Johannes Gutenberg is frequently cited by technologists. The transformation of society by computers will prove as profound as that caused by the invention of printing 560 years ago, they opine. While this may be true, there is one slight hitch: no one knows exactly what Gutenberg invented.
To find out, printing historians had a go at recreating the world’s first tech start-up last month at London’s St Bride Foundation, a cultural centre for printers. Neither Gutenberg’s press nor any of his metal types survive; the replica workshop at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, western Germany, is based on educated guesswork.
Alan May, a British printer and woodworker, has gone one better and crafted a full-scale wooden handpress based on a 1511 sketch by Albrecht Dürer. Unlike the press Mr May built for a BBC documentary, this one is for public use. Beyond careful mechanical inferences about how Gutenberg may have repurposed a wine press to pound paper on to inked lead type, its chief virtue, Mr May says, “is that it works”.