John Gutenberg changed all this. He did it by inventing the art of printing from movable type.

Gutenberg was born about the year 1400, at Mainz, a German city on the Rhine, near Frankfort. His parents were of noble blood, and people of means, who took a prominent part in the affairs of the city. Nothing is known of Gutenberg's boyhood days, other than that they were passed amid scenes of strife between the common people and the nobility.

When John Gutenberg was a boy, it was thought beneath the dignity of one of noble birth to do any ordinary labor, or to learn a trade. Despite this belief, he learned not one, but two trades. He learned the art of cutting and polishing precious stones, and of mirror making.

It is not an easy task to-day to learn a trade. It was even more difficult when John Gutenberg was a boy. The trades at that time were in the hands of guilds, or, as we would say, trade-unions. Of those in a trade, only the master workmen were allowed to teach it. The number of boys a master workman might take to teach was limited. The boy while learning the trade, which took from five to seven years, received no wages. Instead, he often had to pay a considerable sum for his instruction.

A boy on undertaking to learn a trade became an apprentice. As an apprentice, he ran errands, brought tools and materials, took care of the shop, and assisted in other ways. After two years or more, he rose to be a journeyman and served a second two years. In this period, he learned how to handle and to use tools, and how to do simple kinds of work. In the last two or three years of his service, the journeyman conquered the more difficult parts of the trade. As a kind of final examination he made what was called a masterpiece. This was examined by a committee of master workmen. If they were satisfied with his workmanship, he was admitted to the guild at a great banquet held at his expense, and given the right to set up in business for himself.

A long time to learn a trade? Yes. But John Gutenberg learned two, and at thirty-five was well established at Strassburg with a good paying business. He was also sought out by young men wishing to become cutters of precious stones or makers of mirrors, and was paid for teaching them these arts.

The idea came to Gutenberg, that all words, all writings, all languages are expressed in a small number of different letters. Our language has, for example, only twenty-six letters. With a large number of letters properly set together, a whole page of text could be printed at once. By resetting the different letters, and by repeating the process of printing, large books could be swiftly multiplied. This idea took possession of him, and after 1436, to the neglect of everything else, he gave his time, his energy, and his fortune to working out the process.

Should you go into a newspaper office and see a printing press print, cut, paste, fold, and deliver in sixty minutes forty-eight thousand newspapers of sixteen pages each, it would be natural to think that the most important part of printing is the press. The most important part, in printing, however, is the type, or the little movable metal letters. For this reason, the key to inventing printing lay in finding the right kind of metal, and in finding an easy way of making type.

Knowing that block books were printed from carved blocks, Gutenberg first tried to make type from wood. It would seem easy to do this. Yet it proved difficult to carve a good letter upon the end of a small wooden stick. It proved equally hard to cut the sticks of such width that there would be equal spaces between the letters. Even when Gutenberg succeeded in doing this, for he was an expert carver, the ink so softened the wooden type, that after a few impressions the printed letters became blurred. As the printed letters must be clear and distinct, Gutenberg was forced, much against his will, to give up trying to make movable type from wood.

It now occurred to him that lead would serve. From his work in making mirrors he knew how easy it was to mold it. With a simple mold he cast a number of small lead sticks of uniform width and height, and then with no great difficulty he carved a letter on the end of each stick. He seemed to be on the direct road to success, but when he came to print from lead type, he found that it took more pressure than with wooden blocks, and when the pressure was sufficient to transfer the impression to the paper, the lead letters were flattened out.

Since lead was too soft, Gutenberg thought that iron might do. It proved difficult to mold small iron sticks. The iron stuck to the mold, and the sides of the little sticks were so rough that they would not fit closely together. Expert as Gutenberg was, it was slow work to cut the letters. Worse yet, when the letters were cut, so much pressure had to be used in printing, that the hard iron type cut into the paper.

These attempts at making type from wood, lead, and iron took weeks and months. Thus a great deal of time and labor seemed lost. Yet this was not all true; for Gutenberg learned from these trials that a metal would have to be found, out of which to make type that could be easily cast. He learned that this metal would have to be harder than lead, but softer than iron. He also learned from trying to cut metal letters, that a mold would have to be invented in which the type could be cast.

