WEBVTT - The Printing Press: The Invention Built on Debt and Sin 0:00:17.560 --> 0:00:21.479 Pushkin too quick. No, it's perfect push kit stuff. You 0:00:21.600 --> 0:00:33.159 got it. 0:00:33.879 --> 0:00:37.400 Frank up the siege engine. Because we're going back to 0:00:37.440 --> 0:00:38.279 the Middle Ages. 0:00:38.560 --> 0:00:40.200 I will wear my leather corset. 0:00:40.960 --> 0:00:44.239 We're doing a biggie today. We are maybe the biggest 0:00:44.240 --> 0:00:48.960 one we've done yet. The printing press, the printing press. 0:00:49.720 --> 0:00:54.680 Love the printing press. Yes, it is everything, including a business. 0:00:54.680 --> 0:00:57.560 I'm Jacob Goldstein, I'm Robert Smith, and this is business 0:00:57.720 --> 0:01:00.800 show about the history. So why don't we go way back. 0:01:00.680 --> 0:01:03.560 Of business today on the show the invention of the 0:01:03.560 --> 0:01:09.240 printing press, which is a surprisingly modern story. There is debt, 0:01:09.479 --> 0:01:13.840 there is equity, there is a court case, competition, international 0:01:13.880 --> 0:01:19.600 branch offices, and the Protestant Reformation. Our show today begins 0:01:20.640 --> 0:01:25.039 with the man named Johannes gen Spleisch zuur Lauden. 0:01:25.160 --> 0:01:26.080 Did not see that coming. 0:01:26.160 --> 0:01:28.480 I'm probably saying it wrong because I don't speak German. 0:01:29.080 --> 0:01:32.600 Johannes Goose Flesh of the House of Laden was born 0:01:32.640 --> 0:01:36.839 around fourteen hundred to relatively rich parents in a town 0:01:36.920 --> 0:01:40.320 called Mainz in what's Germany today. At the time it 0:01:40.360 --> 0:01:42.840 was part of the Holy Roman Empire. 0:01:42.680 --> 0:01:45.759 Which Fultaire said, of course, was neither holy nor Roman. 0:01:45.920 --> 0:01:46.600 Nor An Empire. 0:01:46.800 --> 0:01:50.000 When Johannes is around twenty years old, his father dies 0:01:50.240 --> 0:01:54.200 and his mother comes into possession of a house called 0:01:54.520 --> 0:01:59.080 the hoff Zuom Gutenberg House of the Good Mountain, and 0:01:59.160 --> 0:02:04.640 Johannes becomes known as Johannes Zoom Gutenberg. I guess last 0:02:04.720 --> 0:02:07.000 names work differently back then. 0:02:07.080 --> 0:02:09.280 There are many Johannases and you're like, oh, the Good 0:02:09.320 --> 0:02:10.480 Mountain one. 0:02:10.120 --> 0:02:12.760 The one he's over at the Good Mountain House. So 0:02:12.840 --> 0:02:16.679 what do we know about Gutenberg. There's a famous engraving 0:02:16.760 --> 0:02:19.280 of him. If you've seen a picture of Gutenberg, it 0:02:19.360 --> 0:02:22.440 is from this engraving. He's got this long white beard, 0:02:22.960 --> 0:02:26.280 comes down to like two points on his chest like 0:02:26.400 --> 0:02:29.679 zz top, Yeah, like zezytop style. He's wearing a fur 0:02:29.720 --> 0:02:34.160 trimmed hat. Gutenberg didn't look like this. The picture was 0:02:34.200 --> 0:02:36.720 made like one hundred years after he died. There's no 0:02:36.800 --> 0:02:39.520 pictures of him as far as we know from his lifetime. 0:02:40.000 --> 0:02:42.120 And I love this right And as we'll see, there's 0:02:42.160 --> 0:02:44.200 all this myth, even as you get into the story 0:02:44.320 --> 0:02:47.200 sort of embroidered about him. I mean, we don't know 0:02:47.760 --> 0:02:50.120 what he thought or felt, you know, as far as 0:02:50.160 --> 0:02:53.240 we know, there's no diary or trove of letters. But 0:02:53.280 --> 0:02:56.240 of course he printed books, and a surprising number of 0:02:56.240 --> 0:02:57.280 the books still exist. 