Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of Five
Speaker 1: Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, I'm welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there,
Speaker 1: there's Jerry out there, our ethereal ephemeral producer, and this
Speaker 1: is Stuff you Should Know, which um for this edition.
Speaker 1: I feel like we should be playing like harpsichord or
Speaker 1: something like that in the background when we start. You
Speaker 1: want to do that? Should we gus see it up
Speaker 1: a little? Yeah? Jerry knows what she's She knows her
Speaker 1: way around an old harpsichord, so maybe maybe she can
Speaker 1: do that for us. I wonder if we have a
Speaker 1: message break stinger that's harpsichord. Oh, that's a great question,
Speaker 1: because we've been getting I mean, we've gotten great ones
Speaker 1: all along, but sometimes they're just showing up. I'm like,
Speaker 1: where did this come from? I don't even recognize this
Speaker 1: one's great stuff? Yeah, and too, you know, for those
Speaker 1: of you who don't know, those are made by listeners. Yeah,
Speaker 1: submitted out of the goodness of their hearts for yep
Speaker 1: to say. Here you go, guys, I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 1: You can use it all you want. It's very sweet.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about the printing press, and um, we're
Speaker 1: talking about the invention of the printing press, and the
Speaker 1: printing press itself is basically synonymous with a man named
Speaker 1: Johann Gutenberg. Johannes we just got right out of the
Speaker 1: gate man. I'm going with Johann Gutenberg, or as the
Speaker 1: rest of us in the world call him Gutenberg, let's
Speaker 1: call him Steve Gutenberg gut Buck. Okay, okay. So, Um
Speaker 1: Gutenberg is traditionally credited with inventing the printing press, and
Speaker 1: for all intents and purposes, he did invent the printing press.
Speaker 1: But um, as our friend ed Grabanowski goes with great
Speaker 1: pains to point out, he did not invent it out
Speaker 1: a whole cloth, as apparently some people believe that that
Speaker 1: it was just a pile of lumber and an idea
Speaker 1: for him that he that he put together. Like every
Speaker 1: inventor whoever invented anything, he he built on different concepts
Speaker 1: that have been worked out over centuries. Um. The thing
Speaker 1: is is, like that's not to detract from his accomplishment
Speaker 1: or anything like that. Like what he did literally change
Speaker 1: the world, as we'll see in some amazing ways, but
Speaker 1: he helped provide the first information age and got really
Speaker 1: kind of screwed over in the bargain. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's kind of a familiar story at this point, right, sadly, yes, man,
Speaker 1: And I'm kind of sick of that. I wish which
Speaker 1: one of stealing, of building on others, or of yeah,
Speaker 1: the second one. No, I understand building on the work
Speaker 1: of others. That's the other thing, too, is I don't
Speaker 1: think Guttenberg ever said like, no, I invented all of
Speaker 1: this without any help. We don't have any indication he
Speaker 1: was like that at all. That just kind of got
Speaker 1: hung on him over the years. By sixth graders, we
Speaker 1: built on the work of Adam Curry. We didn't he
Speaker 1: still at it? Did you know that he's still podcasting?
Speaker 1: I'm almost a million percent sure, which is really sure?
Speaker 1: And did he really have the first one? I don't
Speaker 1: know if he had the first, but he's credited with
Speaker 1: having the first. Very interesting. He's definitely still active on
Speaker 1: social media, for sure. So for the printing press, if
Speaker 1: if we jump back in the old way back machine
Speaker 1: and we we breathe past Adam Curry, there, Hi, Adam, Hey, Adam,
Speaker 1: Look at his hair, just waving that very nice. Uh.
Speaker 1: We would go back and see people carving up these
Speaker 1: things into would uh and then they would um. It's
Speaker 1: sort of like a stamp you would get for a
Speaker 1: kid these days, or if you you know, you go
Speaker 1: to a stamp shop and you want to get a
Speaker 1: stamp with your address or whatever for an adult. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like we got a stamp made. Emily got a stamp
Speaker 1: made of our house when we finally finished renovating our house,
Speaker 1: which we've never used. Our our friend so that you
Speaker 1: haven't used. So is it a picture of your your house? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, it looks like a little woodcut. But
Speaker 1: it's not like we send people letters and stamp that
Speaker 1: or any man. I gotta tell you, I would like
Speaker 1: to see that on a Christmas card envelope. You know.
Speaker 1: You know she did give me, and boy, I'm going
Speaker 1: to use it one days. Uh. You know how they
Speaker 1: would melt wax and seal the envelope with a little stamp.
Speaker 1: She got me one of those little kits for Christmas
Speaker 1: a couple of years. Nice and you still haven't used it. Now,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm going to write you a letter
Speaker 1: on some vellum. Thank you. I'm gonna stamp my house
Speaker 1: on it. I'm gonna wax, seal it and with and uh,
Speaker 1: then put on some red lipstick huh, and then tinkle
Speaker 1: on the whole thing, give it a kiss, and then
Speaker 1: be on it. Um. We we have a stamp too,
Speaker 1: but it's um has our address stamped on. Our friends
Speaker 1: Lorrel and Brandon gave it to us. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that makes a lot of sense, right, and we have
Speaker 1: used that one before. But I want to see this stamp,
Speaker 1: this whole Christmas card would tinkle on it and vellum
Speaker 1: and wax. I can't wait to see it. All right,
Speaker 1: it's gonna happen. So a wood cut and a long
Speaker 1: way of saying it looks sort of like one of
Speaker 1: these stamps. It's cut out, um, out of a wood block.
Speaker 1: And then you take paper or vellum or something or
Speaker 1: whatever you want to print it on, rub it down
Speaker 1: with some ink, and then press it down. And they
Speaker 1: had a thing back in the day in Europe in
Speaker 1: the fourteen hundreds called block books that were made from
Speaker 1: these wood cuts. They were you know, ten to pages long,
Speaker 1: and they kind of look like comic books if you
Speaker 1: look them up. They have a little bit of artwork,
Speaker 1: a little bit of text. Medieval comic books. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like comic books without any of the fun because they
Speaker 1: had some sort of moral message attached to it. Usually right,
Speaker 1: it was like a jack Chick tract or something. But
Speaker 1: they were a big deal in Europe in the fourteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: and they thought that they invented something. But of course
Speaker 1: the Chinese were like, excuse me, We've been doing this
Speaker 1: stuff for hundreds of years. Yeah, and and I think
Speaker 1: as far back as nine No. Eight sixty eight c.
Speaker 1: Which is a while ago, more than a thousand years about.
