Press Your Luck With This Quiz on the History of Printing

The “Diamond Sutra” Buddhist text was printed in China in 868 CE, using block printing on a 17.5-foot scroll. The 6,000-word text is part of the “sutras,” or the sacred texts of Mahayana Buddhism, believed to have been dictated by the Buddha himself. The ancient text was discovered by a monk in 1900 in a secret library in the Gobi Desert that had been sealed since 1000 CE.

In 1786, Valentin Haüy, a French advocate for the blind, was the first to use embossed printing as a means for blind people to read. In 1824, Louis Braille used embossed printing to create his own writing system for the visually impaired. The eponymous Braille system consists of 63 characters and is read by lightly passing fingers over the embossed text.

The German monk and theologian Martin Luther is considered the world’s first bestselling author. In 1517, Luther penned the famous “95 Theses” in which he criticized the Catholic Church for selling people absolution from their sins. Printers, in turn, printed and sold the text to the public, and it became so popular that it sparked the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.

The steam printing press gradually replaced the Gutenberg press during the Industrial Revolution. Invented in the early 1800s by William Koenig and Andreas Bauer, the press was powered by steam rather than relying on hand-operation like the Gutenberg press. The new steam press allowed newspapers, pamphlets, and books to be printed and distributed much more quickly and at a much lower cost.

The first printing press in North America was established in Mexico City, Mexico, in 1539. The Archbishop of Mexico City received permission from King Charles V of Spain to have a printing press sent from Europe and installed in the house of a Spanish publisher. The establishment was named the House of the First Printing Press in the Americas.

The First Folio of Shakespeare was first published in 1623. The collection contains Shakespeare’s 36 plays and is over 900 pages long. It also features 18 plays that had never before been printed, including “Macbeth” and “Julius Caesar,” which likely would have been lost if they had not been included in the collection.

Chinese inventor Bi Sheng developed the first movable type printing process between 970 and 150 CE. The movable type was carved into clay and then baked into hard blocks and arranged on an iron frame. Bi Sheng preferred clay over wood because clay was smooth and easy to clean, while wood had an inconsistent texture and absorbed ink.

Papyrus was made from the papyrus plant native to Egypt. To create a writing material, the Egyptians pressed two layers of papyrus together until plant gum was released and bonded the layers. The Egyptians used papyrus for writing as early as 3000 BCE and exported it throughout the classical world where it was widely used until around 1100 CE, when it was replaced by parchment.

The first movable type printing press in Europe was named after its inventor, Johannes Gutenberg. Invented in Germany in 1454, the press was made up of individual pieces, each bearing a single character, which could quickly be assembled to create and press sentences onto paper. This replaced block printing, in which all characters would have to be laboriously carved into a single piece of wood.

The Bible was the first book printed on the Gutenberg press, allowing the religious text to be widely circulated. The Gutenberg Bible was first printed in Mainz, Germany, and was the first full-scale text printed in Europe using movable type. Only 48 original copies are known to have survived, and of that number, only 20 are complete.