Johannes Gutenberg-Inventor of the printing press

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Johannes Gutenberg- Inventor of the printing press
Printing is the process of making copies of documents using alphabetic or numeric characters. In the medieval age, scribes were employed to copy documents by hand. A scribe had to have spent several years training as an apprentice to perfect their skill of copying. The process was slow and laborious making the produced manuscripts rare and expensive to acquire. Printing made it possible to produce many copies in a short time making the readily available and at a lower cost (Srinivasan 2).
The revolution of printing was the work of Johannes Gutenberg. According to Burch`s Fine Print: A Story about Johann Gutenberg, Gutenberg was born in Mainz, Germany around 1400. The exact year of his birth is not known. Little else is noted about his life other than he was a goldsmith and had worked with other metals before he invented the printing press. It is believed that his was not the first printing press, but a modification of the concept that previous models were based on.
As a goldsmith, Gutenberg knew how to make molds of letters, called type, as opposed to the whole page models that were being used previously. His model became famous since it had a greater impact due to the fact that its type was movable and allowed for the rearrangement of the characters to print a different page. He made thousands of these then assembled them together to replicate a page of a book. This assembled block would be used to make hundreds of pages that were identical to each other using a pressure press derived from machines used to press grapes in the wine making industry. He would then disassemble the block and reassemble it to make another page (Shaw 21).
In 1450, Gutenberg entered into an arrangement with a German businessman Johannes Fust who agreed to finance Gutenberg`s idea to start a printing business. His aim was to print bibles that he would then sell to the church and priests to make money. The arrangement later ended after a disagreement when the Guttenberg's Bible was being printed. Fust went to court to acquire the printing business since Gutenberg had not repaid his loan and won the case. Gutenberg lost his business and died a poor man in 1468. Credit for the invention of the press was given to Fust and he benefited financially from it. It wasn`t until much later that Fust gave credit to Gutenberg as the inventor of the printing press.
IMPACTS OF THE INVENTION
The invention of the printing press dramatically changed the world. It led to mass production of literature. After the first printing press was developed, several copies were made all over Europe leading to production of more books and making them available to the residents. This led to the building of libraries to store all the books and journals that were printed in the subsequent years.
The invention turned books from an expensive luxury to a common item. Intellectua...