Speaker 1: Plus the Diamond Sutra, which was a buddhist Um text,
Speaker 1: was the first known printed book, and they printed it
Speaker 1: like you just described, where each page was a wood
Speaker 1: carving in negative chuck in negative, because if you made
Speaker 1: it in in the positive when you put the paper
Speaker 1: on it with the ink, it would be in reverse
Speaker 1: when you looked at it on the page. So you
Speaker 1: had to carve each page like that in negative. So
Speaker 1: it was a really difficult process, but it worked. It
Speaker 1: was useful. It was a lot easier once you got
Speaker 1: those blocks carved for a page. Then it was to
Speaker 1: transcribe entire books and texts by hand, which is what
Speaker 1: they've done up to that point and still continue to
Speaker 1: do for a very long time. Yeah. So when I
Speaker 1: saw the Diamond Sutra, just obviously the word sutra stood
Speaker 1: out to me because of the Kama Sutra, and I really,
Speaker 1: of course, and I didn't even I realized I didn't
Speaker 1: even know what that word meant. And it's just it's
Speaker 1: a collection of observations basically, he said, Oh, I mean
Speaker 1: cook book. Well, it could be. It's a collection of
Speaker 1: observations in a book or a pamphlet. And I think
Speaker 1: we really missed a diamond opportunity for our book title
Speaker 1: by not calling it like the Stuff you Should Know Sutra. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: hey if this one, if this one goes even passingly
Speaker 1: well ourselves passingly, well we'll probably have a second chance.
Speaker 1: You can pre order that thing, by the way, the
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know, No, boy, you could pre pre
Speaker 1: order that one, right. I'm getting limber as we speak
Speaker 1: to try to get that one done. Right. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: can preorder our book, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting
Speaker 1: stuff Sutra. Thanks. You should have just had comma comma sutra,
Speaker 1: get it right. I like that? So that was one
Speaker 1: in eight six eight CE like you said. Then in
Speaker 1: seventy one b C. There was another one called did
Speaker 1: you mention that one? The Trippy Taka? Not yet? That
Speaker 1: was another Buddhist text that was ce C E. Oh
Speaker 1: it is, so they got wrong here, Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: so the whole thing starts about eleven years ago. Okay,
Speaker 1: well that makes more sense. Yeah, but that's the one
Speaker 1: that had I think a hundred and thirty thousand would
Speaker 1: block carvings. Yeah, that's insane. That means not only that
Speaker 1: somebody carved that, but somebody kept that like at their house.
Speaker 1: Imagine living around a hundred and thirty thousand wood block carvings,
Speaker 1: and you would be like, I need to reprint page
Speaker 1: eight thirty two, and then having you to go find
Speaker 1: the wood block carving for page eight thirty two and
Speaker 1: just it just sounds like a nightmare. I'd be like,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't care about reading or literacy or
Speaker 1: moving humanity forward at this point. Maybe it was the house.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. You just blew my mind right out of
Speaker 1: the top of my head. So there was some more
Speaker 1: experimentation going on after this in China and Korea, UM
Speaker 1: and some big and they were using like little wood
Speaker 1: or ceramic or metal blocks to make individual characters for
Speaker 1: the first time. And this was a big kind of
Speaker 1: pushed forward towards what we all though as what would
Speaker 1: eventually be the Gutenberg Press. Is individual letters are in
Speaker 1: their case characters instead of just doing each page as
Speaker 1: a separate woodcut. Yeah. What's awesome is there is a
Speaker 1: commoner in China named B. Shang who um is thought
Speaker 1: to have come up with movable type, where rather than
Speaker 1: you know, carving a woodblock for each page, you have letters,
Speaker 1: individual letters carved out and you can arrange them just
Speaker 1: so anyway you want, and then once you print that page,
Speaker 1: you can arrange them in a different way to print
Speaker 1: the next page. And that is a huge innovation for sure.
Speaker 1: And again note that this guy came up with this
Speaker 1: in about ten forty one CE, so a good four
Speaker 1: hundred years before Guttenberg was working. What does Ed keep saying, BC,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think he really likes the sound
Speaker 1: of it, all right, fair enough, it's definitely see either.
Speaker 1: Uh no, I'm not doubting that. I'm just I was
Speaker 1: thinking too. I was like, gosh, what if he was right?
Speaker 1: What if all this had started a good thousand years earlier,
Speaker 1: Like how much further along would we be right now?
Speaker 1: Because it held Yeah if this had happened three thousand
Speaker 1: years ago rather than one thousand years ago. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: here's the little spoiler. Printing books is a big deal.
Speaker 1: Like some say that religion and democracy and I mean
Speaker 1: just sort of the advancement of humanity was was this?
Speaker 1: It was key to advancing all those things. Do you
Speaker 1: know who says that us people who are right us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I definitely am on board with that because, yeah, the
Speaker 1: for the best way you can put it, it was
Speaker 1: the first information age that got launched by Guttenberg, by
Speaker 1: gut Buck. So that's I keep saying that because it's
Speaker 1: Steve Guttenberg's handle on Twitter. Oh is it really okay?
Speaker 1: Steve gut Is it really? He is the nicest guy too.
Speaker 1: I haven't Uh yeah, I haven't. I haven't checked in
Speaker 1: on his feed for a very long time, but um,
Speaker 1: years back, he used to be like all up in
Speaker 1: our feed, and um he was just so nice, Happy
Speaker 1: Friday everybody kind of stuff, like every Fridays. Just a
Speaker 1: super nice guy. So I'm assuming nothing's gone horribly wrong
Speaker 1: with him and that he's still just as nice as
Speaker 1: he was a few years ago. Well, I highly recommend
Speaker 1: you know, I've always um promoted the Great Great Stars
Speaker 1: TV show Party Down one of my favorite shows of
Speaker 1: all time, and Goots has a great, great, great episode
Speaker 1: and it seems like that's who he is, and he's
Speaker 1: a super nice guy in that episode because he um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's about a catering company. There were a
Speaker 1: bunch of like writers and actors and stuff doing catering
Speaker 1: work and he hires them to come over to his
Speaker 1: house for his birthday. There there at the house when
Speaker 1: he pulls in and he's like, oh man, we ended
Speaker 1: up having a surprise party for me and I've forgot
Speaker 1: So he's just like, why don't you guys just come
Speaker 1: and then we'll be the party. Right, But you could
Speaker 1: really get the idea that that's who Goods is as
Speaker 1: a person. You know, it's great as you've definitely definitely
Speaker 1: told that story before on the podcast, which means like
Speaker 1: we've gotten to this point where we're amassing, like we're
Speaker 1: building a standalone universe where like when Steve Gooberg appears,
Speaker 1: this story pops up as well around him. You know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, like, Oh, I knew, I told it.
Speaker 1: I couldn't remember when though, What when would he have
Speaker 1: come up? I don't remember, but I'm sure we talked
Speaker 1: also about what a great guy he is on Twitter
Speaker 1: and all sorts of stuff, like like we have a
Speaker 1: character like a simil acrome of or simil acro of
Speaker 1: Steve Guttenberg that lives in our podcast universe, and he's
Speaker 1: very less multifaceted than I'm sure he is in real life,
Speaker 1: but in our universe's nice guy on Twitter, had a
Speaker 1: great episode of Party Down. That's all you need to
Speaker 1: know about Steve Goomberg. I know we haven't even gotten
Speaker 1: into police Catty. Do we do a show on Police Academy?
Speaker 1: So that probably would have made sense. I don't think
Speaker 1: we have. If we have, I must have been blacked
Speaker 1: out or something. Alright, So printing press is advancing forward.
