Universal Encyclopedia
Who was Johannes Gutenberg?
He didn't invent printing — he invented the system that made books cheap. In a decade, Mainz gave Europe the machine that ended the age of the scribe.
Last updated: October 2026
Around 1440, in a workshop in Mainz, a goldsmith's son combined three borrowed ideas — movable metal type, oil-based ink, and the wine press — into a machine that could print a book faster than a roomful of monks could copy a page. Within fifty years, Europe held twenty million printed books. Nothing since the alphabet had changed minds at that speed.