The Printing Press: How This 15th Century Invention Changed the World

I've always been rather fond of books. In fact, I think they're just about the most important things we've ever created. The building blocks of our civilization. So, when someone suggested a journey in search of the genius who invented the printing press, I jumped at the chance. My lord, is this it? This is it. This was the man who launched the first media revolution and opened the door to the modern age. But his story is shrouded in mystery. So, to get closer to him, we also decided to stage an experiment and build our own medieval printing press. So beautiful. That meant getting to grips with the tools and technology of the 15th century. Don't do that, Stephen. And actually making some of the ingredients with my own bare hands. This takes me back to the art room at school where I was always a dunderhead. As it turned out, that was the most revealing bit of all. I feel connected to Gutenberg somehow just by doing this. So, here it is then, the slightly more hands-on than I expected story of Johannes Gutenberg and his marvellous machine. Well, if you're anything like as old as me, you may well remember this. The John Bull printing outfit, made in England. This was where I got my first experience of how printing works, really. And, simple as it is, these little rubber bits here tell you all you need to know about printing with movable type. You've got ink. Ooh, there it is. Oh, I'm going to get my fingers dirty already. There are lots of different letters. And you can rearrange them in any way you want onto one of these, which I think is called a form. And then, when you print out... Hmm. It's exactly the same every time. You can have hundreds, thousands, millions of pages that are identical. And there we are. Of course, the point about it being movable type is that I can move these letters into any order, make another word. Not unlike Scrabble. Sorry, I'm going to mess around. What am I going to get? There we are. So how is it it took mankind so long to bring together these simple elements into one machine that could make books? The breakthrough was made by a man called Johannes Gutenberg more than 500 years ago. His printing machine was the most revolutionary advance in technology since the invention of the wheel. And we're still living with its consequences today. As you can see here in the basement of the British Library, where they hold a copy of every book published in English. You know, there are 14 miles of shelves here. There are another 8 miles added every year as 3 million new books come on stream in British. And above me, all the readers demanding their books have little idea that there's this labyrinth of shelves here. It was the invention of the printing press which started all this, making mass production of books possible for the first time in history. Within a few years, there were millions of them in circulation. And as they travelled, they carried their precious cargo of new ideas or theories, philosophy or propaganda to every part of Europe and beyond, sowing the seeds for that great cultural blossoming we call the Renaissance. The fruit of Gutenberg's work can be seen all around us, but it's more important than that. Everything that our culture and our civilization depends on starts with Gutenberg's invention. And this was his calling card, one of the first and finest books created using his new machine. To the modern eye, the Gutenberg Bible opens a window onto a vanished world of monks and monasteries. But when it first appeared in the 1450s, it was viewed not as a reminder of the past, but as a signpost to the future, glittering proof that a new information age was dawning in Europe, fuelled by the power of the printed word. I want to find out how and why Gutenberg invented his machine. To answer the how question, I'm planning a unique experiment. And here's the laboratory where it's all going to happen. This workshop in the heart of England may not look very high-tech. That's because the job I have in mind requires 15th-century materials and techniques, and a man who spent a lifetime investigating the first printing pioneers. Step forward, Alan May. So this is where you're going to attempt to build a printing press? That's the idea, yes. But not any old press. I want a fully operational Gutenberg-style one. There aren't any surviving machines from this early period, and no-one's ever discovered an illustration of what they looked like, so Alan has his work cut out. Well, essentially, this is uncharted territory. It's a detective story, if you like. The earliest illustration of a printing press is the Dance Macabre, 1499. That's about 50 years after Gutenberg started his printing, isn't it? And things evolved pretty quickly. That's right. I think that this early period was actually quite revolutionary. There were things changing all the time. It took off rather like the internet has now. It really went whoop! Alan reckons that Gutenberg's press did share some family traits with later machines. All printing presses up to about 1800 have a central part which pushes down onto the type. It's a piston and platen assembly. And the other thing that is required in any press of this sort is that you have some means of transporting the printing surface and the paper under that platen. Right, so you've got the slidey bit moving along here, and then you've got a flat platen, you call it? Coming down there. And that presses down. But there's one crucial difference between Gutenberg's original and later so-called common presses, such as the one this model's based on. To print on a press like this, they put two pages of type on this stone here. Right. Very heavy stone, about 100 weight. Goodness! And then the process of printing was a double process. You wound in for the first page, just there, and