The Buddhist history of moveable type before Gutenberg (2016)

https://tricycle.org/magazine/buddhist-history-moveable-type/

by krig • 5 years ago

83 42 5 years ago

benjohnson• 5 years ago

This article missed the point. Gutenberg didn't invent metal movable type and that's not why we remember him. He invented making a repeatable casting method with appropriate alloys for metal type that had accurate enough uniform dimensions that he could to use a wine press mechanism to press paper onto the uniform surface.

The molding method he made was astounding clever and went far beyond using basically metal coin minting process that has existed for thousands of years around the world.

WalterBright7• 5 years ago

It's like the arguments that Edison didn't invent the lightbulb. Other inventors had made glowing wires before. But Edison's great insight was to pass high voltage but low current through the filament (previous inventors used low voltage and high current). Edison also used an effective vacuum machine to prevent the filament from burning.

The result was a practical light bulb, one that lasted more than moments, and did not consume vast amounts of power.

Retric8• 5 years ago

It’s a little more complicated, lightbulbs where very much a useful thing before Edison and several other improvements occurred from 1802 to Edison’s 1879 patent and the actual breakthrough of a cheap bulb reaching 1200 hours occurred after that patent. Warren de la Rue for example had an efficient and long lasting design that was simply to expensive for mass production. Henry Woodward is arguably the first inventor of a practical bulb using carbon rods in nitrogen filled bulbs, though his business failed and he sold the patent to Edison.

Critically, it was really electric infrastructure more than the physical bulb design that resulted in GE’s success. Arc lamp’s had become very popular for street lighting through the 1870’s, which really set the stage for lighting alternatives.

dbt00• 5 years ago

Gutenberg's place in history is as the man who ushered in the printing press and commodity publishing in the west. Whether or not he was the first ever to do it isn't relevant to that history, but I do think knowing that other people were onto similar ideas is interesting. Just like in 100 years the iPhone will be "the first smartphone", and people will learn about blackberries and palmpilots in random little "did you know" snippets...

jlg23• 5 years ago

Or it's the place in history of a man who provided a tool that allowed dissemination of "heretic" ideas, thus enabling reformation.

mymythisisthis• 5 years ago

He was interrupted printing the Bible, the Pope asked him to print indulgences. Indulgences were sold, to raise money for the Papacy. Enter Martin Luther and the Protestants Reformation.

hoophoop2• 5 years ago

that's not why we remember him

99% of people believe that he single-handedly invented the press with movable type. Ask around.

geoduck14• 5 years ago

Can confirm. I totally thought that.

Also, I represent 99% of America.

Igelau• 5 years ago

Are people going to start protesting on my lawn now that I'm in the 1%?

Fern_Blossom2• 5 years ago

Yea, but let's reframe this... does it matter? Let's say people thought Bozo the Clown invented the printing press. What does it change? I'm not trolling. This might be more of me having too deep of thought on the matter. I'm the kind of guy that'll rabbit hole into the history of Macedonia for too much of 3 weeks because I came across an article about them having trouble getting into NATO due to the country's name (yes I did this). I know more about Macedonia (now North Macedonia) than 99% people... so what?

Better example, I enjoy watching sports with friends and with alcohol. Every now and then, commenters and friends will mention some sort of niche bit of info. Like a certain football play and what it means. Knowing or not knowing the specifics of game plays changes zero of my entertainment of the game. In truth, it wouldn't mean anything to my friends either in reality. Any of us knowing or not knowing the exact, specific details of football changes nothing. We still watch it on ESPN. We still hang out at someone's house. We all bring food and booze. It matters to the players, coaches and anyone else directly involved. Them flubbing a named detail can change the game, yes. Me knowing? I could call American football, "ice skating" and it'll change zero in the real world. That's not a football, it's an ice cube. Pauly Shore was the nickelback for the Bucks in the last Nachobowl.

99% of people can get through life just fine thinking the printing press was invented by a hamster. That knowledge doesn't change the utility of a book. I think I'm just overthinking it, but maybe culturally we apply too much value on tidbits of facts.

lolinder• 5 years ago

I, for one, grew up hearing that Gutenberg invented the printing press—when people wanted to be more specific they would credit him with movable type.

I think it's valuable to point out from time to time how incremental most of the actual innovations in history have been, even the most revolutionary ones. The most frequent narrative surrounding these major breakthroughs in history leaves people assuming that the way the world works is everything sits stagnant until some great person comes along and changes everything. A far more productive lens through which to see human progress is one in which most progress is the result of tying together existing ideas in new ways. This kind of innovation is within the reach of most of us, if we simply stopped trying to be the "first" and became okay with synthesizing what's already there.

ptr2voidStar• 5 years ago

Hear, hear!

kragen2• 5 years ago

Gutenberg didn't just invent typemetal; he also invented printer's ink.

wombatmobile• 5 years ago

"Johannes Gutenberg is famous for having designed and built the first printing press to incorporate movable type and mechanized inking and for using his invention to produce the Gutenberg Bible."

