Printing Press Video

The Printing Press

“A Matter of Fact” with James Burke

• Thanks to technology, we can communicate with anyone
• Other people make things you use
• Natural world has been mechanized to fit means of distribution or method of manufacturing
• Up until 1450
  • News was all word-of-mouth (usually from the church)
    • Everyone was isolated to their own city and town (approx. 7 miles)
  • Everything was oral (most people were illiterate)
    • Troubadours would sing songs to remember the past
  • Act of writing was mystical à not many people could write and it only be done in church
    • Monks in monasteries lost manuscripts and books because they could never find what they were looking for (nothing was properly categorized)
  • Black death helped peasants who survived because their work was a rare and highly-payed commodity
    • If you managed to stay in a town long enough, your boss/owner couldn’t force you to come back: you were a free man
  • By 1400, paper was everywhere
    • Indulgence à bought from the church and it gave you penance against the sins you had committed or had yet to commit
      • Not supposed to be affected by commercial side of life
      • Worked on a sliding scale: those who were worth more had to pay more for their indulgence
    • Johannes Gutenberg à credited for creating the printing press
    • 1517à churches were putting out even more indulgences and the money was used to upgrade the churches
      • Fake indulgences were going around
    • Martin Luther created a list of reasons for which indulgences should not be sold
      • Forgiveness should not be sold
      • Luther was the first person to use print to share a widespread message to German civilians
      • Church put his work on a list of prohibited books
    • Print shops became meeting places to share ideas
      • Started by printing Bible
      • Printers were first real capitalists (80 million books in first 40 years)
    • 16^th century herbalist (pharmacist) started the scientific boom by printing pictures (carvings with ink) to identify the plants they were talking about
    • Latin started to die when dictionaries in “modern” languages came out to immortalize language
    • Cross-indexing showed how ideas might interrelate (1+1=3)
    • Thanks to printing, we have a world were “fact” means something new: it is now fluid