operated the lever, which made the platen go down. And you then release it partly, and wind it into the next page to print again. Hence the term two-pull press. Forensic analysis of Gutenberg's original Bible reveals that he only printed one page at a time. In other words, his was a one-pull press. That will influence the size and design of Alan's experimental machine, which is already starting to take shape in another corner of the workshop. Right, here we go. Now, what if you pass me the mallet and chisel? Oh, Lord, yes, here we go. Woodwork was never my strongest subject at school, but no-one seems to have told Alan that. The trick is to not use the whole width of the chisel. Right. To use just about a third of it, so that enables you to steer it. Better to be shallow than too steep, so if it's too shallow, you just tear it down by hand, OK? Right, have a go. Oh, my goodness, you may regret this. I don't want to ruin it. Now... Oh, I say. Right, about a third there, like that. About that way. Come on, courage. That's pretty good. Oh, wow. It's very pleasing. It's a nice feeling, isn't it? It is. I get the feeling you're trying to reveal a fossil coming out of a rock. Yes, it is. Isn't it too deep? No, yeah, it's fine. It's an extraordinary... It's an extraordinary thing that you create something like a mechanical part. Literally out of your hand. Well, there you are. Well, that's... If you could just finish that off for me. About yay big. When Alan's finished the press, I want to print a replica page of the original Gutenberg Bible. That means I'll also need to track down some other ingredients, including movable type and 15th-century paper. But first, I have a journey to make. I'll be travelling through the Silicon Valley of medieval Europe to explore the places where Gutenberg and his team developed the machine which shaped the modern world. My first port of call is Mainz, on the banks of the Rhine in western Germany. This was Gutenberg's birthplace and the city where he spent his childhood. But despite first appearances, only a few traces of the medieval city that Gutenberg grew up in still survive. This is the birth house of Gutenberg. A chemist's job. Oh, yes. You can read it? Here stands Gutenberg's birth house. And Gutenberg is the name of his family? No, actually the name of his family was Gensfleisch. Gensfleisch? Yeah. Which means... Goose meat. I always say, who wants to run around with the name of goose meat in his life? Just around the corner is the church where he was probably baptised. Well, part of it at least. Mainz was heavily bombed in the Second World War, so the medieval remains of St Christopher's are now bolstered by some post-war concrete. So it's been left like this deliberately as a memorial? Yeah. Yeah. Think of a printer, you think of fonts, and this must be a 7,000-point font. But it's terrific to see. Oh, and there's a plaque, too, isn't it? Well, it tells Johannes Gutenberg... Yeah, now, something I wanted to talk to you about, actually. The city of Mainz proclaimed in the year 2000 that it was his 600th anniversary, so they think he was born in 1400. Well, that was decided on publicly actually 1900, when they made already the same fuss about this centennial at this time, and then they decided Gutenberg was born 1400. But the exact date is somewhere between 1397 and 1404. Well, I have to say I slightly agree with the city of Mainz. I think 1400's a good year to describe his birth, not because it's a round number, but because it's actually the year that Geoffrey Tronson died in England. So it was the end of one age, if you like, the age of the medieval writer and the beginning of a new age, the early Renaissance. There's very little evidence about Gutenberg's early years in Mainz. We know his mother owned some land and that his father was a merchant, whose work brought him into contact with the city's goldsmiths, expert metalworkers with skills which Gutenberg would later find very useful. And it's likely that he studied at university, so he'd have come into contact with books, unlike most of his contemporaries. But that's about as far as it goes. It's like catching the occasional glimpse of a figure in a crowd only to watch him melt away a few moments later. And even when you finally come face to face with the great man, you can't be sure you're looking at the real Mr Gutenberg. So whether or not Gutenberg had three hands, like this one here, whether or not he looked like David Tennant as Doctor Who, or whether or not he had a beard shaped like a fish stuck to his face, one thing's certain, we don't actually know what Johannes Gutenberg looked like at all. And that gives us great scope. Perhaps he looked like you. Or me. Unlikely. He would have been burnt if he looked like me. No-one knows exactly when the elusive Gutenberg first dreamed of building his printing machine. But this was a revolutionary idea in the handmade world of the 15th century. We're so used to living with printed matter every day of our lives, from the cereal packet in the morning to the book at bedtime, that it might perhaps be rather hard to imagine what the world was like before printing. So we have to come somewhere like here, this monastery, Koster Eberbach, in a village just a few miles from Mainz, where Gutenberg grew up. And this is where not the printed word, but the written word, was king. Dr Schneider. Hello. Hi, what a pleasure to meet you. It's wonderful to be here in a monastic setting. I'm trying to get a picture of what life was like around the time of Gutenberg, how books were produced in the scriptoria, I think they're called. Yeah. This is a rather fine room. This is, in fact, the chapter house, where they would read the chapters of the Bible and they'd all sit round on the benches. So a scriptorium presumably was a different kind of room to this. Yes. What sort of thing would you expect to find in a scribe's room? Scriptoriums were smaller rooms than this because they needed heat in these rooms and because you need warm fingers to write and to hold the feather and to do all this fine work with your hands. And they needed light. They needed windows in the summer and in the winter they needed... Candles. Yes, candles. Yeah, yeah. Do we have any idea of the character and personality of some of these scribes? Very seldom. Sometimes we have, at the end of such Bibles or other manuscripts, small texts where the scribes tell how hard their work were. Oh, really? They didn't have a record? Yeah, yeah. It was very cold. They had to sit always in the same position and they get... Cramps and stiffness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was cold and it was dark and their eyes were tired. And they write this down? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Hand-copied Bibles were rare and expensive commodities far beyond the reach of ordinary mortals and even the best scribes made mistakes. A printing machine would allow the creation of exact copies and lots of them. Whilst some church leaders feared anything that might break their near monopoly on learning, others recognized that a common and universally accepted version of the Bible might be a powerful weapon in the battle to preserve Christian unity. But the church was just one potential market for printed books. Beyond the cloister, new universities were springing up across Europe. So it's tempting to assume that Gutenberg, aside from his technical interest, was an entrepreneurial? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a mixture of three things, I think. He was an engineer about the technical things. He was a merchant and he was an intellectual. He had studied at a university and he knew that many people needed books. With demand for books growing all the time, anyone who could devise a machine for making them could hope to make a fortune. And growing up in the heartland of the German wine industry, Gutenberg didn't have far to look for inspiration. These are rather noble structures and I think if poor old Alan back in England is trying to build a press, he's going to find it rather useful to see what these originals were like. These contraptions are wine presses. Alan May thinks that Gutenberg's press evolved from machines like these. Oh, that's very artistic. Very good. Yes, for Gutenberg, these must have been a very common sight. He grew up in an area, one of the biggest wine-growing areas of the world. I wonder if there was an actual moment though when he was sitting next to one of these or watching some grapes being pressed and saw the spindle sending the thing down and thought, ah, that's what I need. Just this big frame with a spindle. Presses like these may have started Gutenberg's creative juices running but to turn such a basic piece of engineering into a precision machine would be a tall order and that was only part of the challenge he faced. The whole project would take years of experiment and it would cost a fortune. But money didn't grow on trees in 15th century Mainz. I think it was a city of past glory. It had been very influential and very rich in the medieval times but then in the 14th century it came down a little bit. The plague was there two times. The Black Death. The Black Death, yes, and the city didn't have the richness anymore. But it had been politically very influential. The Archbishop had been the elector and was the primus inter pares, as we might say, of the electors. And so it was an important city in any case. In a sense what I'm getting from you is that Mainz was a city of the past and what Gutenberg needed was a city to look to the future. Yes, I think so. For a budding entrepreneur like Gutenberg Mainz was no place to start a business. He would have been in his early thirties when he packed his bags and set sail down the Rhine. Two days to the south was the city where his experiments in printing would first begin. At Alan May's workshop in England are own printing experiments already in full swing. Alan's invited his fellow printing expert Martin Andrews along to show him work in progress. I'm pleased to see that my holiday snaps turned up. Alan's also finished carving this hefty wooden thread which generates the pressure needed to print. But the thread needs a counter thread to guide it on its downward journey and it has to be cut by hand into the head of the press. Sounds tricky to me, but Alan has a plan. It's an amazing contraption, Alan. I mean the idea came from a guy called Hero of Alexander in something like A.D. 64. This ingenious device uses these wooden pegs to guide the thread on its journey. Meanwhile a set of cutters at the other end carve the counter thread through this solid wooden block. I'm careful to tap this not on the sharp edge. So you're in fact using the real thread itself to cut its equivalent part. That's it, that's the elegant part of it. Actually it's pushed loads and loads of sawdust ahead of it, look. It's cutting something, but there's only one way to find out if the thread and the counter thread are a perfect match. Ah, that changes the whole perspective, doesn't it? So you need to take that out. One can see how it's all working. Oh my goodness, there she goes. Excellent. I think that's a pretty good job, isn't it? I do. And I've never seen anything quite like it. So I'm convinced. I think it works. I'm convinced too, but there's clearly a bit more to do. I'm following the Gutenberg Trail down the Rhine from Mainz to Strasbourg. When Gutenberg arrived here in the early 1430s this was a bustling city with trading links across Europe and beyond. That made it a far more promising business base than the bankrupt city of his birth. And towering above the commercial centre was the great cathedral