-- brittanica.com

"Gutenberg's technique of making movable type remains unclear. In the following decades, punches and copper matrices became standardized in the rapidly disseminating printing presses across Europe. Whether Gutenberg used this sophisticated technique or a somewhat primitive version has been the subject of considerable debate.

"In the standard process of making type, a hard metal punch (made by punchcutting, with the letter carved back to front) is hammered into a softer copper bar, creating a matrix. This is then placed into a hand-held mould and a piece of type, or "sort", is cast by filling the mould with molten type-metal; this cools almost at once, and the resulting piece of type can be removed from the mould. The matrix can be reused to create hundreds, or thousands, of identical sorts so that the same character appearing anywhere within the book will appear very uniform, giving rise, over time, to the development of distinct styles of typefaces or fonts. After casting, the sorts are arranged into type cases, and used to make up pages which are inked and printed, a procedure which can be repeated hundreds, or thousands, of times. The sorts can be reused in any combination, earning the process the name of "movable type.

"The invention of the making of types with punch, matrix and mold has been widely attributed to Gutenberg. However, recent evidence suggests that Gutenberg's process was somewhat different. If he used the punch and matrix approach, all his letters should have been nearly identical, with some variation due to miscasting and inking. However, the type used in Gutenberg's earliest work shows other variations."

-- Wikipedia

dhosek• 5 years ago

There's a lot of mystery even among those directly studying Gutenberg, exactly what he invented. There's some evidence that he didn't actually have character-based movable type at all, but was casting slugs of type for each line using punches to set the characters in a larger mold (I'm going on 25-year-old memories of an article I read in maybe Printing History). What is certain is that post-Gutenberg, punch-cutting to make matrices to cast individual characters and wooden printing presses spread across Europe pretty quickly. The press remained pretty much unchanged until the invention of the iron printing press in the early nineteenth century, followed by a flurry of improvements in the coming decades including cylindrical presses and stereotype printing. Typecasting remained largely unchanged until almost the twentieth century when there were the trio of inventions of the Monotype and Linotype casters which combined typesetting and typecasting and the pantographic engraving process which allowed designers to directly engrave matrices using a larger representation of the character rather than having to manually carve the letter at the actual printing size.

a11r• 5 years ago

The timing is interesting. According to the article, one of the reasons this did not succeed more broadly was due to the large number of characters in the script adapted from the chinese writing system. The invention of Hangual a couple of centuries later did bring to Korea a script with dozens of letters instead of thousands. If the modern script was invented first, perhaps we would be crediting Korea as the birthplace of the printing press.

edit:fixed typo

lasagnaphil• 5 years ago

Hangul is still quite finicky to create a movable type with though. Although the basic letters themselves count in the dozens, they can combine not only horizontally but vertically (and even both at the same time), so in practice you would have to create every block for each possible syllable. It's still a lot less than the Chinese scripts, but large enough to make the printing press less practical than the alphabet. (Here's an example of a Hangul movable type: https://www.museum.go.kr/files/zin/curator_14_3.jpg)

selimthegrim• 5 years ago

- Uyghurs were Manichaeans too

- pretty sure the neighboring Tangut (Western Xia) had printed books too (maybe courtesy of the Uyghurs?) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auspicious_Tantra_of_All-Rea...

sammalloy• 5 years ago

It seems the difference is that the Korean Jikji (1377) is considered the oldest extant book printed with movable metal type, while the Tangut book (1139?) found in China is the oldest extant book printed using wooden movable type.

bumbada• 5 years ago

The travels of Marco Polo(1300) talks about books in China so cheap that people could actually buy them as they are made from woodblocks.

But "cheap" here is not the price of a book today. A book requires someone spending at least a year writing it, specially in the past, with very bad lighting after sunset or in bad weather. That usually meant a book costing the equivalent of a car today, or even more expensive.

Chinese books were cheap compared to buying a car but way more expensive than today. And very few books could justify the investment of creating the woodblocks.

Gutenberg probably got the idea from Marco Polo,woodblock was already used for graphics in Europe, but added his knowledge with metal working and invented an alloy that expands as it cools down. That is extremely rare in metals, almost all of them contract.

That unique property gave Gutenberg type its incredible quality.

Also, Gutenberg knowledge of metal made him create a method that let you recreate the type very easily again and again when the type wears out.

