since so few people could read or write, that hardly mattered. But as a commercial class arose, with more workaday needs like contracts and accounts, the cheaper writing material being used by the Arabs started to look attractive. And the existence of cheap paper made the economics of printing look attractive too. The set-up cost of typesetting could easily be offset with a long print run. That meant either slaughtering a million sheep or using paper. And printing is only the start of paper's uses. We decorate our walls with it as wallpaper or posters and photographs. We filter tea and coffee through it. We package milk and juice in it. As corrugated cardboard, we make boxes with it. And in the 1870s, the same decade that produced the telephone and the lightbulb, the British Perforated Paper Company produced a kind of paper that was soft, strong and absorbent. The world's first dedicated toilet paper. Paper can seem charming and artisanal, but it's the quintessential industrial product churned out at incredible scale. Indeed, when Christian Europeans finally did embrace paper, they created arguably the continent's first heavy industry. Initially they made paper from pulped cotton. This requires some kind of chemical to break down the raw material. The ammonia from urine works well, so for centuries the paper mills of Europe stank as soiled garments were pulverised in a bath of human piss. The pulping also needs a tremendous amount of mechanical energy. One of the early sites of paper manufacture, Fabriano in Italy, used fast flowing mountain streams to power massive drop hammers. Once finely macerated, the cellulose from the cotton breaks free and floats around in a kind of thick soup. The soup is then thinly poured and allowed to dry, where the cellulose reforms as a strong, flexible mat. Over the years, the process saw innovation after innovation. Threshing machines, bleaches, additives, each one designed to make paper more quickly and cheaply, even if the result was often a more fragile surface that yellowed and cracked with age. Paper became an inexpensive product, ideally suited for the everyday jottings of middle class life. By 1702, paper was so cheap that in the UK it was used to make a product explicitly designed to be thrown away after just 24 hours. The Daily Courant, the world's first daily newspaper. And then, an almost inevitable industrial crisis. Europe and America became so hungry for paper that they began to run out of rags. The situation became so desperate that scavengers combed battlefields after wars, stripping the dead of their blood stained uniforms to sell to paper mills. There was an alternative source of cellulose for making paper. Wood. The Chinese had long since known how to do it, but the idea was slow to take off in Europe. It was the mid-19th century before wood became a significant source for paper production in the West. Today, paper is increasingly made out of paper itself, often recycled appropriately enough in China. A cardboard box emerges from the paper mills of Ningbo, 200 miles south of Shanghai. It's used to package a laptop computer, the box is shipped across the Pacific, the laptop is extracted and the box is thrown into a recycling bin in Seattle or Vancouver. Then, it's shipped back to Ningbo to be pulped and turned into another box. When it comes to writing though, some say paper's days are numbered, that the computer will usher in the age of the paperless office. The trouble is the paperless office has been predicted since Thomas Edison in the late 19th century, who thought office memos would be recorded on his wax cylinders instead. The idea really caught on as computers started to enter the workplace in the 1970s and it was repeated in breathless futurologist reports for the next quarter of a century. Meanwhile, paper sales stubbornly continued to boom. Yes, computers made it easy to distribute documents without paper, but computer printers made it equally easy for the recipients to put them on paper anyway. America's copiers, fax machines and printers continued to spew out enough sheets of paper to cover the country every five years. After a while, the idea of the paperless office became less of a prediction and more of a punchline. But perhaps things are finally changing. In 2013, the world hit peak paper. Many of us still prefer the feel of a book or a physical newspaper to swiping a screen, but the cost of digital distribution is now so much lower, we go for the cheaper option. Finally, digital is doing to paper what paper did to parchment with the help of the Gutenberg press, out-competing it, not on quality, but on price. Paper may be on the decline, but it will survive not just on the supermarket shelf or beside the lavatory, but in the office too. Old technologies have a habit of enduring. We still use pencils and candles and the world still produces more bicycles than cars. Paper was never just a home for beautiful typesetting, it was everyday stuff. And for jottings, lists and doodles, you still can't beat the back of an envelope.