itself. Of course, when Gutenberg got here the cathedral hadn't been finished and this huge tower and spire weren't quite completed. As you can see, there's still some work going on to this very day. It's worth thinking about the fact that at this time the only investments that human beings ever seemed to make were really in their future. In other words, in the afterlife. By participating in the building of these enormous structures they were assuring their place in heaven. But around about the time of Gutenberg we started to see the rise of a merchant class who really believed in investing in the idea of their future on earth. Venture capitalists. And such people were to prove very useful to Gutenberg. The cathedral was more than the spiritual heart of the city. It also became a focal point for its dealmakers and moneymen. Prototype capitalists with the cash Gutenberg needed to fund his work. By the late 1430s it struck up a partnership with three of them and was ready to start work in earnest. And if he ever wanted to remind himself that his big idea was a good one he only had to take a stroll through the streets nearby. Rue des Frères, the street of the brothers that tells us something about this area. We're right beside the cathedral which is the ecclesiastical heart of an ecclesiastical city at the heart of an ecclesiastical empire. The Holy Roman Empire. Perhaps worth thinking of it in terms of something like the City of London. It was, in other words, the centre of the entire system that runs the world at the moment. For us it's finance, for them it was the church. It was the church that generated all the paperwork all the legal documentation all the printed services. Everything, in fact, that Gutenberg might have spotted needed reproduction, needed a new technology. And so we turn into this frankly less than prepossessing street but note the title, Rue des Écrivains Street of the Writers Schrieverstube Gas It was in this street in Strasbourg that Gutenberg must have seen the scribes bustling around, self-importantly with great sheaves of paper under their arms and calluses on their inky fingers and he must have thought well, you may believe you've got a job for life but I know better because one day one day you're all going to be replaced replaced by a vulgar machine. He employed a carpenter called Sazpach to work on his new invention. No one knows what it looked like so Alan Mays pieced together other clues to design our machine. He knows that Gutenberg printed one page at a time whereas later presses printed two in quick succession. Maybe that's why this prototype looks rather unusual to an expert eye. Let me have a quick look and see what's actually going on here because it is unconventional. The first thing that surprises me is that we've got all the weight and the framework here and normally on a two-pull press you'd have actually a framework out here which is making this more rigid but also taking the weight of the stone and the gear as it comes through. You don't need that now. You don't need it. Because you only need to go that far. It never has to go farther than that. When the press is in use it never has to go beyond the cheeks. It is unconventional. It may be unorthodox but Alan thinks he's found support for his design in an unlikely source. This illustration of a press was drawn by Albrecht Dürer 60 years after Gutenberg first printed. It's the only drawing that I know of where the feet of the press come forward from the cheeks. That's what mine are doing. And this has got a substantial structure at the front. Which you have. Which the common press never has. It just has a little leg. So I'm wondering whether this is an obsolete press that Dürer's got hold of and we're looking at a product which is actually 50 years old. Perfectly prepared to be broad-minded. Whether the other authorities in the world will agree with you, I don't know. If Alan's right, this is a major discovery. Could this be a snapshot of an early Gutenberg press? Gutenberg's team was growing. Besides the carpenter Zaspach he'd recruited other craftsmen from the Strasbourg guilds and set them to work at his new premises. Not in the city itself but in a hamlet downstream far away from the prying eyes of potential competitors. Why the secrecy? Why was it necessary? There were a number of people working in this area trying to solve this problem. If only they could come up with a printed word for the church they would have their fortunes made. So he had to keep it as a secret otherwise everybody else would be doing it. Yeah. Whilst they worked in secret on the printing press they needed a second revenue stream to keep the wolf from the door. Lo and behold, fate brought to Gutenberg a brilliant idea. This was the creation of mirrors for pilgrims coming to the pilgrimage at Aachen. Why was Aachen important? Aachen was important because there was a cathedral there and in the cathedral were relics directly descending from Christ, supposedly. They were on display every four years and pilgrims would come from all over Europe to see the relics and receive the rays of healing that emanated from them. Eventually there were so many pilgrims that they couldn't all get close to the relics. So the idea came into existence that there should be some way of capturing these rays. The rays were captured by a concave metal mirror which would be held up so that it was some sort of a satellite dish capturing radiation. Local makers could not keep up with the demand. Gutenberg's idea was that if he could mix his metal right he could use the presses that were in development to print out mirrors which could be sold to the pilgrims at Aachen. It looked like a surefire winner but in 15th century Europe there was one thing which could usually be relied on to scupper the best laid business plan. Black death strikes