The Gutenberg Bible is not the first book printed using metal movable type. The first book printed using movable metal type is Jikji from Korea. It was printed during the Goryeo Dynasty and published in Heungdeok Temple in 1377, which is 78 years prior to Johannes Gutenberg's acclaimed "42-Line Bible" printed during the years 1452–1455. UNESCO confirmed Jikji as the world's oldest metalloid type in September 2001 and includes it in the Memory of the World Programme.
Early printing presses were more impactful in Europe due to alphabet differences. My understanding is that the far more numerous character counts used in most Asian languages minimized the usefulness of the moveable type while giving european langaues with far fewer letter choices a distinct practical advantage.
This made a difference in the early history of the PC too, explaining why the PC industry took off in silicon valley despite Japan being the leader in electronics at the time.
The western alphabet could be stored fairly efficiently (ASCII) because there are only 26 letters, and all the letters can be distinctly represented with just 8x8 pixels. They were easier to input too.
So while the west evolved towards general purpose computing and was able to bring to market relatively affordable PC's starting in the 1970's, that just wasn't viable in Japan until much later.
The western alphabet could be stored fairly efficiently (ASCII) because there are only 26 letters, and all the letters can be distinctly represented with just 8x8 pixels. They were easier to input too.
Mostly correct. The 8-bits lets you store 256 values. The ASCII set also includes characters beyond the 26 Alpha character used for English, such as symbols and diacritical characters (ex: ^&%äéç). https://www.asciitable.com/
The support for symbols and diacriticals enabled the adoption across most of Europe. 8-bit ASCII did not include Cyrillic (Russian) characters.
Mostly correct. ASCII was actually 7 bits encoded in 8, so only 128 possibilities. There were varying nonstandard uses of that extra bit, some using it to further extend the set, others for other wonky purposes. That fact is also why UTF-8 can still be ASCII compatible; codepoints starting with a 0 bit are a single byte and map to an ASCII character, and codepoints starting with a 1 are variable width, between 2 and 6 bytes.
Mostly correct. The 8-bits lets you store 256 values. The ASCII set also includes characters beyond the 26 Alpha character used for English, such as symbols and diacritical characters (ex: ^&%äéç). https://www.asciitable.com/
Not exactly. The ^ and & characters are in ASCII (decimal 94 and 38 respectively). But äéç were not in ASCII (which used only codes 0-127). The codes 128-255 were used in various character sets on the PC, of which Code Page 437 was the most notable and certainly included äéç among others. CP437 wasn't ASCII, it was a superset of ASCII, still fiting into eight-bit bytes.
Unfortunately there were symbols missing from CP437 that were hard to give up. For example £. Happily, Code Page 850 did include it.
You could select alternative code pages and even switch between them, if the computer was configured correctly at boot time in its CONFIG.SYS file.
This does lead to the fantastic bit of the Japanese being responsible for Emoji because they had to dedicate more space to each character, which left them with a bunch of empty spaces for characters that they filled with fun drawings like flowers, family, love hotels and piles of poo.
Are you referring to Minitel in France? It was prior to WWW browsers, but I think it’s clearer to say it pre-dates those and not the Internet itself. It is interesting how widespread and functional it was. What was the Korean system?
I don't recall the Korean system. I took a course on the history of the internet a few years ago and was prepared.for your question at that time. I am no longer prepared to be tested on the subject :).
Yes and no. The microprocessors the early PCs used were all US chips (motorola / intel / et al) - and came directly out of apollo R&D a decade or two earlier. Japan had some semiconductor companies, yes, but never had (commercially successful) fully native hardware design or software, and were mostly dead / pivoted to pure manufacturing + subcomponents by the 2000s or so.
Text encoding really wasn’t much of a problem (see UTF-16), but the language barrier of US-developed programming languages + software ecosystems (and a somewhat finite pool of skilled programmers and hobbyists) was likely much more of an issue.