0:02:58.120 --> 0:03:00.720 And also conveniently for. 0:03:00.680 --> 0:03:03.760 Our purposes, he wound up in court a few times 0:03:04.360 --> 0:03:09.079 and the paperwork, the court records, actually still exist. And 0:03:09.160 --> 0:03:12.520 so a lot of what we know about Goot and 0:03:12.560 --> 0:03:14.400 the invention of the printing press and how it was 0:03:14.520 --> 0:03:18.639 used comes from these basically lawsuits over money, which is 0:03:18.680 --> 0:03:22.760 great for US business history. So here's this story we 0:03:22.760 --> 0:03:26.880 can put together. At some point, we know Gutenberg became 0:03:27.040 --> 0:03:30.320 an affiliate of the Master Goldsmith's. 0:03:30.000 --> 0:03:31.959 Not an apprentice, but an affiliates. 0:03:31.520 --> 0:03:35.120 Exactly, so it's different. So the Master Goldsmiths are a guild, 0:03:35.400 --> 0:03:37.520 which is, you know, the medieval version of a union. 0:03:37.560 --> 0:03:39.080 Guilds were a big deal. Maybe we should do a 0:03:39.080 --> 0:03:42.440 guild show. Actually he was not in the union. He 0:03:42.800 --> 0:03:45.640 worked with gold is basically what that means in some way. 0:03:45.760 --> 0:03:48.800 So we know that he's into metal, and we also 0:03:49.200 --> 0:03:53.160 know that he was an entrepreneur. And now here, I 0:03:53.280 --> 0:03:56.360 am this is like an anachronism, right, I'm sort of 0:03:56.400 --> 0:03:59.880 projecting backwards. There there were not entrepreneurs in the modern sense. 0:03:59.920 --> 0:04:03.640 The word didn't exist. But yet I think you'll see 0:04:03.680 --> 0:04:05.720 as we go through the story. He was a hustler, 0:04:05.760 --> 0:04:08.560 he was a guy who started businesses. His life is 0:04:08.640 --> 0:04:10.800 much more that way than I would have thought for 0:04:10.920 --> 0:04:13.960 someone who living in you know, the end of the 0:04:13.960 --> 0:04:16.760 Middle Ages basically. But then again, like he is the 0:04:16.760 --> 0:04:18.760 guy who is going to invent the thing that's gonna 0:04:18.880 --> 0:04:22.960 create the modern world, so maybe it makes sense. So 0:04:23.039 --> 0:04:25.880 the first kind of hustle, the first business that he 0:04:26.200 --> 0:04:31.360 starts that we know of, is mirrors. Gutenberg gets into 0:04:31.400 --> 0:04:35.280 the mirror game and he finds this great, you know, 0:04:35.400 --> 0:04:38.520 fourteen hundreds kind of niche, which is he's going to 0:04:38.560 --> 0:04:42.000 sell special mirrors to religious pilgrims. 0:04:42.200 --> 0:04:45.640 What made the mirror special? They're special. They're like convex 0:04:45.720 --> 0:04:49.279 mirrors that are specially made for the pilgrims. 0:04:48.680 --> 0:04:51.240 To take on their pilgrimage. And I'll explain why. I'll 0:04:51.279 --> 0:04:55.680 explain why. So what's going on is in fourteen thirty nine, 0:04:56.240 --> 0:04:58.880 there's going to be a pilgrimage to this German town 0:04:59.480 --> 0:05:03.120 to see these relics that are displayed just once every 0:05:03.320 --> 0:05:07.599 seven years, like a piece of the gown that Mary 0:05:07.680 --> 0:05:13.000 wore the night Jesus was born, the loincloth that Jesus wore, 0:05:13.040 --> 0:05:15.200 on the cross and is stained with blood, that kind 0:05:15.279 --> 0:05:15.560 of thing. 0:05:15.600 --> 0:05:19.480 Yeah, this is like woodstock for religious pilgrims. 0:05:19.560 --> 0:05:24.040 Yes, yes, And so the idea with these mirrors is, 0:05:24.279 --> 0:05:26.920 you know, when you get your moment before the holy 0:05:27.040 --> 0:05:30.800 relics looking at them, you hold up the mirror, and 0:05:30.800 --> 0:05:34.680 the mirror can somehow capture the holy power that the 0:05:34.760 --> 0:05:38.400 relics have. And to be clear, he didn't invent this idea. 0:05:38.640 --> 0:05:41.640 This was a thing that people were doing, spread by 0:05:41.960 --> 0:05:45.640 mirror merchants perhaps perhaps, but he's he's going with it. 0:05:45.680 --> 0:05:47.960 He's going with it, and he actually gets a couple 0:05:47.960 --> 0:05:51.320 of investors who have equity in the project. Essentially what 0:05:51.360 --> 0:05:53.840 we would call equity, starts making the mirrors, as far 0:05:53.839 --> 0:05:57.400 as we can tell. And then when your classic pieces 0:05:57.440 --> 0:06:01.839 of medieval bad news arrives, the plague on the back 0:06:02.080 --> 0:06:04.560 of a rat, the back of a flea, on the 0:06:04.560 --> 0:06:08.040 back of a rat. It's like panics in the stories 0:06:08.040 --> 0:06:11.400 we tell the nineteennres. You know, everything's going fine, and 0:06:11.440 --> 0:06:11.880 then the plague. 