again and the pilgrimage is put off. Right, they would postpone a pilgrimage for the plague. Could not, I mean it would be a real disaster if you had 100,000 people all gathered together and you got a plague. So that means that all the investors had been hoping for the money to come to them back here were going to have to... Yes, one of the partners died. The partnership began to collapse leaving Gutenberg not exactly in the lurch but struggling. This setback would have deterred a lesser man but by now Gutenberg must have been completely possessed by his plan so the work continued. So, Gutenberg Island and there's a statue of him with the fish on his face again. No one knows exactly where his workshop was but it must have been somewhere near here. He had chosen a secluded base to protect himself from the threat of industrial espionage but there was another reason for being close to the water because Gutenberg was playing with fire. Do you remember my John Bull printing set and those rubber pieces of type? Gutenberg's plan would only succeed if he could devise a system for mass-producing individual letters which could be set and reset in any order. He went to the Guild of Goldsmiths and found a man called Hans Dunn. Together, they made the crucial technical breakthrough which made Gutenberg's brilliant idea a practical proposition. So, this is a type foundry you've created. This table is, believe it or not, a complete foundry. I've asked Stan to help me make a piece of type a single letter E which I can use in our grand printing experiment. For the sake of authenticity I want my letter to match the dimensions of the original font used in the Gutenberg Bible. First, we have to make a punch a master copy of the letter we want to reproduce. After we've transferred its outline onto the tip of this steel bar it has to be carved by hand using a file a very sharp file. You do maybe a punch a day, two punches a day? So, in order to do the full set of type that Gutenberg needed for his Bible how much work was that? Well, there were at least 270 characters, perhaps more. So, you know, given that a lot of holidays I would imagine close to the better part of a year. A year. So, if you were one of those people that invested in this new technology you'd be getting rather impatient. You'd be saying, now, Mr Gutenberg you really need eight different Es. And the reason he needed different ones was obviously because it was a very elegant and harmonious look he was after. He wanted absolutely top quality. So, he wanted some that were slightly wider some that were slightly narrower so that he could always have justified lines without trailing white space and sort of ugly, bad compositing things. This is a smoke proof. A way of checking that our punch is an accurate copy of the letter we want to replicate. It looks spot on. Now, how clever is that? So, here we have it. It's hand carved and grooved and shaved and emeryed and rasped and shaped and hardened and tempered. And now that is the key that unlocks the technology that changes the world. The punch. Beautiful. And we made it. But what's the next stage? Well, we have to strike a matrix with that. Strike a matrix. Yeah, we're going to hammer that punch straight into that piece of copper. So, we'll leave an impress of the letter shape. Absolutely. The experts can't agree about how exactly Gutenberg cast letters from his moulds, but Stan's theory is the most commonly accepted one. He thinks he invented something like this ingenious device. This tool in front of us is the single unique element of Gutenberg's invention. This is a type mould. And it's made of two halves. And these two halves mate together to form a cavity in which the type will be formed with the matrix at the bottom. Right, this precious matrix. Yes, it's been working. And so these two halves are beautifully fitted. And because they make either a narrow or a wide opening, by placing this matrix beneath the mould, which we've carefully formed, and closing the mould on the matrix and using the spring to keep it in place, that's what this sort of thing is, now there's a hollow inside of this mould that's the shape of the letter we're going to form. Okay. Isn't that neat? I can't believe this is going to work. And it's quite a unique part of the invention. There was nothing else like this before Gutenberg. So we're going to pour molten metal here, lead, tin and antimony, straight away in there. And it hardens instantly, it's already hard. Do you? Yeah. So we take the spring out of the way, we release the matrix by pressing on it, we pry the mould open, and there's a piece of type. Oh my goodness. Isn't that marvellous? So which bit is the type? Well, there's the face we formed. Oh my goodness. And it's an exact duplicate. There's the E, yeah. And if you look at the punch we have here, Yeah. you'll see that that punch is replicated on the face. Yes, it's identical. Of the type. Because it's back to its... It's back to its form. See, isn't that neat? It's more than neat, it's revolutionary. Because now we can make as many E's as we want, quickly and cheaply. I wonder how many it takes to print a full Bible. Look what I did. I made an E. Well, these seem like components of the greatest revolution in humankind since the invention of fire, yet you could argue they certainly are, and one of the reasons is that they're identical. It's an extraordinary thing, such ingenuity, using arts and crafts that have been known for some hundreds of years, but adding to it this unique little device that just enabled printers all over Europe to start spreading the word. I've heard great reports about Alan's progress with the press, so I've returned to base to help him put together the finished article. If you've ever had a traumatic experience with a self-assembly wardrobe, now might be a good time to make a cup