Gutenberg invents the printing press
Around 1440 in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg combined three existing technologies — movable metal type, oil-based ink, and a screw press adapted from olive and wine production — into a system that could reproduce text faster than any scribe. By 1455 he had completed the 42-line Bible, the first major book printed in Europe. Within fifty years, an estimated 20 million books had been printed across the continent, more than the entire scribal output of the previous thousand years. The Catholic Church's monopoly on text reproduction, and therefore on the authoritative version of any document, was structurally over. Every later narrative-control inflection — Luther in 1517, the penny press in the 1830s, broadcast radio, the internet — is a downstream consequence of this single workshop.
Gutenberg himself died poor. He had borrowed heavily from a financier named Johann Fust to develop the press, and Fust foreclosed on the workshop in 1455 just as the Bible was completed, taking the printing operation and most of the profit. The pattern — inventor builds the technology, financier captures the value — has recurred reliably through every subsequent media revolution. By 1500 there were printing presses in 250 European cities. By 1517 Luther could circulate his theses to all of Germany inside a fortnight.
01 · Medici & Monarchs
Information was property of whoever owned the fastest couriers. The Medici bank, founded 1397, was the Bloomberg terminal of its era — papal accounts, royal debts, grain prices across the Mediterranean, all passing through one family's ledgers in Florence.
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