By Peter Smith
In the year 1439 Johannes Gutenberg was onto something. He wanted to create a machine that could easily replicate a page of words in 30 seconds. He wanted to end a period where knowledge could only be spoken. That is not to say that there were no books, but they were handwritten and it took someone 5 years to copy down a book like the Bible. That meant that only very wealthy people could buy books, the cost of a Bible,for most, was 5 years wages.
Gutenberg and others before him knew of technology that could print something.It was quite simple actually, all you had to do was press a rock with ink to a page and you would get a shape. It was possible to carve a letter out of iron or wood and get a shape which could be read as well; however if you wanted to print a page it would take years to carve all those letters. So Gutenberg knew he had to find a way to make the letters fast and be able to reuse them after he was done printing something.
There is a general interest and worry cancer as it is responsible for the death of 1 out of 4 people in America. Certainly there are many different angles for a science publication to cover. However for our first article on the topic we decided to explore the diagnosis of cancer, because you can’t treat or cure a disease if you can’t find it.
So he invented a machine which could make letters out of lead, which he could arrange to form a page ,and then take the letters and rearrange them to form another page. To make the letters Gutenberg would have to file all the letters of the alphabet in iron, but only once! Then he would hammer the iron letter into copper and an imprint would be made. The copper would then be slid into the casting machine and lead would be poured into the cast. The lead would harden very quickly because it was mixed with other chemicals so after a few seconds out popped a letter. Guttenberg made a set of letters and constructed a press similar to one that would press napkins or linen. Underneath where the napkins would go he placed his "movable type" and could print pages upon pages of media by pressing the paper against type. At first Guttenberg only printed Bibles, but the idea of printing spread through Europe and soon the world was ready for a period of great thinkers for they were armed with a way of sharing their thoughts.
How Printing Changed Science Forever