0:06:12.480 --> 0:06:15.480 The plague is the financial panic of the thirteen and 0:06:15.680 --> 0:06:16.280 fourteen hundred. 0:06:16.279 --> 0:06:16.920 It's very good. 0:06:17.760 --> 0:06:20.240 Pilgrimage is delayed until fourteen forty. 0:06:20.400 --> 0:06:22.880 He must have been sad, looking out over one hundred 0:06:22.960 --> 0:06:26.320 convex mirrors, all staring back at him. One of Gutenberg's 0:06:26.320 --> 0:06:29.880 investors dies, oh man, could have been plague, could have 0:06:29.920 --> 0:06:30.400 been anything. 0:06:31.480 --> 0:06:34.640 Fourteen thirties, You could die of anything at any time. 0:06:34.920 --> 0:06:39.160 And the investor's family, the investor's family, the guy who 0:06:39.160 --> 0:06:43.120 has died, His family sues Gutenberg over whatever, over that 0:06:43.160 --> 0:06:43.920 guy's stake. 0:06:43.720 --> 0:06:44.320 In the business. 0:06:44.320 --> 0:06:45.320 Come on act of God. 0:06:45.520 --> 0:06:46.800 Yeah, I don't know what the details are. I think 0:06:46.839 --> 0:06:51.640 Gutenberg wins. But there is this really interesting, just kind 0:06:51.680 --> 0:06:55.560 of enticing detail mystery in the lawsuit, and it's just 0:06:55.600 --> 0:06:58.719 a few words. And what we know from the lawsuit 0:06:58.760 --> 0:07:03.120 paperwork is that Gutenberg is afraid that his trade secrets 0:07:04.000 --> 0:07:05.680 are going to get out. Of course, there's you know, 0:07:05.720 --> 0:07:07.960 no intellectual property as we know it in this era. 0:07:08.120 --> 0:07:11.200 You try and keep your secret secret. In particular, he 0:07:11.280 --> 0:07:15.240 says he is worried that visitors to the dead Man's 0:07:15.240 --> 0:07:17.560 house are going to see And this part is a 0:07:17.560 --> 0:07:20.560 direct quote, or at least a direct quote translated into English. 0:07:21.080 --> 0:07:26.560 Four pieces lying in the press, the press, the press, 0:07:26.640 --> 0:07:28.520 the printing press. We don't know, we don't know, we 0:07:28.520 --> 0:07:28.840 don't know. 0:07:28.840 --> 0:07:31.520 But he tells somebody to take these pieces apart so 0:07:31.560 --> 0:07:33.880 nobody can tell what they are. Historians, of course, have 0:07:33.960 --> 0:07:37.239 been speculating for hundreds of years about these six words. 0:07:37.880 --> 0:07:39.600 Was he already working on the printing press? 0:07:40.120 --> 0:07:40.640 Unclear? 0:07:41.080 --> 0:07:43.200 We don't actually know what happened with the mirror business 0:07:43.200 --> 0:07:46.720 for that matter. Next piece of evidence. Next time we 0:07:46.800 --> 0:07:49.200 have a clear view of what's going on with Gutenberg's 0:07:49.200 --> 0:07:53.920 actually ten years later, fourteen fifty. So Gutenberg, I will say, 0:07:54.240 --> 0:07:56.960 as a fifty something man, is fifty ish at this point. 0:07:57.320 --> 0:07:59.160 He's not a kid. Some might say is washed up, 0:07:59.480 --> 0:08:03.040 some might say he's at his peak. So it's fourteen fifty. 0:08:03.080 --> 0:08:06.320 Gutenberg is around fifty years old, and he makes another deal. 0:08:06.360 --> 0:08:10.040 He enters into another business arrangement. This time it's with 0:08:10.120 --> 0:08:13.920 a guy named Johann fuoh Ho, and Foust agreed to 0:08:14.160 --> 0:08:20.720 lend Gutenberg eight hundred guilders at six percent interest, collateralized 0:08:20.800 --> 0:08:26.840 by the apparatus sparatus. We're getting excited, Oh, apparatus, I 0:08:26.880 --> 0:08:28.480 like this. Out of that, it's like he has a 0:08:28.520 --> 0:08:32.760 code name das apparatus. Sorry to all our German speakers. 