When was invented the printing press

The English language is filled with colorful turns of phrase. There can be many reasons as to why some phrases make no sense. Maybe their original meaning has been lost to time, or the definitions of individual words have shifted.

This one might seem to make sense. They have a few sweat glands like other mammals, yes, but their preferred method of cooling down is to find a nice mud bath. Why do we say someone sweats like a pig, then? As it cooled, it would gather droplets of water that made the iron look sweaty. In all of recorded weather history, there have been a few occasions of animals falling from the sky.

But never has there ever been a report of cats and dogs raining down. Lewis Carroll played around with a lot of English idioms in his Alice in Wonderland series. Their origins are often lost. August is the time of year when it feels like fall and winter will never come again.

Yes, those are the dog days of summer. And sure, the image of a dog sweltering in the heat captures the feeling of the month pretty well. It does seem like at least a bit of a stretch to call them dog days, however, especially when all the animals are suffering under the sun.

The Greeks believed that during the times of year when Sirius and the Sun rose in the sky at the same time July into August , the combined intensity of the two stars is what caused the summer heat. They were wrong, of course, but the phrase stuck around. What could it mean to kick the bucket? Is the water in the bucket the symbol of your life? Maybe it was a reference to someone being hanged, and kicking the bucket out from beneath themselves.

Theater is filled with old superstitions. At this point, you might be unsurprised to know this is another phrase origin no one agrees on. It made the leap to theater at some point after that. Of all the fruit in the world, it seems strange that the apple would be chosen above all others to be the symbol of love.

Sure, apples are good, but are they really the sweetest possible thing to compare your love to? Probably not. Some people think it makes perfect sense, while other have trouble parsing it. For the most part, these names are chosen either by the group of people who live there, or by a colonizing force that decided to divide up a land according to its whims.

Naming a continent is a whole different story, though. So where do these names come from? Continent etymology is more complicated than you might think. This fact is taught in English-speaking countries, as well as in most of Western Europe, along with China, India and the Philippines.

Europe and Asia are divided by a mountain range, but they most definitely belong to one landmass. This especially makes sense for Russia, which straddles the two. The two are continuous, after all, even if the width of land narrows in Central America.

Asia and Africa, for example, are very closely joined at the Isthmus of Suez, which is part of Egypt. By some definitions, Egypt is in fact part of both Asia and Africa. An extremist might even argue that there are only four continents: Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, Australia and Antarctica. There are countless historical reasons why, but colonization of both land and language is the big one.

They had no idea at the time just how large Europe or Asia actually were, but they applied the names liberally.

The third was Libya. At the time when the Ancient Greeks were exploring beyond their boundaries, it was Ancient Libyans who inhabited Northern Africa. The Egyptians were also there, but the Ancient Greeks decided that the Nile was the dividing line between Asia and Libya, so Egypt was grouped in with Asia in their conception of the world.

The entire process is done by hand. The letterpress is often used by small, boutique printers, and offers a beautiful handmade look. The offset press revolutionized the printing industry, making it possible to print enormous quantities efficiently and cost-effectively. In a nutshell, modern offset printing involves using a computer to create a plate, which is then placed on a cylinder. Ink is applied to the plate cylinder, which rolls against a rubber cylinder, which in turn rolls the ink onto sheets of paper fed through the press.

Offset presses are used to mass produce newspapers, magazines, books, and other printed materials. Digital presses make low-volume printing affordable, and have similarly revolutionized the printing industry, because they do not require plates. Instead, they use advanced inkjet or laser jet technology to transfer ink to paper.

Though these are the most popular types of printing presses, other types exist for specialized purposes. For example, engravers are often used to create the raised logos often seen on letterhead. At first, the noble classes looked down on it.

To them, hand-inked books were a sign of luxury and grandeur, and it was no match for the cheaper, mass-produced books. Thus, press-printed materials were at first more popular with the lower classes.

When word spread about the printing press, other print shops opened and soon it developed into an entirely new trade. Printed texts became a new way to spread information to vast audiences quickly and cheaply. An important side effect was that people could read and increase their knowledge more easily now, whereas in the past it was common for people to be quite uneducated.

This increased the discussion and development of new ideas. The printing press also helped standardize language, grammar, and spelling. They had also something no one else in printing had had up till then: an alphabet, a simple group of relatively few letters for writing every word one wished to say. There was no explosion of printing in the Western Mongol empire. Nonetheless, movable-type Uyghur-language prints have been discovered in the area, indicating the technology was used there.

Furthermore, the Mongols may have carried the technology not only through Uyghur and Persian territory, but into Europe, including Germany. The Mongol empire repeatedly invaded Europe from roughly to AD; that period saw the entry of enough Western Asian recruits and captives to bring the loanword horde from their Turkic languages into European ones.

That business took decades of his life to bring to fruition, forced him into bankruptcy, and led to court filings by investors who repeatedly sued him to get their money back.

The stories we tell about the man, and how the Bibles came to be, have been cobbled together from a fistful of legal and financial records, and centuries of dogged scholarly fill-in-the-blank. Indeed, the entire history of the printing press is riddled with gaps.

Gutenberg did not tell his own story in documents created on the printing presses he built; to the best of modern knowledge, he did not leave any notes on his work at all. And if Gutenberg was reticent, the Mongols, their Uyghur compatriots, and Eastern Asia government heads were even more so. The fantastical idea that Gutenberg alone invented the printing press ignores an entire continent and several centuries of relevant efforts and makes no effort to understand how or why technology might have spread.

But Davis, who was unavailable for an interview for this article, does little to correct the record in The Lost Gutenberg. She mentions China just a few times and Korea only once—and the Mongols, Uyghurs, and non-Christian aspects of printing history not at all.

Indeed, she never explains that the Gutenberg Bible is not universally acclaimed as the most important book in history. Nor are copies of the Bible the oldest books created with movable type that still exist today—although a reader could be forgiven for gathering that impression from The Lost Gutenberg. It dates to and has served as a starting point for scholarship on the origin of movable type. After returning to England, he set up a press in Westminster Abbey , where he worked as a printer for the monarchy until his death in The worldwide spread of the printing press meant a greater distribution of ideas that threatened the ironclad power structures of Europe.

Twenty years later, books from John Calvin and Martin Luther spread, bringing into reality what Alexander had feared. Furthering that threat, Copernicus published his On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres , which was seen as heresy by the church. By , the first official newspaper, Relation , was printed and distributed in Strasbourg.

The Invention of Printing. Theodore Low De Vinne. Rebecca Romney. Joseph Needham, Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin. Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Patricia Buckley Ebrey. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and the invention of the mechanical movable type printing press helped disseminate knowledge wider and faster than ever before. German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around , although he was Americans enjoy freedom of the press as one of the rights guaranteed by It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.

The Han Dynasty ruled China from B. Though tainted by deadly dramas within the royal court, it is also known for its promotion of Confucianism as the state religion and opening the Silk Road trade route to Europe,