Speaker 1: Go to Korea in twelve thirty four, and you're going
Speaker 1: to find a man named Show Young Wee who was
Speaker 1: commissioned to do uh some more boot is text. A
Speaker 1: lot of this was Buddhist text. Well yeah, if you'll
Speaker 1: notice religious texts help push this whole thing forward from
Speaker 1: different religions, even yeah, like that Bible that Guttenberg would
Speaker 1: make stunts. Sorry, so this one was really really long,
Speaker 1: and he was using this movable print that had already
Speaker 1: been around, but this time he was making these letters
Speaker 1: for metal um, kind of using what the technique they
Speaker 1: did for coin minting, which had been going on for
Speaker 1: a while. Set him in a frame, lined them all up,
Speaker 1: coded them with ink, and pressed them. And if you think, hey,
Speaker 1: that sounds like a printing press, you would be exactly right.
Speaker 1: You're right, fella, for sure. That's that's basically what Guttenberg
Speaker 1: came up with. He had a couple of extra innovations,
Speaker 1: for sure, that are definitely credited to him directly, but
Speaker 1: that general idea had been around for a couple of
Speaker 1: hundred years at least before he started printing his own
Speaker 1: stuff using this machine of his invention. Now, again, this
Speaker 1: is not detract at all from Guttenberg. He put together
Speaker 1: a lot of disparate ideas, and there's also a lot
Speaker 1: of debate whether he would have known about the Korean
Speaker 1: or Chinese advancements in printing um. If so, maybe it
Speaker 1: was the Mongols that spread it west, but they're not
Speaker 1: entirely certain there's no smoking gun, so it's possible he
Speaker 1: also thought of it himself, just by being involved in
Speaker 1: it and thinking about it, or maybe he heard about
Speaker 1: some other stuff and refined it into his own thing. Regardless,
Speaker 1: he came up with the printing press, and the Chinese
Speaker 1: and the Koreans are not credited with that for actually
Speaker 1: a couple of reasons. And the upshot of all of
Speaker 1: it is that it didn't ever really take off in
Speaker 1: China or Korea. Um, even though it was invented there,
Speaker 1: it didn't become widespread or widely used, and it certainly
Speaker 1: didn't create an information age revolution. Well, how's this for cliffhanger.
Speaker 1: We'll take a little break and we'll tell you a
Speaker 1: couple more reasons why it never took off in Asia
Speaker 1: right after this, alright, Chuck, I can't take this any longer.
Speaker 1: To tell us, tell us why it never took off
Speaker 1: in Asia. Well, some some reasons that just make a
Speaker 1: lot of sense. Um. They are they have very complex
Speaker 1: characters with their language, and they have, you know, up
Speaker 1: to tens of thousands of characters with different pronunciations, different
Speaker 1: phone ms, different syllables, and you can't. You just can't
Speaker 1: do it. You can't have that many little tiny blocks,
Speaker 1: much less multiples of those if you want to print
Speaker 1: a page, you know, because it's not like you can
Speaker 1: move them around. And then keeping up with all these
Speaker 1: was literally one of the big problems. Like they made
Speaker 1: these big I think there was a man named Wang
Speaker 1: Wang Zen who use these revolving tables to access these
Speaker 1: big racks of letters. But it was kind of like
Speaker 1: what you were talking about with the house made of
Speaker 1: woodblocks of hundred and thirty thousand wood cuts. It's like,
Speaker 1: you you just can't keep up with that many. So
Speaker 1: it wasn't practical. And then Guttenberg comes along, He's like,
Speaker 1: we only have twenty six letters, so this is pretty
Speaker 1: this is pretty dumbed down as a language goes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean even if you do you know, capitals
Speaker 1: and lower case, that's still just what fifty two and
Speaker 1: throwing some punctuation, Yeah, some punctuation makes some doubles because
Speaker 1: you know you're gonna use E a lot more times
Speaker 1: than one per page, so you need to make some
Speaker 1: backup copies of them. He made about three hundred in
Speaker 1: the end, right, That's what I saw Yeah, three hundred um,
Speaker 1: different characters, spaces, punctuation um, upper case, lower case, and
Speaker 1: that that's all he needed. So the three hundred verses
Speaker 1: tens of thousands um. Number one is this easier to make,
Speaker 1: but number two it's he's year to keep up with two.
Speaker 1: So um. Guttenberg just happened to be working in just
Speaker 1: the right language for a movable type printing press to
Speaker 1: really make sense. Should we talk about this guy? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I like him. He's he's um. He had a
Speaker 1: bit of a hustle to him, and I like and
Speaker 1: he's also one of histories kind of hard luck guys
Speaker 1: in a way, even though I mean, you know, his
Speaker 1: name is legendary, so you can't put a price on that.
Speaker 1: I'm sure he would have liked to have put a
Speaker 1: price on that, so it I just want to say,
Speaker 1: from what I saw, it is very much up for
Speaker 1: debate whether he actually was financially ruined in the end
Speaker 1: that he was doing fine. Because one thing we got
Speaker 1: to tell everybody chuck out of the gate is Guttenberg
Speaker 1: was born at a time where his father was a patrician.
Speaker 1: He was an aristocrat in Um in Germany. Mains is
Speaker 1: it mains Minz Germany. Um, So he was, you know, notable,
Speaker 1: but this wasn't a time where people of that class,
Speaker 1: you know, he wasn't like a king or anything like yet,
Speaker 1: so there was not a lot of documentation of his birth.
Speaker 1: Were not entirely certain when he was born. His early
Speaker 1: life has kind of lost to history too, because he
Speaker 1: was just kind of a nobody until he invented the
Speaker 1: printing press. But the thing is, when he invented the
Speaker 1: printing press, it was so revolutionary and so obvious how
Speaker 1: revolutionary it was out of the gate that within a
Speaker 1: decade or two of his death, historians were studying and
Speaker 1: documenting his life. So there's a surprising amount of stuff
Speaker 1: that was documented about him that's preserved still. But the
Speaker 1: stuff that we do have is almost entirely his work.
Speaker 1: And then court records when he was dragged into court
Speaker 1: by creditors and investors. Yeah, so you said he had
Speaker 1: a little bit of a hustle, um, I think ed says.
Speaker 1: They referred to him charitably as having entrepreneurial flair. It's
Speaker 1: another word of saying he had a bit of a
Speaker 1: hustle to him, and he would get in He was
Speaker 1: always trying to make a buck, always had some sort
Speaker 1: of scheme in the works, and which means he had
Speaker 1: investors a lot of times and a lot of times
Speaker 1: he might not come through. So as a result, he
Speaker 1: was taken to court a lot, like you said, and
Speaker 1: it's kind of funny to build this guy's life out
Speaker 1: of court records, but we are able to construct a
Speaker 1: little bit of it because of him being hauled in
Speaker 1: there and being sued time and time again, and most notably,
Speaker 1: were able to kind of piece together the printing press
Speaker 1: that he invented, what he invented, what he knew when
Speaker 1: from these court records, because all of these um these
Speaker 1: lawsuits basically were over his work. They were between investors
Speaker 1: in his work and him. And the thing is is,
Speaker 1: like I don't have the impression that he was a
Speaker 1: hustler in the sense that he was a con man
Speaker 1: or shark or anything like that. He he had very
Speaker 1: high aspirations. He also had these smarts to figure out
Speaker 1: how to achieve these aspirations. He just didn't have the
Speaker 1: money to achieve these aspirations, so he needed outside help.