0:08:33.040 --> 0:08:37.559 So eight hundred guilders is a lot of money. It's 0:08:37.640 --> 0:08:42.320 enough to buy one hundred oxen or four houses at 0:08:42.319 --> 0:08:45.079 These figures, by the way, come from a book called Gutenberg, 0:08:45.320 --> 0:08:50.280 A Life in Books by Eric Marshall White, which is 0:08:50.320 --> 0:08:53.320 a good book, a really helpful book. It's relatively recent 0:08:53.360 --> 0:08:57.720 and it's really careful. It's a really careful biography of Gutenberg. 0:08:58.040 --> 0:09:00.760 So it was really helpful in kind of untangling the 0:09:00.800 --> 0:09:04.120 myth from what we know. So okay, so they make 0:09:04.160 --> 0:09:08.160 this deal. In two years later, Foust makes another investment, 0:09:08.760 --> 0:09:11.080 agrees to put in three hundred more guilders right away, 0:09:11.160 --> 0:09:15.880 up to eight hundred more overall. And here we know 0:09:16.120 --> 0:09:18.360 from the kind of documentary evidence that we'll get to 0:09:18.960 --> 0:09:23.199 that this is explicitly for the work of the books. 0:09:23.400 --> 0:09:25.440 This is the work of the books. It's happening, and 0:09:25.480 --> 0:09:26.080 so there he is. 0:09:26.120 --> 0:09:28.520 If we zoom out now, like we're right in the documents, 0:09:28.559 --> 0:09:30.240 really in the in the micro, if we zoom out 0:09:30.240 --> 0:09:33.600 to the macro for a sec it's interesting to think, 0:09:33.760 --> 0:09:36.520 why why is why? Why are they bringing a lot 0:09:36.559 --> 0:09:37.439 of money into this. 0:09:38.080 --> 0:09:43.520 We don't have the aha moment, the big surprise story 0:09:43.559 --> 0:09:45.720 where you know he was I don't know, you left 0:09:45.760 --> 0:09:48.800 some type somewhere and his wife sat on it, and 0:09:48.840 --> 0:09:51.719 she gets up and he sees the impression there, yes, right, 0:09:51.800 --> 0:09:54.400 Or he falls in some inc and there happens to 0:09:54.400 --> 0:09:56.640 be a little coin on top of the inca that 0:09:56.760 --> 0:09:59.600 gets on his shirts and he thinks, ah. 0:09:59.200 --> 0:10:02.840 We do know this, we do know this. Demand for 0:10:03.200 --> 0:10:06.679 books was really high in Europe at this point for 0:10:07.160 --> 0:10:11.080 some interesting reasons and kind of varied social and economic reasons. 0:10:11.120 --> 0:10:16.800 So and political actually, so you have governments are becoming 0:10:16.840 --> 0:10:19.680 more of a thing, right, It's not just kings occasionally 0:10:19.760 --> 0:10:22.640 going to war. You're having kind of bureaucrats, sort of 0:10:22.720 --> 0:10:27.240 modern governmental functions emerging. And for that you need people 0:10:27.280 --> 0:10:30.160 who are literate, who have gone to school and read 0:10:30.200 --> 0:10:31.559 books to learn how to read. 0:10:32.000 --> 0:10:33.800 So there is demand for books. 0:10:34.600 --> 0:10:37.880 You have the Renaissance getting going in Italy by this point, 0:10:38.040 --> 0:10:41.000 and all the rich guys in Italy want to build 0:10:41.040 --> 0:10:45.080 their libraries of books from classical antiquity. There's actually this 0:10:45.160 --> 0:10:48.520 little story that I love of a businessman in Florence, 0:10:48.600 --> 0:10:52.199 a guy named Vespasiano di Bistici. 0:10:52.880 --> 0:10:53.560 One more time. 0:10:53.679 --> 0:10:59.880 I love it, Vespasiano Dibistici, that's the name Babistici. I 0:10:59.920 --> 0:11:02.079 believe he started out as a paper merchant, but he 0:11:02.160 --> 0:11:04.760 winds up creating kind of like what to me seems 0:11:04.760 --> 0:11:08.480 like a book factory in the fourteen forties, no doctor 0:11:09.440 --> 0:11:13.719 without a printing press. So what happens is Cosimo di Medici, 0:11:13.800 --> 0:11:18.960 you know, of the Florentine Medici, decides he needs his library, 0:11:19.080 --> 0:11:22.480 his personal library, and he goes to the Bistichi and 0:11:22.520 --> 0:11:27.040 Bistici has like fifty five scribes writing for him, like 0:11:27.200 --> 0:11:31.120 you know, copying out manuscripts for Cosimo. And these fifty 0:11:31.160 --> 0:11:34.880 five guys create something like two hundred books in two years. 