Johannes Gutenberg
Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, better known as Johannes Gutenberg ( /ˈɡuː tənbɜrɡ/) or Johannes Gutenberg (Mainz, Holy Roman Empire; c. 1400 - ibidem, February 3, 1468), was a German goldsmith, inventor of the modern printing press with movable type, around 1450.
His most recognized work is the 42-line Bible (referring to the number of lines printed on each page), which is considered the first book printed with movable typography, and which was key to the spread of Martin's ideas Luther and with it the Protestant Reformation. He was involved in a famous court case in his native Mainz, where details of his invention until then secret were aired.
His invention is considered, along with the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire and the discovery of America, as the main drivers of modernity. Despite the importance of his invention to the history of mankind, its life is relatively unknown.
Biography
Origins
He was born in Mainz, Holy Roman Empire, in present-day Germany, around the year 1400, in his father's house, called zum Gutenberg. He was the son of the German merchant Friedrich Friele Gensfleisch, (who would later adopt the surname zum Gutenberg around 1410), and his wife, Else Wirich.
His real surname was Gensfleisch, which in the Rhenish German dialect would mean "goose meat" (although the probability that this is the literal meaning of him is also accepted), so Johannes chose to use the word Gutenberg as his last name.
Trajectory
Knowing the art of casting gold, Gutenberg excelled as a blacksmith for the bishopric of his town. The family moved to Eltville am Rhein, (present-day Hesse), where Else had inherited a farm.
According to tradition, he would have studied at the University of Erfurt, where the name Johannes de Alta Villa (Eltville) is recorded in 1419. His father died that year.
The Strasbourg process
Nothing else is known about Gutenberg until in 1434 he lived as a silversmith in Strasbourg, where five years later he was involved in a legal process that showed that Gutenberg had formed a partnership with Hanz Riffe to develop certain secret procedures.
The problem arose because Gutenberg, Riffe, and two wealthy men from the city, Andreas Dritzenh and Andreas Heilmann, entered into a business partnership for Gutenberg to teach gem polishing and mirror carving, for a fee. However, Gutenberg withdrew from his work because he was secretly busy with another matter, and despite his associates finding out, they decided to support him with his project. It was thus that in 1438 the four men signed a contract to bring the secret affair to a successful conclusion.
However, on December 25, 1438, Dritzenh died suddenly and his brothers claimed as his heirs the right to participate in the Gutenberg society. Since this event was not contemplated in the contract, and when Gutenberg refused to agree to the request of the Dritzenh brothers, they demanded compensation. Failing to reach an agreement, the brothers sued the partnership in the following year, and finally the Strasbourg courts ruled in favor of Gutenberg and his partners.
During the judicial process it was made public that his secret project was the invention of the printing press, since witnesses claimed to see Gutenberg with large amounts of lead and presses, which the printers of the time identified as key elements for a printing. So Gutenberg's secret project was his invention of movable type.
Invention of the printing press
Before the modern printing press existed, books were distributed through the handwritten copies of monks and friars dedicated exclusively to prayer and the copying of copies commissioned by the clergy themselves or by kings and nobles. Despite what is believed, not all copyist monks knew how to read and write. They performed the function of copyists, imitators of graphic signs that they often did not understand, which was essential in the case of copies of prohibited books that talked about internal medicine.[ citation required] The illustrations and capital letters were the decorative and artistic product of the copyist himself, who decorated each copy he made according to his taste or vision. Each of these works could require up to ten years depending on the length of the manuscript or book.
In the Late Middle Ages in Europe, xylography was used to publish advertising or political pamphlets, labels, and short-page works. For this, the hollow text was worked on a wooden tablet, including the drawings —which was a hard job for craftsmen. Once the wooden board was made, it was attached to a work table, also made of wood, and the board was impregnated with black, red or blue ink (only those colors existed), then the paper was applied, and with a roller the ink was fixed. The problem with this method was that the wear and tear on the wood was considerable, so not many paper copies could be made from the same mould, and it was certainly very expensive to use wooden blocks to reproduce books.
Each printer manufactured their paper, giving it their own watermark as a printer's signature. It is by these watermarks that his works are known.