Speaker 1: His big problem is far as investors go, from what
Speaker 1: I can tell is that he was a perfectionist. So
Speaker 1: rather than just figure out how to invent the movable
Speaker 1: type printing press, which he did, he also tried to
Speaker 1: figure out one that could also print in red on
Speaker 1: a different set, or using copper engraving to create um
Speaker 1: different types of of type. Some stuff that like details
Speaker 1: that were like kind of unnecessary, but made this transform
Speaker 1: this thing from you know, an amazing piece of work
Speaker 1: to a masterpiece. And the time it took to be
Speaker 1: that much of a perfectionist made him run into creditors
Speaker 1: and investors that were not that patient. Yeah, And his
Speaker 1: first sort of tinkering with pressing anything, it seems because
Speaker 1: of again a lawsuit was in Strasbourg when he lived
Speaker 1: there in around fourteen thirty eight, is that ce and
Speaker 1: he would, uh, he had this plan to produce these
Speaker 1: trinkets for people going on religious pilgrimage is more than one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So he had these tools that he could stamp out
Speaker 1: these trinkets and press these things, and so he he
Speaker 1: sort of had an idea at least of how this
Speaker 1: kind of technology worked as far as cutting something, stamping
Speaker 1: and pressing it. And there's some indication, Chuck, that he
Speaker 1: was already figuring out the rough contours, if not more
Speaker 1: detailed than that of his printing press in Strasbourg. Because
Speaker 1: that first court case um was by the family of
Speaker 1: some creditors who who took him to court because they
Speaker 1: wanted in on some secret work he was keeping from
Speaker 1: them um um and being investors in him, they were saying, well,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're doing work on the side, we
Speaker 1: should have a piece of that too. And that's where
Speaker 1: some historians are like, this, actually what they're describing here
Speaker 1: is part of the printing press because of debate. Still, well,
Speaker 1: I mean it was ten years later if that was
Speaker 1: in around four and by the time he got back
Speaker 1: to minds in fort teen forty eight, he borrowed some
Speaker 1: money from his cousin to do like a real printing business.
Speaker 1: So it's I mean, I think you could be right.
Speaker 1: It's very likely those people knew that he was in
Speaker 1: the back room with his plan to print books and
Speaker 1: they wanted some of that action, right, But he's like, no, dud,
Speaker 1: you you you in on the ground floor of the
Speaker 1: trinket business. This is a whole different, world changing business.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have to cough up some more dough. And
Speaker 1: they said nine yeah, they did say nine. And he said,
Speaker 1: all right, well, I'm gonna invent this thing, or I'm
Speaker 1: gonna cobble together a bunch of other people's work in
Speaker 1: a way that makes sense that you can, you know,
Speaker 1: make massive amounts of books that look good and that
Speaker 1: you can sell and make money on. And the Bible
Speaker 1: was a pretty obvious choice for the first big, big project.
Speaker 1: But he was like, the Bible is a lot to undertake. Um.
Speaker 1: And if you've ever seen a Gutenberg Bible, they're they're huge,
Speaker 1: They're not there's two volumes. Yeah, there's not like these
Speaker 1: little handheld Bibles. They're very large arge and I didn't
Speaker 1: get an exact measurement, but you can see when someone
Speaker 1: holds it. It's a big, big book. It's like a
Speaker 1: big fat coffee table book. Eleven by eight mm hmm.
Speaker 1: They seem a little wider than that. But thirty six
Speaker 1: that's as high as I'm going. So he said, uh,
Speaker 1: one dollar. He said that I'm gonna I'm gonna not
Speaker 1: start with the Bible. Too much to bite off. It's
Speaker 1: a little doll um. So I'm gonna start out with
Speaker 1: some other stuff. I'm gonna print some um, some pamphlets.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna see if I can sell these things. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna see how good they look. And h he did.
Speaker 1: He printed a grammar book, um was one of the
Speaker 1: first things. This is from another lawsuit by a Roman
Speaker 1: writer and it was a popular book, which was again
Speaker 1: it's a smart thing that he did. Is is basically
Speaker 1: taking like what would be a bestseller at the time
Speaker 1: and seeing if he could mass produce it instead of
Speaker 1: block book as a regular printed book. Right. So he
Speaker 1: was also doing broad cheese Wi your kind like early newspapers,
Speaker 1: which they had a pretty We should do one on
Speaker 1: newspapers because the early life newspapers were these broadsheets, and
Speaker 1: sailors would buy them, read them and then take them
Speaker 1: into town at the next port and they would be
Speaker 1: sold to those people who who most people weren't literate
Speaker 1: at the time, so they would hire somebody who could
Speaker 1: read in town to read the news out at like
Speaker 1: the local tavern or something. And we both have experience
Speaker 1: with newspapers. Sure, man, um, I would like to do
Speaker 1: newspapers one day. Let's do it. Oh totally, that sounds
Speaker 1: like a two parter to me, okay, so um he
Speaker 1: basically the upshot of all this. And I think that's
Speaker 1: the second time I've said that. I never say that. Um.
Speaker 1: I always want to like deliberately make everything much slower
Speaker 1: than that, the upshot of something like you want. Just
Speaker 1: like you said, as much as we talk about Guttenberg
Speaker 1: and party down, you know what's sad, I'm an unreliable
Speaker 1: narrator in my own life. Oh man, what a great quote.
Speaker 1: So Um. The the overall general point of what we've
Speaker 1: been saying for this moment is that he kind of
Speaker 1: broke his teeth on some slightly easier projects to kind
Speaker 1: of figure out the ins and outs and everything. And
Speaker 1: then when he was finally ready to do the Bible,
Speaker 1: he apparently was well aware that this was going to
Speaker 1: be a masterpiece. He had figured it out and he
Speaker 1: was ready to bite it off, and he started work
Speaker 1: on the Guttenberg Bible, also known as the Gutenberg Bible
Speaker 1: and also known as the forty two line Bible because
Speaker 1: that's how many lines he had per page. Um. And
Speaker 1: even at forty two lines per page, which was more
Speaker 1: lines because he lowered the space in between lines to
Speaker 1: fit more lines per page, it was still something like
Speaker 1: twelve hundred and eighty six pages um over two volumes.
Speaker 1: That's a lot. But the kind of bear that in mind.
Speaker 1: What we're talking about when we talk about this project eventually,
Speaker 1: is that he was creating twelve hundred and eighty six
Speaker 1: page bible. Okay, yeah, one at a time. Yeah, one
Speaker 1: page at a time. That is so, which we'll figure
Speaker 1: in here in a second. So he starts to work,
Speaker 1: he knows that he I mean, before he starts, he
Speaker 1: knows that he's gonna be able to charge a lot
Speaker 1: for these things. And he knows he's gonna need to
Speaker 1: crank them out um as quickly as he can. So
Speaker 1: he's gonna need more space, he's gonna need more presses,
Speaker 1: he's gonna need a lot of ink and and other
Speaker 1: little dude ads and spawn divots that it takes to
Speaker 1: make one of these. And he's gonna need people. You know,
Speaker 1: he's gonna need some assistance. He can't do it all
Speaker 1: by himself. Because here's where that comes back. You can
Speaker 1: only it's not like he would print out a bible,
Speaker 1: and he's like, I got one go sell this thing
Speaker 1: and we can continue to fund our little project. Here.