0:11:35.440 --> 0:11:38.200 So that's basically like if you round it to fifty, 0:11:38.240 --> 0:11:40.080 you know, it takes a guy six months to write 0:11:40.080 --> 0:11:42.960 a manuscript, huh. And of course these are beautiful whatever, 0:11:43.040 --> 0:11:45.640 but like that's a lot of labor. 0:11:45.480 --> 0:11:47.160 Yeah, And that's a lot of money for each book, 0:11:47.200 --> 0:11:48.439 and a lot of money for each book. 0:11:48.800 --> 0:11:55.319 Now, there is something making books cheaper, and that is paper. 0:11:55.760 --> 0:11:56.160 Paper. 0:11:56.559 --> 0:11:59.080 I presume Cosimo's books would have been on parchment, which 0:11:59.120 --> 0:12:01.400 is what you know, they had been using in Europe 0:12:01.440 --> 0:12:02.839 for a long time and it was still the high 0:12:02.840 --> 0:12:07.080 class thing. And paper is profoundly cheaper than parchment. Parchment, 0:12:07.080 --> 0:12:09.680 of course, made from animal skins, costs a lot to 0:12:09.760 --> 0:12:13.720 grow an animal to make the parchment. And paper has 0:12:13.760 --> 0:12:16.040 been around in Asia for quite a long time by 0:12:16.080 --> 0:12:19.640 this point, but it has recently come to Europe and 0:12:19.720 --> 0:12:23.120 has become sort of industrialized, right, And the availability of 0:12:23.160 --> 0:12:28.120 paper is profound for the book business because when a 0:12:28.200 --> 0:12:31.240 scribe is writing a book on parchment, the parchment is 0:12:31.280 --> 0:12:34.200 a huge chunk of the cost, maybe most of the cost, 0:12:34.440 --> 0:12:37.319 but once you have paper, almost all of the cost 0:12:37.360 --> 0:12:39.920 of making the book is the cost of the labor, 0:12:39.960 --> 0:12:41.360 the cost of the scribes time. 0:12:41.840 --> 0:12:45.400 This is a classic business situation, right. You have a 0:12:45.520 --> 0:12:48.400 high demand for a product, and the demand is going up. 0:12:48.720 --> 0:12:51.400 The thing that you use to make the products, the input, 0:12:51.480 --> 0:12:54.520 the expensive input, is getting cheaper with paper, and so 0:12:54.640 --> 0:12:59.120 what you are left with is a bottleneck, a low 0:12:59.200 --> 0:13:02.720 productivity part of the process, and that is the scribes. 0:13:03.160 --> 0:13:05.640 And so we could talk about, oh, was it an insight? 0:13:05.679 --> 0:13:09.120 Did Gutenberg see something that no one else saw? Really, 0:13:09.200 --> 0:13:11.920 there were economic pressures. Somebody was going to do that, 0:13:12.200 --> 0:13:15.520 because it's obvious when you have a bottleneck, a very 0:13:15.520 --> 0:13:19.880 expensive bottleneck in the process, you should try to automate that. 0:13:20.120 --> 0:13:22.200 And there was printing in the world. 0:13:22.559 --> 0:13:26.040 Woodblock printing had been used for hundreds of years in Asia, 0:13:26.440 --> 0:13:29.240 and it was it was in use in Europe somewhat. 0:13:29.520 --> 0:13:29.680 You know. 0:13:29.760 --> 0:13:33.400 Obviously, you carve sort of a single pages worth of 0:13:33.600 --> 0:13:36.880 typically an image, sometimes some words into a woodblock. But 0:13:36.920 --> 0:13:39.240 of course it's static, right, you got your block. You 0:13:39.240 --> 0:13:40.560 can print one page, but that's it. 0:13:40.640 --> 0:13:42.480 We've all done this with potatoes when we were a kid. 0:13:42.559 --> 0:13:45.360 Yes, it's that movable type, which is you know, as 0:13:45.400 --> 0:13:47.440 we know, what he's going to invent is way more dynamic, 0:13:47.960 --> 0:13:51.800 way better. And by this time, by the mid fourteen hundreds, 0:13:52.000 --> 0:13:55.160 movable type had been invented also in Asia. In Korea 0:13:55.200 --> 0:13:59.000 they had even used metal types. But both in China 0:13:59.040 --> 0:14:03.240 and Korea at the time they used pictograms. Each word 0:14:03.520 --> 0:14:04.560 was its own character. 