As lead could be easily molded, and was at that time one of the cheapest metals, Gutenberg set about finding a metal to mix with lead, to give it the needed hardness and toughness. Many are the mixtures he must have tried. On one day, this and that combination of lead and copper was tested. On another, lead and brass were combined, now in this and now in that way; and so on, week after week, month after month. Some of the combinations were fairly good, but Gutenberg was never satisfied with half success. He worked on and on, until he hit upon combining five parts of lead, four parts of antimony, and one part of tin. The lead supplied the bulk of the type, the antimony the hardness, and the tin the needed toughness. This mixture of metals proved satisfactory. Strange as it may seem, it is about the one used to-day. No better combination of metal for type has ever been found. It is known as type metal, and is only one of the great discoveries of Gutenberg.

While Gutenberg was trying to find a metal suitable for type, he was at the same time working upon a mold. Unless an easy way of casting metal type could be found, printing from movable letters could never be made a success.

To understand what he really invented, let us see what tools are now used in making type. The most important of these tools are the punch or master type, the matrix or mold for the face of the letter, and the mold in which the body of the type is cast.

The punch is made by taking a bar of steel about six inches long, and of the width of a printed letter, and three or four times its thickness. Upon one end of this bar is drawn, say, an H. The surrounding parts of steel are then cut away until the letter stands out in bold relief. Each separate letter, both small and capital, requires a separate punch.

The matrix, or mold for the face of the letter, is made by taking a bar of copper half an inch thick, and about twice the width and four times the length of a printed letter. A punch is driven into this with a sharp blow. The result is the sunken imprint in the copper of the letter on the punch. This sunken letter becomes a mold for the face of the letter.

The mold consists of two halves. When these halves are put together, their inner sides face each other and form an opening. On the lower side of the mold, and just under the opening, is a place for fastening the matrix. On the upper side, the opening is left open for the inflow of the molten type metal. A dozen or more molds are needed for each set of type.

It was easy enough for Gutenberg to make a mold with which he could cast metal sticks of the same thickness. The difficult problem was to make one which would cast metal sticks of different widths, and at the same time form a letter on the end. He tried many ways of doing this. Months passed before the idea of a separate mold for the face of the letter occurred to him. Matrices were then made of lead, of iron, and of brass. In some, the impress of the letter was cast; in others it was cut or engraved. But no sooner was one made, than it was put aside. Still other months went by before he thought of the punch. Molds for the body of the type were made first in one way, then in another. Some were of iron, others of lead, and still others of copper, but not one would do. How many years he toiled, in hope and in despair, no one knows. We only know that by trying again and again, and never giving up, he learned that the mold should be of two like, adjustable parts and that the punch should be of steel, and the matrix of copper.

Thus by patient toil, Gutenberg invented the tools needed in casting type. With them he could easily cast two or three thousand letters a day. So well did he do his work, that more than four hundred years have made little changes in these tools, or in the metal from which they are made. Although type-casting machines are now employed, which cast a hundred type a minute, the punch, the matrix, and the mold invented by Gutenberg are in all important points like those in use at the present time.

No press was needed in making either manuscript or block books. But when Gutenberg came to print from metal type, he discovered that considerable pressure was required to transfer the likeness of the letters to the parchment or paper. That this pressure might be quickly given and be uniform over the face of all the type, it became necessary to invent a press.

Gutenberg modeled his printing press after the wine press then in use. It had two upright posts of great strength. These were placed four feet apart, fastened at the bottom to a solid wooden base, and joined together at the top by a heavy crossbeam. The middle of this crossbeam held an iron screw worked by a lever. On the lower end of the screw hung a heavy block of wood called the plate, the under side of which was flat and smooth. By turning the screw, the plate could be forced up or down. Between the two upright posts, and upon the base of the press, stood a strong, four-legged stool, which served to support a heavy wooden platform, four feet wide and six feet long. Upon this was laid the form, or the wooden frame in which the type was locked. Crude as this printing press was, it served Gutenberg well, and presses like it were the only kind used for more than a hundred and fifty years.

The only ink at the time was the writing fluid of the copyists. Gutenberg found that when this was employed in printing, instead of forming a thin black coat over the type, it collected in drops and blotted the paper. Another kind of ink had to be made, if printing from metal type was to be a success. The Italian painters had lately invented a new paint composed of lampblack and linseed oil. It was probably from them that Gutenberg got a suggestion which turned him in the right direction. At any rate, he hit upon mixing lampblack and boiled linseed oil, and this mixture proved satisfactory. Printer's ink is still made in the same way.