Speaker 1: You gotta print out one page at a time, over
Speaker 1: and over and over and over, and then print out
Speaker 1: page two over and over and over or two and
Speaker 1: whatever the reverse side is. And eventually you're gonna be
Speaker 1: able to start putting them together in bound form, and
Speaker 1: only then can you start actually making money, right, right,
Speaker 1: So he he was Also that was another thing that
Speaker 1: he doesn't get credited for enough, I think, is that
Speaker 1: he figured out like how to um do a rough
Speaker 1: primitive version of an assembly line. Basically he was he
Speaker 1: was mass producing these books out of the gate. That
Speaker 1: was the point. You're you're mass producing it, not doing
Speaker 1: it one page at a time, like you were saying,
Speaker 1: like the old block books used to be. Right. So
Speaker 1: he gets four presses going at a time, later went
Speaker 1: up to I think six, and because of all this
Speaker 1: upfront money that he needs to keep this going until
Speaker 1: he can sell them and turner profit was uh, he
Speaker 1: needed like always, he needed some dough. He he wasn't
Speaker 1: just he didn't have his pockets lined with money. So
Speaker 1: he had to go to a guy. And that's this
Speaker 1: guy's name was Johann fust Hm. And and because he
Speaker 1: calculated he would need about two years and because before
Speaker 1: he could start selling. Yeah, the whole project, he figured
Speaker 1: out was going to be about two years. This print
Speaker 1: run of Bibles is going to take him two years
Speaker 1: to do. So he needed to be able to pay
Speaker 1: everybody he needed money for all the supplies, all the materials.
Speaker 1: He needed to be able to survive for two years
Speaker 1: because he would not be able to sell one single
Speaker 1: Bible until all of them were done. None of them
Speaker 1: were going to be done until all of them were done.
Speaker 1: That's just the way the process worked out, right. So Foost,
Speaker 1: I think saw the writing on the wall, knew it
Speaker 1: was gonna be expensive, but knew that he was going
Speaker 1: to probably be able to make a lot of money.
Speaker 1: And who knows, I don't know this Foost guy from Adam,
Speaker 1: but maybe in the back of his head he also thought,
Speaker 1: you know what, I might also be able to just
Speaker 1: sue this guy at some point and take control of
Speaker 1: these printing presses because this guy didn't have a pot
Speaker 1: to urinate in and he's not gonna have any money.
Speaker 1: So and that's exactly what happened. He ended up um
Speaker 1: having no assets other than these presses. And when he
Speaker 1: got sued and lost, and I don't even know what
Speaker 1: he got sued for was it for taking too long? Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: that makes the whole thing that much worse that he
Speaker 1: was sued basically like I was saying, for being a perfectionist.
Speaker 1: And technically Guttenberg could have gotten the Bible out before
Speaker 1: Foost sued him. Um, but again he was Yeah, just
Speaker 1: a slightly less masterful version that would have just knocked everyone.
Speaker 1: So had just the same amount of an impact on
Speaker 1: the world. I don't think the world would have been
Speaker 1: changed really any um had he had he gotten him
Speaker 1: out in a time when Foost was was willing to
Speaker 1: not sue him, but he wasn't prepared to do that.
Speaker 1: He was he was an artist. He was an artist.
Speaker 1: He had the soul of an artist. So he just
Speaker 1: kept going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole to
Speaker 1: try to make this thing more and more perfect and elaborate.
Speaker 1: And Foost said enough, and the court actually sided with Foost.
Speaker 1: So Foost line him eight hundred guilden or golden um,
Speaker 1: which at the time was about the the price of
Speaker 1: a lot of money. Eight houses. That's what we're going with.
Speaker 1: We'll see in a second it will make sense. But
Speaker 1: let's say eight average cost houses. Um, that's how much
Speaker 1: he lent him, Then he did it again. He lent
Speaker 1: him another eight hundred golden, and so he was into
Speaker 1: him for sixteen hundred golden. Would have easily been able
Speaker 1: to pay that back when he Foost. Foost sued him.
Speaker 1: The court said, not only do you owe him sixteen
Speaker 1: hundred golden, you owe him in interest. We're gonna say
Speaker 1: to get this, about two thousand and twenty golden is
Speaker 1: what he ended up having to pay Foost. Now, did
Speaker 1: he sue him because, uh, he was that far over schedule?
Speaker 1: The only because he told him it would take two years.
Speaker 1: Did it take like six or something? I saw that
Speaker 1: from the court records. They believe that he was done
Speaker 1: by fourteen fifty five, and I believe he started in
Speaker 1: fourteen fifty three, so he was probably right on schedule.
Speaker 1: I have the impression that Foost was a bit of
Speaker 1: an impatient sure squad well, and also get the feeling
Speaker 1: that that Guttenberg probably didn't dot his eyes and cross
Speaker 1: his teas contractually. Maybe not, maybe not. I could see
Speaker 1: that too. You got to bake in a little bit
Speaker 1: of over over time there, you know for sure. But
Speaker 1: I think I think he may have been roughly on schedule,
Speaker 1: because because by fourteen fifty two he had created the Bible.
Speaker 1: And here's the other thing. Here's the other reason why
Speaker 1: Foosh suing him was a bit of a screwjob or
Speaker 1: a huge screw job. Um. And by screwjob, I mean
Speaker 1: like the act of a screwdriver screwing a screw into
Speaker 1: a slab of wood that the screw doesn't want to
Speaker 1: go into that wood. It wants to stay free. That
Speaker 1: kind of kids. So um, the reason why, why why
Speaker 1: it really stunk that Foos sued him, is because he
Speaker 1: got the Bible's done. The Bible. The Bible run was completed,
Speaker 1: and Foosh still sued him. And still one Um, if
Speaker 1: I had been foosed in, the investor would have been like, okay, fine,
Speaker 1: you finished. Um, maybe pay me more or something like that.
Speaker 1: But that was not the case. Yeah, and who knows
Speaker 1: what's going on back then? He could have bribed a
Speaker 1: judge who got a piece of the action. You know.
Speaker 1: I mean not speculation, but I'm just saying, it's not
Speaker 1: like today when our court system is just so perfect
Speaker 1: in every way, right, wall, let's run exclusively by artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: So um ed was kind enough to cobble together if
Speaker 1: you just sort of fun facts about that Bible run. Uh.
Speaker 1: He printed a hundred and eighty of these things, initially
Speaker 1: sold all of them, of course. Uh today there are
Speaker 1: forty nine of them still around, which um ed points
Speaker 1: out and and I agree, is a really great UM
Speaker 1: survival percentage for something that old UM forty nine out
Speaker 1: of a hundred and eighty. And that just sort of
Speaker 1: pinpoints UM or or just puts a point in the
Speaker 1: fact that puts a pin in what am I trying
Speaker 1: to say, really drives home the fact that these things
Speaker 1: were very cherished and taken care of from the beginning. UM.