And then he added the concept of the press and the distributor of ink that were taken from other professions like olive oil and wine makers(something as old as Romans in Europe).

agumonkey• 5 years ago

was the expanding easy to control ? seems to me naive eyes that expanding on cooldown would lead to graphical issues too.

kragen2• 5 years ago

Type metal doesn't actually expand much when it solidifies either; it's an alloy of tin, lead, and antimony which contracts when it solidifies, but only very slightly. Antimony by itself expands when it solidifies, and so by varying the amount of antimony (and consequently the proportion of antimony crystals in the solid) you can get a type-metal-like alloy that expands when it solidifies, one that contracts, or one that remains precisely the same size. What you actually want is something that contracts by the same amount as the mold, which is a very small amount, because the mold ("matrix") is made of iron.

The Sn–Pb–Sb eutectic is 4–84–12. Most type metal alloys have a substantial excess of antimony over that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_metal

thaumasiotes• 5 years ago

A book requires someone spending at least a year writing it, specially in the past, with very bad lighting after sunset or in bad weather. That usually meant a book costing the equivalent of a car today, or even more expensive.
Chinese books were cheap compared to buying a car but way more expensive than today. And very few books could justify the investment of creating the woodblocks.

I think you're overstating things. Some extracts from the introduction of https://www.amazon.com/dp/1624666841/ :

Whereas only dozens of biji have survived from earlier periods, extant Song [10th-13th centuries, predating Marco Polo] works number in the hundreds. This development can be attributed to three major factors: the expansion of the publishing industry, the growing size of the scholar-official class, and the rising level of literacy among the Song population. Combines, these trends led to the wide circulation of printed materials in general, and the increase in biji authors and popularity of anecdotal writing in particular.
it was a common practice among Song biji authors to state in the prefaces for their works that their biji were the result of years of casual record keeping of items gathered at social occasions or acquired through personal investigation. As a result, a typical biji would touch on various topics, ranging from observations about natural conditions to everyday life of the elite and ordinary people, and from local practices and customs to interesting personalities and strange and unusual occurrences.
The sizes of biji collections, for example, varied greatly. Some contained only a few dozen short entries. Others included lengthier episodes and amounted to hundreds of chapters. Equally diverse were the backgrounds of biji authors. While towering scholarly and literary figures [such as... ] composed biji, the majority of biji authors achieved neither high office nor literary fame. Their biji collections were often their only surviving works, bearing witness to these men's varied geographic and familial origins, travels, social connections, scholarly and artistic inclinations, and everyday concerns, such as personal hobbies, career aspirations, and obsessions.
Even though both Casual Notes and the Record [夷坚志] are classified as biji works, Hong Mai apparently meant for them to differ in their content and purpose. Compared to the Casual Notes' attention to the institutional, literary, and historical developments of the Song and earlier times, the majority of the Record stories were gathered through conversations and hearsay. If Casual Notes was more scholarly in nature and intended to demonstrate Hong's erudition in the classics, literature, and history and politics, the Record was a declaration of the author's love of the strange, the marvelous, and the supernatural
The Record achieved an immediate success. In multiple prefaces, Hong Mai referred to its popularity and the pressure he was under to produce additional chapters in increasingly shorter intervals.
At the time of Hong Mai's death in 1202, the Record had grown to a massive collection of 420 chapters, totaling over four thousand entries. Although it is not clear whether any complete editions were ever published by any Song publisher, we do know that multiple editions of varying sizes and qualities were made available by commercial publishing houses in different parts of the country.

This describes a rather robust publishing industry that was happy to create blocks for the minor memoirs of people of no particular note, and that published works that achieved actual popularity in every conceivable price point, cutting new blocks specifically for the cheaper editions! And all this is against a cultural background in which reading -- the skill and the activity -- is much more difficult than it ever was in Europe.

Meanwhile -- OK, several hundred years prior -- novels were produced for the popular market in the Hellenic world. Those were not printed and could not have been as cheap, but they were a popular consumption good, not something out of reach.

You see Don Quixote hailed as the first novel (granted, this happens less than it used to), but that reputation is based only on a gross unawareness of history.

pradn• 5 years ago

I liked the article, but it's mistaken in its use of named centuries. It says "In the 12th century, the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan consolidated the largest empire in human history", but instead means the 1200s, which is the 13th century. (Recall the years 1-99 are the first century though the year numbers don't start in the 100s.) This mistake happens a few times in the article, but at least its consistent.

shipman05• 5 years ago

I have been workshopping a theory that the printing press was far more valuable in the West due to the small number of characters needed for printing the Latin alphabet compared with Chinese characters.

I'm admittedly unfamiliar with pre-modern Chinese printing techniques, though. Is my theory plausible or am I way off base?

The Buddhist history of moveable type before Gutenberg (2016)

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