How Did Johannes Gutenberg Influence The Printing Press

For many people, imagining a world where few people read is relatively difficult. Today, literacy is widespread, and that's how it has been for quite a long time. Who made it that so many people have access to books? The answer is Johannes Gutenberg. In the times of the Renaissance, he made it so much easier to publish books, thanks to his innovations on the printing press. Without all he did, it very well could be like it was before he came along, with very few people able to read and write. In the estimated year 1398, a boy by the name of Johannes Gutenberg was born in Mainz, Germany to mother Elsgen Wyrich, second wife to father Friele zum Gensfleish. It is believed he would have been literate from a young age, coming from a good family. There isn't much information on his early years, but he wasn't trained in the art of printmaking. Most likely, he was trained as a goldsmith, or possibly a gem cutter. Much of

The printing press first appeared more than 600 years before he began to work on his innovations to make printing easier and less expensive. The Tang Dynasty was where anything like the modern printing press first appeared. The Chinese adopted a method known as "block printing", which involved wooden blocks being painted with ink before they were pressed onto a sheet of paper. Japan and Korea were also using similar methods by the eighth century before moveable type was even used. In the eleventh century, a Chinese man named Bi Sheng created the first press with movable typeface. There isn't much known about Sheng unfortunately, as he was a peasant. However, a scholar by the name of Shen Kuo documented how the early press worked. “Dream Pool Essays”, a work by Shen Kuo, talked about the ink and individual characters. He says the blocks were made out of dried clay, and the ink was composed of wax, paper ashes, and pine