Gutenberg's Metal Letters
1440 AD
1440 1440
08.17E50.00N
SCI

MAINZ, GERMANY
	Before the invention of movable type, printers would laboriously carve all the words for an entire printed page from a single block of wood.
	But then, around 1440 AD, Johann Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, came up with the idea of casting single letters in metal and then simply aligning them in a form to make up a page.  This not only made it quick to assemble a page, but when the printer was finished using them to print one page, he could use the same letters to make a completely different page.  By cutting costs, Gutenberg's process made books more widely available and led directly to the spread of knowledge.
	Gutenberg's most famous effort was the beautiful Latin Bible he printed.  Even though he had invented a faster way to do printing, it still took many workmen laboring on six printing presses several months to print 200 of these Bibles, of which 21 complete copies remain today.
	Gutenberg was not the first to invent movable type, and he may not even have been the first European to come up with the idea.  The Chinese had the same idea about 400 years earlier, but the huge number of Chinese characters made the invention impractical in that part of the world.
	Interestingly, the invention of movable type is similar to the development of personal computer. Both inventions have dramatically cut the cost and time involved in communicating, and both have radically changed the world.