of tea. It's like those cereal packets, slot A into tab B or whatever it is. Yeah, that's right. I'm going to get to it. Pull it up. I feel like Atlas. I'll give you a variety. Move the whole box over. That's much more sensible. Use your mallet. Yeah. I'll hold it, you go and kick it. We're getting good creaks. I suppose, Alan, really, no-one has done anything like this for 500 years. That's absolutely right on this sort of press. That's it. Good. Honestly, I would never have made a Boy Scout. Hopeless. You see, what I love about this is that on the one hand it's desperately simple and on the other hand there are all these little cunning things that I would never have thought of in 100 years, and I love when Alan showed me that he was doing this double thread and you think, OK, I'll follow my finger round here and it'll go behind and surely it'll come out here, but no, it comes out there, because it's a double thread and the other one goes that way, and it's quite complicated. It screws my head, quite literally. He's not sure that this is exactly what Gutenberg would have had, but it looks right, and so often that's the secret of this kind of engineering and designing, is if it looks right, feels right, then it is right. It's a most satisfactory object. Apart from everything else, wouldn't it be fun to have one in one's bedroom? You could convert it with a little wash hand basin or something, or maybe even have the mirror here at an adjustable height. I'm going slightly mad now because I'm so fond of it. The one thing I, of course, can't wait to see is how it actually prints. I'm starting to share the sense of excitement Gutenberg must have felt when he was finally ready to start printing. By the late 1440s, he had moved on from Strasbourg, which had recently been terrorised by a marauding band of French mercenaries called the Armagnacs. Perhaps they were the reason that he decided to head home to Mainz. As usual, money was tight, so he borrowed some cash from a relative. This house was used as security for the loan, and he struck up a partnership with a new investor called Johann Fust. It was a deal he would later regret, but it did give him the cash injection he needed to set his press running. He didn't start with the Bible, far too ambitious. He road-tested the new technology on modest print jobs, like this Latin grammar book. To show the church that his invention presented an opportunity and not a threat, he also printed documents like this papal indulgence. Now, indulgence is this wonderful Catholic way of raising money, wasn't it? It sort of reminds me of today. If you journey in an aeroplane or something, or have a very fuel-inefficient car, you can offset your carbon, can't you? You can pay money to a company that offsets your carbon. It forgives you your carbon sins, and this is a bit like the same idea. You offset your sins, don't you? It must have been marvellous for them to have Gutenberg's new technology, because before that, of course, each one would be handwritten by a scribe, and it's not just a quick voucher, it's a lot of lines. So it was a very good way of Gutenberg showing off his new technology. Yes, yes. I think it shows also that the church really was very interested in printing, that they did not consider it a black art, as it is said in German. They were interested because they saw all those advantages it brought to them. With church support for his magnum opus, there was just one more issue to resolve. Most high-end books in those days were written not on paper, but on something called vellum. And what was vellum made out of? It was made out of those little fellows, those pretty brown, round-eyed calves. They yielded their skins just as they yielded the rest of themselves for veal chops, for the tables of the mighty. Gutenberg, who was determined that his Bible was to be nothing if not the highest possible quality, thought that he would print every Bible on the finest vellum. But either he or his business partners did some serious mathematical modelling, as it would now be called, and they quickly realised that actually only a few could be done in vellum, because a little herd like this, well, he wouldn't be out of the Old Testament. You've got those two there, we'll call them Genesis, we'll call that fellow there Exodus, we've got Deuteronomy over there, Leviticus. It would take 140 calves to provide enough vellum for just a single copy of the Bible. For a print run of 180, which was what he planned, Gutenberg would have needed a staggering 25,000 of the poor creatures. That's an awful lot of veal chops in anyone's book. There are, therefore, a few Gutenberg Bibles extant in the world which are printed on vellum, but most are printed on paper. Without a system for mass-producing paper, Gutenberg's invention would have been dead in the water. But although the Chinese had first invented the stuff 1,200 years earlier, it was still a new commodity in the West. This mill at Basel in Switzerland was set up at almost exactly the same time as Gutenberg was working on his machine, and they still make paper here the old-fashioned way. Not from wood pulp, but from cloth rags. Oh, that's rather satisfying. First, the rags are mashed to a fine pulp. A water wheel provides the power to drive these hefty hammers. Once it's reached the right consistency, the pulp is transferred to a huge vat, which is where the fun really starts. This is going to be our paper. It seems extraordinary. These are the bits of cut-up linen that have been pounded away, and they've turned into this pulp. OK, so I'd better keep stirring, yes? Yes. Oh, extraordinary. That's what you feel is the heating. The water is a little bit warm. Because it's organic matter and it's breaking down? No, because it's a little bit easier to work with warm water. And the warm water goes quicker down from the sieve. So this is what now happens, OK? Yes. Let's do it. Let's make paper. We go in like this, turn it, and come up. Shake it a little bit so the water goes down and the fibre rests. Goodness me. And so we are ready for the next. Would it be all right if I could make some paper? Yes. You'll have to take over my job. And now, shall we swap places? Yes. This is very exciting. OK, yeah, I'd better do that. It's a horrible feeling. This takes me back to the art room at school where I was always a dunderhead. Right, so just... The other side, the other side. Oops. This way? No, like this. Oh, I see. Like so, you mean. First of all, I've already... I'll show you. Ah, yeah, but there's some on already. Should we get rid of that? That's all right. OK, ready to scoop? Down, turning, come up. And... Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. This side a little bit. Yeah, that way too. Oh, yeah, it's got a few white bits in, but it's not bad. I think... Stop it. Some paper for you, René. Amazing. And is it ready to take a deckle? There it is. This is probably... It's always the second that goes bad. And... Oh, this is a magical process. It's rather like panning for gold, isn't it? And perhaps that's not a bad analogy. Paper was like gold in medieval times. It was unbelievably valuable. And although it's quite a time-consuming process, it's a lot less time-consuming than making vellum from calfskin. I must say, I've rather enjoyed this. I feel connected to Gutenberg somehow just by doing this. That's good. How do you know when it's ready? Because the ripples stop. Yes, now it's OK. Oh, that's not so good. Hang on. OK. Not quite so good, that one. No. Oh, well. Put it back? Yeah, put it back. Shall we put it back? And just... Turn it? Oh, turning it. Yes. Like so. No. Oh, I thought maybe it would go... Oh, like so. Yes. Oh, dear. I've ruined the place. Oh, I see. Better. Screwed up. To make paper fit for printing is a fine art. The raw materials need to be mixed to perfection to produce the right texture and absorbency. For Gutenberg, this was the final crucial ingredient which made printing the Bible a viable business proposition. Beautiful. My very own piece of paper. And first, of course, it has to be dried, doesn't it? Yes. But I do hope Alan will be satisfied with that. How could he not be? That's worthy of the finest printer's art. The great day's arrived. It's been five months since Alan first got together his plans and designed his printing press. It's now built. The paper's been made in Basel. I've cast the type personally. Nothing can stop us from printing a page of Gutenberg text. This must be how the great man felt himself. Before we start printing, I have a little confession to make. It took Stan and me the best part of a day to make just one individual letter E. To produce all the type needed to print a full Bible probably took Gutenberg's team around a year. And frankly, I don't have his time or his patience. So I've cheated. This package has come from the States. It's a replica page of type set to the exact measurements of the Gutenberg original. And thankfully, nothing's been damaged in transit. So this is perfect, isn't it? We can print from this? Well, almost. Surely there's room for my little E somewhere on the page. Oh, it's going to go in. That's so exciting. Now, what word is that? Can you read that? Legges. L-E-G-E-S. Yes! That's great. You know, I have to confess I had my doubts about whether or not Alan would be able to bring off the construction of a printing press in the time we'd given him and whether, in fact, there was enough known about printing then to be able to produce something that could actually work and come up with a reasonable facsimile of something that Gutenberg could have done. I have to say, all my doubts have been cast aside by the brilliance of the work he's done. And all three of the experts are through there giggling like children at the excitement of what they've all created together. I'm going to see now, so the real printing can happen. Right, this is a moment of truth. Let's see how it fits. Not bad, actually. I think we're almost OK there. OK, right, here we go. My goodness. Wait for the creak. Here we go. Well, there's impression there, Martin. There is indeed. Look at how it's just bit into the paper. Wow. Oh, my word! That is quite remarkable. That is extraordinary. Congratulations, everybody. The inking is superb, Martin. The alignment is fantastic. And there is your E, right? And that E in particular stands out as being... It's the best one on the page. ..far and away. Excellent job. Bravo. I am very, very pleased with that. So you should be. I mean, seriously, first of all, I think that's startlingly good. It's extraordinary. Anyway, let's do some more. Well, that's the proof of a printing press, is being able to do more. As we print, the normal procedure would be that the puller, your puller, OK? OK. It takes the sheet off. It gives it a cursory glance, but he's got to get really ready for the next print. Right. While the inker, while he's away from the press, the inker is going to be inking up again for him. Right, so it's a real assembly line. And when he comes off the inking, he checks the quality of the print that you've just done. Right, he's not proofreading it, that's all... No, he's looking to see that the impression is, everything's printed out. Right, and they're not getting too thin. That's right, yeah. OK. And my frisket. Yes. Tin pan down. Tin pan, that's it. That's its bed. Now we all hold on to the press now. Right, and... That's him. Right, isn't it? Superb. There you go. Pretty good, yeah. No, I think, actually, that's better. It is, isn't it? Gutenberg's first edition of the Bible ran to 180 copies, each containing more than 1,200 pages, which had to be set, inked and printed. Very nice. And that was