0:14:04.760 --> 0:14:07.880 So you'd need thousands of these little things in order 0:14:08.000 --> 0:14:08.880 to have a. 0:14:08.840 --> 0:14:11.480 Book to have a book, right, much less practical than 0:14:11.480 --> 0:14:13.679 when you have an alphabet, and you can do whatever 0:14:13.720 --> 0:14:16.160 your upper case in your lower case and dozens. The 0:14:16.240 --> 0:14:18.760 order of magnitude is dozens, and you can print anything. 0:14:19.120 --> 0:14:23.000 And so there is this question. Was Gutenberg copying an 0:14:23.000 --> 0:14:26.720 Asian press? It doesn't seem like it. There's no evidence 0:14:26.800 --> 0:14:29.520 that he knew that people in Europe knew, you know, 0:14:29.560 --> 0:14:31.840 in any kind of a real way about these presses 0:14:31.840 --> 0:14:35.280 in Asia. It seems like when Gutenberg is doing this 0:14:35.480 --> 0:14:40.280 work around fourteen fifty, he's working from first principles. 0:14:40.600 --> 0:14:41.680 And we know, you know, he. 0:14:41.600 --> 0:14:45.880 Had done some kind of work related to goldsmithing. His 0:14:46.040 --> 0:14:48.560 dad was affiliated with the Mint, so maybe he knew 0:14:48.600 --> 0:14:52.200 something about the way coins were made. We know he's 0:14:52.400 --> 0:14:56.000 like a hustler, you know, he's entrepreneurial. And it seems 0:14:56.080 --> 0:15:00.240 like Gutenberg on his own invented or invented for Europe 0:15:01.000 --> 0:15:06.000 the movable type printing press, arguably the most important invention 0:15:06.360 --> 0:15:08.720 ever to come out of Europe. Up there, mean want 0:15:08.760 --> 0:15:11.479 the croissant, The steam engine. 0:15:11.240 --> 0:15:14.840 Oh, the steam engine. Of course, internal combustion huge. 0:15:14.960 --> 0:15:16.600 So there were a few other biggies, but one of 0:15:16.640 --> 0:15:19.800 the biggies Fondue, but certainly one of the biggies. The 0:15:20.000 --> 0:15:23.640 earliest image we have of press is not of Gutenberg's 0:15:23.640 --> 0:15:25.680 press in particular, but it's not that long after. It's 0:15:25.680 --> 0:15:30.320 from about fifty years later. It's this form of picture 0:15:30.720 --> 0:15:34.040 that was popular at the time called the dance macabre. 0:15:34.560 --> 0:15:37.720 You have pictures of people in everyday life and then 0:15:37.760 --> 0:15:41.720 you have death kind of dancing through I guess to 0:15:42.200 --> 0:15:44.360 remind you that everybody's going to die. Maybe they're taking 0:15:44.400 --> 0:15:48.800 away these people, yeah, Memento Moury. And so in this 0:15:48.920 --> 0:15:51.880 image you can see like a Gutenberg ish press. 0:15:52.480 --> 0:15:53.320 Are you looking at it? 0:15:53.400 --> 0:15:53.640 Yeah? 0:15:53.680 --> 0:15:56.800 There are these kind of skeleton looking dudes. Yeah, and 0:15:56.840 --> 0:15:59.560 what's death? Those are death? Yeah, I got that. And 0:15:59.600 --> 0:16:02.160 one of them has his hand on the person who's 0:16:02.200 --> 0:16:04.240 picking out the type, who's putting the type too, right. 0:16:04.280 --> 0:16:06.240 They call that guy the compositor, right, So for each 0:16:06.280 --> 0:16:08.840 page he arranges the letters, and the letters are backwards, right, 0:16:08.880 --> 0:16:10.080 you arrange it all backwards. 0:16:10.120 --> 0:16:12.360 And there's a guy who's doing the actual press, which 0:16:12.400 --> 0:16:14.360 looks like one of those things where you pull the 0:16:14.440 --> 0:16:16.560 lever and it goes down like maybe you'd use to 0:16:16.640 --> 0:16:18.960 squeeze olive oil or something. Yes, they had used presses 0:16:19.000 --> 0:16:20.280 like this, and you're up for a long time. 0:16:20.360 --> 0:16:20.600 Yeah. 0:16:20.600 --> 0:16:24.200 And there's another skeleton dude like touching that man. That's amazing. 