Speaker 1: I went to see how much he could buy one
Speaker 1: of these four Oh yeah, what'd you find? Well? Eight
Speaker 1: seven was the last one I saw at auction. UM.
Speaker 1: There maybe one since then, but in seven it went
Speaker 1: for five point four million, So that was one one volume.
Speaker 1: A complete set hasn't been auctioned since nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: for two point two million in nineteen seventy eight dollars.
Speaker 1: From what I saw, if you were you get the
Speaker 1: New Old Testament only or something if you're lucky, but
Speaker 1: if the complete copy they think would be UM thirty
Speaker 1: five million today. I think it went to auction. That
Speaker 1: makes sense, it's about right. But so so he made
Speaker 1: two he made two versions. He made one like a
Speaker 1: regular version on paper and it sold for twenty golden,
Speaker 1: and he made a vellum one on calf skin for
Speaker 1: fifty golden. I mean forty five of those. So allow
Speaker 1: me to figure these calculations real quick. Okay, boy, here
Speaker 1: we go. So remember I'm going to get this right right.
Speaker 1: So there's this historian named Andrew Petigree who says that
Speaker 1: a house in Mainz Mines would have cost up to
Speaker 1: a hundred golden a house. So the total that he
Speaker 1: could have made selling this is these bibles is hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty print run of bibles is fifty golden. It
Speaker 1: is let's say, at a hundred golden a piece. That's
Speaker 1: forty nine and a half houses. Don't ask about the
Speaker 1: half of a house, but let's say today's dollars that
Speaker 1: we're saying that a house is two hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 1: per house. Okay, so two hundred thousand dollars times forty
Speaker 1: nine and a half houses means that he made off
Speaker 1: of these hundred and eighty bibles almost ten million dollars. Oh,
Speaker 1: I can't wait for the correction. It's right, dude, I
Speaker 1: I am definitely right. And so here's the other thing too.
Speaker 1: So Um, when Foost sues him and gets that twenty
Speaker 1: like two, gets that judgment of two thousand golden against him, Um,
Speaker 1: a lot of people say, well, that ruined Guttenberg and
Speaker 1: he died a pauper. If that Bible runs sold out,
Speaker 1: he still would have had more than half of that
Speaker 1: nearly ten million dollars left over after paying Foost. So
Speaker 1: it's very much unclear that that he was a pauper
Speaker 1: or not. The the overall point of what I've been
Speaker 1: saying up to this moment is this upshot. It's that, Um.
Speaker 1: That was the word you could have used earlier too,
Speaker 1: when you were looking for a word upshot, what it worked.
Speaker 1: I wasn't going to encourage the use of that though.
Speaker 1: But the the the the upshot of his that Foost
Speaker 1: got his hands on Guttenberg's printing press right after that
Speaker 1: that run of Bibles was made, or his six printing presses.
Speaker 1: Rather he and his and his printing assistant Um, who
Speaker 1: was actually Foost's son in law, that he got the whole,
Speaker 1: the whole, she bank, all this plates everything. You know.
Speaker 1: My favorite thing about your math stuff is what I
Speaker 1: know the second that you start that there are thousands
Speaker 1: of people math math busters, if you will that just
Speaker 1: immediately get out their pencil and pad and to see
Speaker 1: if they can prove you wrong. That is fantastic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is a game, and I always win. All right,
Speaker 1: So we're gonna take another break. Okay, we're gonna tally
Speaker 1: up your math uh wins and losses, and we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about how this thing actually worked right after this.
Speaker 1: So I think we came up chuck with the the
Speaker 1: that I've won every math contest I've I've initiated everyone. Okay, alright,
Speaker 1: so shall we talk about the Guttenberg Press. Yes, well,
Speaker 1: you got your individual letters, okay, al right, so if
Speaker 1: you're gonna we we said he ended up making three
Speaker 1: hundred of these things, so you're gonna need all these
Speaker 1: little individual letters carved. Uh, they're carved into steel using
Speaker 1: these little files, and these are the master letters, and
Speaker 1: then they punch those into soft metal um, most likely copper,
Speaker 1: and then the impression in the copper is formed into
Speaker 1: a mold and then you're gonna pour molten metal. And
Speaker 1: what I saw was that one thing that Gutenberg definitely
Speaker 1: invented with this hand casting instrument where they actually uh,
Speaker 1: where you would actually pour this this molten metal. I
Speaker 1: think he used lead tin and uh antimony whatever that is.
Speaker 1: That was an alloy that he invented, even like add
Speaker 1: that to his list. Yeah, so he invented some stuff.
Speaker 1: But this is how you would actually make the individual
Speaker 1: letters was by this early process. Right. So the one
Speaker 1: thing that's still up for debate, supposedly is whether he
Speaker 1: invented or used that punch matrix thing where you punched
Speaker 1: the letter into a softer metal. It's they're not entirely certain,
Speaker 1: but yes, he definitely was casting letters with alloy of
Speaker 1: his own making um, and apparently it cooled like the
Speaker 1: moment like you just poured it in closed the mold
Speaker 1: and opened it and it would be cool enough to
Speaker 1: dump out on the table and start filing down. Because
Speaker 1: that was the other thing too, You had to file
Speaker 1: down every letter to make sure that they were uniform.
Speaker 1: And he even went, this is an example of how
Speaker 1: how um, how detailed he got. He even was like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this this f has a lot of space between, you know,
Speaker 1: on either side of it. So he filed down the
Speaker 1: sides of all the fs after testing it a few times,
Speaker 1: to make basically curning. He was. He was. He figured
Speaker 1: out curning right out of the gate um, the first
Speaker 1: time anyone had ever really created the printing press. There
Speaker 1: was also curning, just the spacing between letters. Like, if
Speaker 1: you've ever seen a bunch of letters strung far apart,
Speaker 1: it looks really weird. Curning is out of that. That's hot.
Speaker 1: That's a high curning value. Low curning values where they're
Speaker 1: tighter together, which is what you want. Yeah. So the
Speaker 1: long and short of his this of these little blocks, though,
Speaker 1: is that you only needed to carve each one one time. Um,
Speaker 1: you had to pour a bunch of molds if you
Speaker 1: wanted a bunch of ease or as or other vowels
Speaker 1: and stuff, but yeah, that was nothing. You only had
Speaker 1: to do that carving once. File these things down until
Speaker 1: they're all uniform, and then it moves on to someone
Speaker 1: known as the compositor. Yes, the compositor or not to
Speaker 1: be confused with the eradicate tour from kids in the
Speaker 1: hall um. The compository was the person who sat there
Speaker 1: with like the manuscript right and read each line. And
Speaker 1: as they were reading each line, they were gathering the
Speaker 1: letters they needed and putting putting the letters together in
Speaker 1: like a like a handheld little rack um to basically
Speaker 1: make each line. And they would slide each line into
Speaker 1: a frame um called the form um. And you we
Speaker 1: do that just line by line until the whole form
Speaker 1: the whole frame is filled up with the lines that
Speaker 1: you're going to print a page with. Yeah, basically what
Speaker 1: they did in Korea two years earlier, except with far
Speaker 1: fewer characters. Yeah. And you get the idea that if
Speaker 1: you were a composit or working for uh, for Guttenberg,
Speaker 1: the perfectionist, it was probably a pretty nervy job because
Speaker 1: you're reading that manuscript. Any misspelling, any any misuse of punctuation, uh,
Speaker 1: that would have I'm sure there would have been heck
Speaker 1: to pay from Herr Guttenberg. So I imagine that job
Speaker 1: was just sort of um high, high tension. And Gutenberg
Speaker 1: very famously was super passive aggressive in his managerial stuff.