In this environment, Gutenberg produced a true innovation, being able to reproduce several copies of the Bible at the same time in less than half the time it took to copy one of the fastest copyist monks in the world Christian, and that these copies would not be different at all from those handwritten by them.
Instead of using the usual wooden tablets, which wore out easily with use and required hard work by many artisans, he made wooden molds of each of the letters of the alphabet and later filled the molds with iron, creating the first "movable types". He had to make several models of the same letters and signs to match them all, in total more than 150 "types", perfectly imitating the writing of a manuscript. Then he had to join the letters one by one to form words and phrases, until completing a page, the & # 34;movable types & # 34; Thus ordered they were fastened in an ingenious support, the ink was applied to them, and thus the types were applied to the paper. The alloy of the printing press was improved by Gutenberg, forming "types" stronger but lighter with iron, lead, and antimony; with this system the manipulation of "types" it was much easier than manually carving a large surface of wood, texts could be reproduced more quickly, and also the "types" Mobiles -always made of metal- were much more resistant to use than wood, now making it possible to reproduce complete books and not just short texts.
As a printing plate, Gutenberg molded an old grape press used to make wine, to which he attached the support with the "movable type", leaving the space for capital letters and drawings. These would later be added using the old xylographic system and finished decorating manually.
What Gutenberg miscalculated was the time it would take him to put his invention into operation, so before finishing the work he ran out of money by spending all the funds lent by Fust. He again requested a new loan from Johannes Fust, and given the mistrust of the lender, he offered to enter into partnership. Johannes Fust accepted the proposal and delegated the supervision of Gutenberg's works to his son-in-law, Peter Schöffer, who went to work as an apprentice while also supervising the investment of his mother-in-law.
After two years of work, Gutenberg ran out of money again. He was close to finishing the 150 Bibles that he had proposed, but Johannes Fust did not want to extend his credit and gave up the previous ones, demanding the immediate collection of the debt. Gutenberg, completely insolvent, lost his business, and Fust put his son-in-law in charge of the printing press, already proficient in the arts of new printing as a partner-apprentice. Gutenberg left his printing press bankrupt and had to start a new printing business in Bamberg, with great difficulty.
Peter Schöffer finished the work his teacher started, and the Bibles were quickly sold to high-ranking clergy, including the Holy See, at a very good price. Soon Fust and Schöffer began to receive many commissions for new work; The speed in executing the printing was undoubtedly the trigger for its expansion, since before the delivery of a single book to a wealthy client could be postponed for years due to the natural delay of the copyist.
The 42-line Bible
In 1452, Gutenberg began publishing the 42-Line Bible (also known as the Gutenberg Bible). In 1455, Gutenberg lacked financial solvency to repay the loan that Fust had granted him, so the union was dissolved and Gutenberg found himself in penury (he even had to spread the secret of setting up printing presses in order to survive). On his part, Fust associated with his son-in-law Peter Schöffer and they published the Bible in Mainz in 1456. Although the edition is known as "the Gutenberg bible" its real editors were Fust and Schöffer. The following year they published The Psalter or Psalmorum Codex.
Controversy of the Constance Missal
Until recently, it was estimated that when Gutenberg formed a partnership with Johann Fust, who had given him a loan to start the printing press, in 1449 he would have printed the Catholic work Missal of Constance, which was considered the first typographical work of the Western world.
However, recent publications by the American bibliographer, Allan H. Stevenson -specialist in watermarks- and thanks to the application of new research techniques, after studying the existing copies, came to the conclusion that the paper used in the missal could not be earlier than 1473. Consequently, it could not have been the work of Gutenberg, who had died in 1468, but probably by one John Meister Koch. In addition, these watermarks could place their printing place in Basel and not in Constanta, as had been believed until now.
For this reason, this incunabula is currently registered and cataloged by the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, under the symbol M24875 and by the ISTC, under the identifier im00732500. The respective catalog cards of the three currently existing copies of the Missal are dated in the same way in the Morgan Library in New York, in the Bavarian State Library, in Munich and in the Zurich Central Library.