0:16:24.320 --> 0:16:25.440 And that's basically it. 0:16:25.560 --> 0:16:25.720 Right. 0:16:25.760 --> 0:16:29.880 The press is actually simple in its way, right, he's 0:16:29.920 --> 0:16:35.080 putting together these different things, but it's not that complicated. 0:16:34.840 --> 0:16:39.080 And that raises this question in my mind, right, which 0:16:39.320 --> 0:16:45.600 is we've talked before about simultaneous invention. It seems like 0:16:46.240 --> 0:16:48.440 all the big inventions that we've talked about, it is 0:16:48.520 --> 0:16:53.520 really not ultimately like one guy figuring it out. You know, well, Edison, 0:16:53.560 --> 0:16:55.240 we talked about it early on in the Edison and 0:16:55.280 --> 0:16:57.560 the Movies story. Lots of people were trying to figure 0:16:57.600 --> 0:16:59.800 out movies. Photography was out there. It was clear somebody 0:16:59.800 --> 0:17:02.239 who was going to figure out movies or telephone. Famously, 0:17:02.440 --> 0:17:05.320 like literally people racing to the patent office to get 0:17:05.320 --> 0:17:11.040 the first patent. I mean even calculus, calculus right, Leibnitz 0:17:11.119 --> 0:17:11.520 and Newton. 0:17:12.159 --> 0:17:15.320 And the reason of course for simultaneous invention is what 0:17:15.360 --> 0:17:17.640 we talked about a little bit earlier. There is the need. 0:17:18.240 --> 0:17:20.320 You know, technology has come up to a certain point 0:17:20.400 --> 0:17:22.560 and people are using that as a launching pad for 0:17:22.600 --> 0:17:24.639 something else. And so it is natural when people are 0:17:24.640 --> 0:17:27.000 trying to solve the same problem, they know about the 0:17:27.000 --> 0:17:29.439 same information out there in the world, they're going to 0:17:29.480 --> 0:17:30.639 come up with a new solution. 0:17:30.960 --> 0:17:32.960 And yet that doesn't happen in this case. Right like 0:17:33.200 --> 0:17:37.040 there is demand for books, there is paper, and nobody 0:17:37.200 --> 0:17:39.640 else in Europe does this. Like that seems pretty clear, 0:17:39.680 --> 0:17:41.960 and so I was singing, why is this too much 0:17:42.000 --> 0:17:46.280 plague always a good answer for this era. I have 0:17:46.320 --> 0:17:49.280 an idea, and my idea is, you know, if you 0:17:49.440 --> 0:17:52.960 think about these other periods we've talked about the eighteen hundreds, 0:17:53.160 --> 0:17:58.879 certainly the nineteen hundreds, the even the seventeen hundreds, everybody's 0:17:58.960 --> 0:18:02.280 reading what everybody else is doing. There are journals and books, 0:18:02.600 --> 0:18:04.600 and you know, in the eighteen hundreds there's a magazine 0:18:04.880 --> 0:18:07.480 printing all the new patents that Thomas Edison is reading. 0:18:07.520 --> 0:18:10.120 To keep up on things, what you need for these things. 0:18:10.000 --> 0:18:11.040 Is a printing press. 0:18:12.119 --> 0:18:14.560 Uh, you need a printing press to know what everybody 0:18:14.560 --> 0:18:18.120 else is working on. And so the reason maybe I'm 0:18:18.160 --> 0:18:20.240 making this up that Gutenberg is the only one to 0:18:20.280 --> 0:18:23.119 invent it is it hasn't been invented yet, so not 0:18:23.200 --> 0:18:25.680 everybody knows everything all the time the way we do. 0:18:26.119 --> 0:18:27.879 Once you have a printing press, I think, I think 0:18:27.920 --> 0:18:30.399 that's a great idea because what would it take to 0:18:30.560 --> 0:18:33.480 spread this. You'd have to write letters to people. But 0:18:33.880 --> 0:18:35.159 even then not everybody who how to. 0:18:35.119 --> 0:18:37.680 Write letters do become a thing, right and science letters 0:18:37.720 --> 0:18:40.119 are a big deal. But the journal, you know, the 0:18:40.200 --> 0:18:43.760 printed journal is a much more powerful tool than letters. 