Speaker 1: He would just kind of wander on the shop with
Speaker 1: his coffee and say, you're gonna I'm gonna need you
Speaker 1: to work Sunday as well. Yeah. Yeah, And it was
Speaker 1: it was like you try to avoid him or whatevery,
Speaker 1: but you had the sixth sense to like pop up
Speaker 1: exactly right as you were trying to leave for the day, right,
Speaker 1: and he would and he would ask about your stapler,
Speaker 1: and he would say my red stapler. Yeah, that was
Speaker 1: that was one of the press the press men. It's
Speaker 1: just kind of kept in the basement. It was a
Speaker 1: weird time for printing. It was another weird time is
Speaker 1: going to be right now when I ask you if
Speaker 1: you understand this gobbledygook about folios, Yeah, so what right?
Speaker 1: So it's way easier to print. Yes, a logistical nightmare
Speaker 1: is another way to put it. But if you take, um,
Speaker 1: you know, one large page that's actually two pages of
Speaker 1: a book wide, and fold it, you have a folio.
Speaker 1: And supposedly Guttenberg printed these things in folios of five,
Speaker 1: so that each each little I guess the thing that
Speaker 1: they did was, um was like twenty pages. They would
Speaker 1: do twenty pages at a time for remember something like
Speaker 1: eighties six pages. They were doing this total per bible
Speaker 1: UM and and I mean that was that The key
Speaker 1: was this I know. To answer your question, No, I
Speaker 1: didn't fully understand the folios. I think there was a
Speaker 1: lot made of folios when there didn't necessarily need to
Speaker 1: be a lot made of folios. The point was that
Speaker 1: when you printed this stuff, this is very very tricky,
Speaker 1: you had to dampen the paper because if you didn't,
Speaker 1: did you like that was leaping ahead? Yeah? When when
Speaker 1: you print UM on paper using the kind of ink
Speaker 1: that he's he created another thing you created, which we'll
Speaker 1: talk about um. The paper can stick very easily unless
Speaker 1: you dampen the paper. The problem is that you gotta
Speaker 1: print on the back side too, But you can't dampen
Speaker 1: the paper again, my friend, or else you're gonna smear
Speaker 1: the ink on the other side, or it's gonna run
Speaker 1: or whatever. So they would print, They would dampen the paper,
Speaker 1: print one side, and then have to print the other side,
Speaker 1: like after the ink on the one side was dried,
Speaker 1: before the paper had dried fully, right, Which is that's
Speaker 1: gotta be tricky. You talk about nerv nous and high stress,
Speaker 1: I mean especially when you're on like a if it's
Speaker 1: a hundred and eighty bibles in a ten million dollar project,
Speaker 1: I mean each page is rather expensive and valuable, so
Speaker 1: you don't want to screw up any of them, you know.
Speaker 1: So if you want to look at a press again,
Speaker 1: I would go to YouTube and see the video but
Speaker 1: actually being done. But the press has two sections. You've
Speaker 1: got this frame uh that allows the plates in the
Speaker 1: paper to align themselves, um, the carriage and then the
Speaker 1: actual press part of the press. And you set these
Speaker 1: plates onto the carriage and they're facing up and then
Speaker 1: you apply inc using these uh and when you see
Speaker 1: it on the video that it kind of looks like
Speaker 1: it kind of looks like these big giant gourds there.
Speaker 1: They have a handle and then this big round sort
Speaker 1: of drumhead looking um body and you and you stamp,
Speaker 1: you know, you roll this thing all around in the
Speaker 1: ink and then roll them around on each other to
Speaker 1: make sure that all all the INCA is really really
Speaker 1: even and it's actually goose skin, uh, these pads are.
Speaker 1: And then you, uh, you just go around and stamp
Speaker 1: these four plates. And you know, from the looks the
Speaker 1: way this guy did it, it took about maybe a
Speaker 1: minute and a half to fully ink them for a
Speaker 1: good page. And these things look kind of heavy. You know,
Speaker 1: he's he's kind of. He doesn't roll them because if
Speaker 1: you roll them you end up smearing, So he's just
Speaker 1: sort of pounding them on there. And it's a lot
Speaker 1: of work. And and all of this looks like a
Speaker 1: lot of work, even the pressing part is it takes like,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of manual strength. Well yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean again two years to just print bibles. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I mean it's a physical workout. Um, he uses this
Speaker 1: inc you mentioned it's an oil based varnish previ lee.
Speaker 1: For many, many hundreds of years they use water based
Speaker 1: which is just no good. Water based ink is is
Speaker 1: not what you want to do when you're printing a book. No,
Speaker 1: And that was actually another reason why it didn't catch on.
Speaker 1: Printing didn't catch on in in China and Korea two
Speaker 1: as they were using water based inks exclusively and it runs,
Speaker 1: its smears, it doesn't stay in place. It's just a
Speaker 1: bad jam. And that was another innovation of Guttenberg's um,
Speaker 1: which was to to use oil based ink. There was somebody,
Speaker 1: I can't remember, we've talked about it in a podcast before,
Speaker 1: but they were they were talking about how some inventor
Speaker 1: just knocked something out of the park. His first time out,
Speaker 1: and they said that it was akin to invent like
Speaker 1: it had the right brothers invented their airplane complete with
Speaker 1: UM airline miles and food trades that that came down
Speaker 1: off the back of the sea in front. It was
Speaker 1: just like this complete thing. And that's that's kind of
Speaker 1: what Gutenberg did with the printing press. He he solved
Speaker 1: all the problems all at once in his his initial invention,
Speaker 1: like he figured it all out, and as we'll see,
Speaker 1: it stayed the same for hundreds of years as a result. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So to hold the paper in place, because you know
Speaker 1: this frame is upright, and then you end up folding
Speaker 1: it down. It's held in by these pins. He's a
Speaker 1: little looked like little nail heads sticking or not nail heads,
Speaker 1: but nail pointy parts the opposite of the head. And
Speaker 1: that way, when you flip it over because you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to print that other side, it's exactly in the
Speaker 1: same spot that it was before. Another nice little, very
Speaker 1: rudimentary way of making something perfect. Uh. And then you
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier he made certain parts read this rubrication UM.