Printed books
Between 1450 and 1455, Gutenberg printed several texts, some of which remain unidentified; His texts did not bear the printer's name or date, so attribution is only possible from typographical proofs and external references. Certainly various church documents were printed, including a papal letter and two indulgences, one of which was issued in Mainz. In view of the value of printing in quantity, seven editions in two styles were ordered, resulting in several thousand copies being printed. Some print editions of Ars Minor, a school book on Latin grammar by Aelius Donatus, may have been printed by Gutenberg; these have been dated between 1451 and 1452 or 1455.
In 1455, Gutenberg completed copies of a beautifully executed folio Bible (Biblia Sacra), with 42 lines on each page. Copies sold for 30 guilders each, which was about three years' salary for an average employee. However, it was significantly cheaper than a manuscript Bible that could take a single scribe over a year to prepare. After printing, some copies were initialed or hand-illuminated in the same elegant way as handwritten Bibles of the same period.
48 substantially complete copies are known to survive, including two in the British Library that can be viewed and compared online. The text lacks modern features such as page numbers, indentations, and paragraph breaks.
An undated 36-line edition of the Bible was printed, probably in Bamberg in 1458-1460, possibly by Gutenberg. Much of it was shown to have been taken from a copy of Gutenberg's Bible, thus refuting earlier speculation that it was the earlier of the two.
Last years
With the money from his creation, Gutenberg became an important man in Mainz, and thanks to the patronage of the city's Catholic bishop and elector, Adolf II of Nassau, he lived a comfortable life until the end of his days, for the German nobleman awarded him a lifetime pension.
Johannes Gutenberg died on February 3, 1468, according to church records, and was buried in a Mainz church owned by the German Franciscans. His tomb, however, was lost during the fires that ravaged Mainz in 1793.
Tributes
Eponymy
- The 42-line Bible was then renamed Gutenberg's Bible, a name it preserves until today.
- One of the craters of the visible face of the Moon was baptized as Gutenberg, in honor of the inventor. The crater is located between the Colombo and Magellan craters.
- The Gutemberg Project was founded in 1971 by American philanthropist Michael Hart, as a free electronic base of public domain books, in different formats including HTML.
- For the preservation of his work was created the Gutenberg Museum, located in his native Maguncia, and which was inaugurated in 1900 as a tribute to the 500 years of the birth of the inventor. The museum suffered some remodeling in 1962 for the 2000 years of its foundation.
Relation to the French Revolution
French revolutionaries credited Gutenberg with being one of the early forerunners of the Revolution, since they considered that thanks to his invention it was possible to propagate the ideas of the Enlightenment and the revolution. In fact, several revolutionary thinkers wanted to transfer the Gutenberg's remains from Mainz to the Panthéon in Paris, to be presented to the French National Assembly. This idea came from the Jacobin Anacharsis Cloots.
In this context, an attempt was made to create the first statue in his honor in 1792, an idea that was defended by the local doctor Georg Christian Wedekind, who, inspired by the ideas of Cloots, considered Gutenberg a precursor of the revolution, and in fact he wanted to take the revolution to Mainz, but the small pockets of insurrection were crushed by the local government.
In 1798, Mainz was annexed to France, during the government of the Directory, which revived the spirit of commemorating Gutenberg as a precursor of the revolution. Mainz was under French control for almost 16 years. By decree of Napoleon I, the commemoration was ordered for 1804, but the lack of resources stopped the celebration plans again. Despite this new setback, the construction of the Gutenbergplatz was carried out, in front of the Mainz Cathedral, where it remains today.
The Gutenberg statue was finally erected until 1837, created in the workshop of Frenchman Charles Crozatier.
Toponymy
Gutenberg also names two geographic sites today: One in the Rhineland, Germany, and one in Austria.
Other tributes
Gutenberg is one of the historical figures with the most statues around Germany and the world.
In Strasbourg, Gutenberg Square was created, where there is also a statue of the inventor. There is also a statue of the inventor in Frankfurt. In Vienna there is also a statue in honor of Gutenberg. The bronze image shows an elderly Gutenberg, with his thick beard and one of his works under his arm. It was built in the 19th century and was inaugurated on June 22, 1890.
In 1840, during the celebration of the invention of the printing press, the Mainz government minted a commemorative coin with Johannes Gutenberg on the obverse, and a Greek coat of arms on the reverse.
On April 14, 2021, the American company Google created a doodle to commemorate the life and work of the German goldsmith.
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