just the black-and-white work. After they'd left the press, each page was hand-decorated by an illuminator before the whole thing was bound together to make a finished book. This is the miracle. They're identical, each one of these wonderful pages, and that had never been seen before in the history of the world. Our experiments nearly finished, but for Gutenberg, this was just the beginning of a monumental two-year print run. But what a beginning it was. The first copies of Gutenberg's Bible were displayed at the Frankfurt Trade Fair in 1454, and they caused a sensation. Today, fewer than 50 of those original books are still in existence. One of the finest is held here at Göttingen in Germany. You know what I'm genuinely tingling with excitement about coming close to a Gutenberg Bible? Having only seen one through glass and having examined so much about its means of production and having discovered just how important it was and what a symbol it is and everything the modern age stands for, the idea of actually touching one, albeit through cotton gloves, is giving me goose flesh. Ah, I cannot believe this. You know, I've looked at them through glass and I've read about them, and to be so close is an extraordinary feeling. You want to have a look? Please. This is actually a remark by Jakob Grimm. Of the famous Brothers Grimm? Yeah, when he was a librarian in Göttingen. It says, Eine Gutenbergische Bibel, a Gutenberg Bible. And it says, Von Höchster Seltenheit, of the highest rarity. Yes. Thank you. And this is the first page of the first volume. Do you know what's interesting? Although the illumination and decoration, you call that a rubrication, don't you? Right. The red letters, literally. Although they're very beautiful, it is the typeface that really draws the eye, isn't it? Yes. People have said that even at the start of this new technology that it is also an example of perfection. Yes. The general view is that it's so much more beautiful than it needs to have been. That is very true, yes. Simply, he was clearly a very driven perfectionist. Yes. He uses what the scribes in the monasteries also used. He used abbreviations. That was the only way to create this right margin, as clean as it is. Now, there's a little hole here. What's going on? Yeah. Somebody must have... What a vandal! ..plundered this. I don't know when this happened. You see, the illumination went up the page when somebody needed a model... Right. ..for an illumination. So they cut it out and put it next to his manuscript and painted it off this model, which is unfortunate. To be able to leaf through this unbelievably rare and important object, a Gutenberg Bible, in my hands, I'm wearing white gloves, I'm terrified of breathing water vapour on it, and yet, you know, the odd thing is that it doesn't feel like something that is going to be crumbling to dust if I turn the pages too fast. It feels very solid and robust, and after all, it was made to be used more than once a day. I mean, if it was bought by a monastery, I guess it would have been used for all the offices of the day. And it was a solid object. A Bible was a thing that people expected to turn to all the time. And it isn't a fragile little thing like an ornament. It's a useful object. And the extraordinary thing about this is that although there were only 100 or so of these made, only 12 of these in existence on vellum, you know that, aside from the illuminations, every page is the same. And that was really the most remarkable breakthrough, wasn't it, that somebody in a monastery in Germany, somebody in a palace in Florence, somebody in a private house in Amsterdam could turn to the same page number, the same word would begin at the top, end at the end. They were looking at mass production for the first time. And although they were very rich, those who could afford it, they were nothing like as rich as those who could afford ones that had been made by scribes, handwritten. I can't believe I'm here looking at it. I'd like to report a happy ending for the man who created this extraordinary book, but it didn't turn out quite like that. Do you remember Mr. Fust, the dragon who bankrolled the printing of the Bible? Soon after the presses started running, he asked Gutenberg to repay the money he'd borrowed. Gutenberg didn't have the cash, so he was forced to hand over all his printing equipment instead. It had taken him almost a lifetime to build his machine. Now, so soon after it had been completed, it was snatched from Gutenberg's grasp. My journey ends here, in the village of Eltville, a few miles outside Mainz. Gutenberg had family roots here, and his friends helped him get back on his feet and even to set up a new printing workshop. But he never enjoyed the riches which his invention earned for his former business partner, Fust. Well, Gutenberg finally got the recognition he deserved. Up in the castle there, the elector called him a knight and gave him a pension, and when he died, the world knew that he had founded the modern art of printing. But it's not that, really, that has brought me here. It's the thought of what went on after Gutenberg's death. The replication of printing across Europe at such a speed, an unimaginable speed for that time, from zero books to 20 million in just 50 years. Gutenberg's technology spread across Europe like a benign virus. It gave new ideas a ticket to ride and kick-started the Renaissance. For the next 500 years, his method of printing was used to make books everywhere. His was the machine that made us. And that art, the art of movable type printing, defines us. It's our civilisation more than anything else. I can imagine a modern world without cars, I can imagine one without telephones or computers, but I cannot begin to imagine a society, anything like the one we have, that doesn't have the printed word. www.gutenberg.de