0:18:44.520 --> 0:18:48.080 It's a thought in any case. In any case, Gutenberg 0:18:48.119 --> 0:18:51.119 now has his press. What does he print first? 0:18:51.400 --> 0:18:54.919 The Bible? Not the Bible? Okay, too expensive maybe, right, 0:18:54.960 --> 0:18:57.600 it's long. The Bible is long, and it has to 0:18:57.640 --> 0:18:59.680 start there, right, start. You don't start with the Word 0:18:59.680 --> 0:18:59.960 of God. 0:19:00.160 --> 0:19:02.600 You love nightmare also you know, yes and yes and 0:19:02.640 --> 0:19:03.479 also high stakes. 0:19:03.480 --> 0:19:04.239 You want to get it right. 0:19:04.320 --> 0:19:08.399 Yeah, So he starts with things that are simpler, cheaper, shorter, 0:19:08.880 --> 0:19:13.200 a German poem, a grammar textbook for last, and then 0:19:13.640 --> 0:19:18.080 this is my favorite sort of pre Bible printing work 0:19:18.080 --> 0:19:22.239 that Gutenberg does, comes around fourteen fifty three, so not 0:19:22.280 --> 0:19:25.680 that long into this project, when there is actually this 0:19:25.920 --> 0:19:28.840 world historical event that's going to be good news for 0:19:29.040 --> 0:19:34.879 Gutenberg's printing business, and that is the Sultan Mehmed the 0:19:35.000 --> 0:19:40.240 Second captures Constantinople. Big news, big news in the religion. 0:19:40.320 --> 0:19:45.440 Teen emperor is decapitated, and now the Catholic Church needs 0:19:45.480 --> 0:19:48.880 money to fight the Sultan. How does the church raise 0:19:48.920 --> 0:19:49.520 money in. 0:19:49.440 --> 0:19:51.639 Fourteen fifty three indulgences? 0:19:51.720 --> 0:19:55.679 Indulgences, They sell indulgences and you know you know this 0:19:55.840 --> 0:19:59.760 from whatever from school. Yeah, if you give money to 0:19:59.800 --> 0:20:03.880 the church, they will remove the punishment that you owe. 0:20:03.720 --> 0:20:06.160 For your sins. They would also allow you to get 0:20:06.200 --> 0:20:09.120 your relatives out of purgatory if they had died. Uh huh, 0:20:09.160 --> 0:20:12.280 that makes sense. That's the little extra, guess cost extra, 0:20:12.400 --> 0:20:12.720 but sure. 0:20:12.760 --> 0:20:15.240 What I didn't realize until I was working on this 0:20:15.320 --> 0:20:19.960 show is indulgences were physical things. There was an indulgence 0:20:20.080 --> 0:20:23.439 which was basically like a nice receipt, a nice receipt 0:20:23.560 --> 0:20:26.960 often written out on vellum of fancy, like a very 0:20:27.000 --> 0:20:31.719 high grade parchment made from calfskin. And this fact that 0:20:31.760 --> 0:20:36.680 the receipt part of the indulgence thing becomes important when 0:20:36.680 --> 0:20:41.119 the Sultan captures Constantinople, because the Church suddenly needs to 0:20:41.160 --> 0:20:46.640 sell lots of indulgences. But they have a labor problem. 0:20:46.800 --> 0:20:49.240 It's the problem we were talking about before, right, There's 0:20:49.320 --> 0:20:53.880 just not enough scribes to write out all the indulgences 0:20:53.920 --> 0:20:56.920 that you need to sell right now, plus so much sin. 0:20:58.080 --> 0:21:01.439 The demand was huge, The demand is huge. Who among us? 0:21:02.160 --> 0:21:07.639 And now here comes Johannes Gutenberg with a solution to 0:21:07.720 --> 0:21:10.800 your problem. You know, your grace, how many do you need? 0:21:11.320 --> 0:21:12.800 I'll just crank come out for you. 0:21:13.119 --> 0:21:16.040 This was also a solution to Gutenberg's problem because he 0:21:16.160 --> 0:21:21.240 had just enlisted the richest customer on planet Earth, or 0:21:21.280 --> 0:21:24.080 one of them at least. Yes, Catholic, definitely a good 0:21:24.080 --> 0:21:26.880 customer to have. And you know, on indulgence, I believe 0:21:26.880 --> 0:21:29.160 it's a single page, right, so you said it once, 0:21:29.840 --> 0:21:31.920