Speaker 1: And I'm not sure what they did for the Guttenberg Bible,
Speaker 1: but in the King James version. If I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 1: Jesus's words are all in red. If i'm I think
Speaker 1: I remember that being the case, But I think he
Speaker 1: just used it here for certain parts and maybe flourishes
Speaker 1: of art, and there was some hand drawn art and
Speaker 1: stuff like that as well. Well, yeah, they you went
Speaker 1: to hand drawn because they they he had so much
Speaker 1: trouble with the the red um, like going back and
Speaker 1: printing after the black was printed, printing on the same
Speaker 1: page with just the red text. It's pretty advanced, right,
Speaker 1: But they said, yeah, we'll just go do the hand
Speaker 1: lettering like like traditional least, and nobody will be mad
Speaker 1: at us for it, right, Like what do you call
Speaker 1: it when the first letter is big drop cap? Yeah,
Speaker 1: drop cap. They did those in red for sure. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then you've got your screw Uh the screw press
Speaker 1: he used. He kind of ganked from wine and great presses.
Speaker 1: And you know, once you have this think inked up,
Speaker 1: you move it over to the press and it's just
Speaker 1: a big, big armed lever. It's not like something that
Speaker 1: moves in a circle. You just kind of pull it
Speaker 1: really tough, uh, kind of one or maybe two times
Speaker 1: and then boom, you've got your printed page, you do,
Speaker 1: and and Ed points out something that I think is overlooked.
Speaker 1: But you know, and one of the other problems with
Speaker 1: Chinese and Korean printing or any kind of printing using
Speaker 1: like blocks or something like that is you're gonna get
Speaker 1: uneven pressure, so you're gonna get an uneven transfer of
Speaker 1: One of the genius things about the press about it
Speaker 1: using basically a wine press for printing, is that it
Speaker 1: applies even slow pressure at you know, increasing pressure and
Speaker 1: then decreasing pressure as you unscrew the screw, so the
Speaker 1: at the same rate, like over the whole plate, right,
Speaker 1: So there was a nice even amount of pressure that
Speaker 1: was increasingly introduced and decreasingly reduced. Um that that really
Speaker 1: kind of made this this beautiful outcome for the on
Speaker 1: the printed page. Yeah, you get when this guy in
Speaker 1: this video holds up the little printed page at the
Speaker 1: end there, you know, there's a little moment of you
Speaker 1: and going on in that room, right and like a
Speaker 1: little trickle of blood comes out of his ears. He's
Speaker 1: just gazing into the king Man. I was worried about
Speaker 1: that guy from I gotta go see that. You should
Speaker 1: check him out. So um, that's I mean, that's the
Speaker 1: printing press we we we should say, after Guttenberg into
Speaker 1: those bibles, Foost got his hands on those presses almost
Speaker 1: immediately and in very short order, I think, like less
Speaker 1: than two years released Assaulter, which is also considered a masterpiece,
Speaker 1: but Foost put his name on it. Even though Gutenberg
Speaker 1: had basically created the whole thing. He also made a
Speaker 1: business for himself creating these bibles using Gutenberg's old plates
Speaker 1: because he got his hands on all those through the court.
Speaker 1: But again, Guttenberg was certainly not lost to history. Everybody
Speaker 1: knew what he did and very quickly, you know, revered
Speaker 1: him as a hero extraordinary. But we were talking about
Speaker 1: what the Gutenberg press did for the world, and it's
Speaker 1: really tough to overstate the impact that it had on things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean just think about, like you said, the first
Speaker 1: information Age, getting out information on on government and politics
Speaker 1: and democracy, and I mean just little things like how
Speaker 1: tos and you know, how to how to that there
Speaker 1: might have been a how to on how to make
Speaker 1: those nails that we talked about in the Blacksmithing episode,
Speaker 1: although I think a lot of that has passed down,
Speaker 1: but all of a sudden, you can get this out
Speaker 1: on mass and and that's the whole thing. It's like,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, hundreds and thousands and hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of people could read information right, and they could
Speaker 1: learn to read too, because books were now way more
Speaker 1: affordable than they have been before. And actually, ironically enough,
Speaker 1: I ran across the history dot com article called seven
Speaker 1: ways the Printing Press changed the World by our own
Speaker 1: Dave Rubs. He went to um he he points out this,
Speaker 1: and I thought this was really important. With the printing press,
Speaker 1: that made it way easier to make way more copies
Speaker 1: of something than ever before, which also made it harder
Speaker 1: to stamp out new ideas. Whereas before, if you had
Speaker 1: some heretic who had this new idea about, you know,
Speaker 1: the earth revolving around the sun rather than the other
Speaker 1: way around, all you do is kill that person, burn
Speaker 1: about the steak, and then burn their copies of their
Speaker 1: notes along with them. In idea gone right now, that
Speaker 1: person could make a bunch of copies and disseminate them,
Speaker 1: and so this idea would be out there. You could
Speaker 1: kill that person, but their idea was going to survive
Speaker 1: because there were too many copies for you to get
Speaker 1: your hands on and stamp out. And that led to
Speaker 1: things like the Enlightenment, like the revolution in America and
Speaker 1: in France, and the birth of democracy in the West,
Speaker 1: like like all of this stuff came from that, the
Speaker 1: ability to disseminate things like never before in the legal system.
Speaker 1: It allowed judges to throw the book at people. Yeah
Speaker 1: before one book. Yeah, they wouldn't throw that one thing.
Speaker 1: They might not get it back, that's right. So wow,
Speaker 1: that's a good one. I think on that one. We
Speaker 1: should end u this episode on the Guttenberg Printing Press.
Speaker 1: Don't you Well? Since I said don't you, everybody's time
Speaker 1: for listener, ma'am alright, I'm gonna call this sweep Steaks Winner.
Speaker 1: This is from Devin John's Hey guys, just listen to
Speaker 1: the sweep Steak podcast. I wanted to share one of
Speaker 1: my wins as a sweeper and I saw a sweepstakes
Speaker 1: for from Interstate Battery and Firestone where they were giving
Speaker 1: away two trucks and a bunch of gift cards. All
Speaker 1: you had to do is get a free battery check
Speaker 1: at any Firestone and enter with your invoice. I thought,
Speaker 1: I need an oil chain so I might as well
Speaker 1: get that battery checked and enter. Less than three months later,
Speaker 1: I was contacted by a third party company who facilitates
Speaker 1: the sweep Steaks. Almost didn't answer. They told me I
Speaker 1: didn't win and he won a gift card. No, he
Speaker 1: won a truck. He won one of those two trucks,
Speaker 1: uh seventeen Chevy Silverado. He said, I loved having a truck,
Speaker 1: but as you guys said, you gotta pay taxes on winnings,
Speaker 1: which counts his income, so ended up selling it, buying
Speaker 1: a nice use car and paying off debt. I've won
Speaker 1: a bunch of stuff and have learned how to spot
Speaker 1: reel and fake giveaways, but they do exist, so keep entering.
Speaker 1: And that is Devin John's and he included a picture
Speaker 1: of himself with his latkar. It's great, it looks good still,
Speaker 1: Thanks Devin, congratulations and that is a fantastic story. That's
Speaker 1: a perfect listener. Male response to the sweep Stakes episode.
Speaker 1: If you ask me, yeah, and in a smart, responsible
Speaker 1: thing you did by getting a cheaper thing and then
Speaker 1: paying off debt. Good for you. Yeah. Uh, Well, if
Speaker 1: you want us to give you a pat on the
Speaker 1: head for something you did. Email to us. You can
Speaker 1: send it off to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
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