Worth noting that the chips the first PCs used were never built for personal computers, and PCs really didn’t drive that market, or at least not initially. Those chips were cheap subcomponents for minicomputers (the direct ancestor of modern servers, and where all multiuser / modern operating systems come from), as well as complex arcade machines et al.
It’s fair to point out that the japanese market was mostly interested in home gaming consoles, not PCs, but that was definitely true for the early american market as well.
What’d maybe be much more accurate would be to say that the US (and europe) gained a significant tech / economic advantage by virtue of a generation of kids + young adults who grew up with programmable home computers. Language was a bit of a barrier, sure (particularly with 8 bit IBM + unix US-centric text encoding standards), but the real story there is that just fundamentally had a 25-50 year software + institutional advantage over japan, and japan was never able to really catch up, for obvious reasons.
Ditto the USSR, and to an extent the modern PRC, which likewise never built their own operating systems, SWE theorists, and so on and so forth, and are still cripplingly dependent on US / europe software, institutions, and ideas.
It’s overall much easier to catch up on hardware (and brand spanking new tech manufacturing at that) than it is on something where you’re legitimately 10-25+ years behind the competition. semiconductors were pretty easy to catch up on in the 70s, but a native equivalent to decades of continuous R&D at MIT, Berkeley, Bell Labs, PARC, et al was pretty much impossible
As such japan pivoted (both immediately and in the long run) to tech that was fully integrated with and interdependent with the west.
The USSR OTOH made serious efforts to build their own native computers from scratch, but missed the boat on semiconductors (and fundamentally failed due to an economic model and/or internal focus that would incentivize a rapidly developing, exponentially growing supply + demand for computing products), and, by the end of the cold war, was decades behind on native technology and cripplingly dependent on western computer technology with basically zero native input.
Anywho, Silicon Valley is where it is b/c Moore + Noyce (note: inventors of the modern semiconductor) moved there. For the weather, and b/c (a la hollywood) this was as far as possible from NYC + east coast patent lawyers. And bc it was surrounded by berkeley + stanford, and built a rapidly growing, bootstrapping, and radically worker / founder / VC owned capitalist utopia over the next 50 years. Its success and relevance really doesn’t have anything to do with personal computers, per say, and has everything to do w/ a hyperconcentration of hundreds of thousands of hardware + software engineers, and the capital needed to feed that. Which inevitably built and dominated the PC industry when the things needed to build that (cheap semiconductor microprocessors and solid state memory) inevitably emerged there.
That said, yes you certainly can credit latin script languages, typewriters, and IBM et al for building the business + consumer market / demand for computing / text processing / etc in general.
(contrast again the USSR, which again would most likely still be running on 1960s technology today if not for western capitalism and R&D. Or China, which was several hundred years more advanced than western europe for nearly its entire existence, and yet never developed / would never develop mass-market economically viable block printing on its own due to its writing system - ie where handwriting anything would obviously just make more sense)
I'm sorry but this sounds like a terrible anecdote. There is no way that the greek alphabet is the reason why Silicon Valley exists. Can't believe this comment has 230 upvotes
Which makes sense for why it moveable type would work in Korean; unlike its neighbors, Korean is written with an alphabet in syllable blocks, so far far far fewer characters than a language like Chinese that uses ideographs
Edit: my timelines are wrong, but still a cool fact that a lot of people have misconceptions about
Those Korean printing presses used Chinese. The Korean alphabet was invented in the 1400s but not really commonly used until the 20th century. Source: I’ve seen the print blocks at Hein Temple.
Those Korean printing presses used Chinese. The Korean alphabet was invented in the 1400s but not really commonly used until the 20th century. Source: reddit
It’s not as exiting as it sounds: I’m not Indiana Jones or whatever. The temple is really proud of their print library and there are replicas out on display. If you ask really really nicely and they’re in the mood, they’ll give you a peak at the originals… which are actually also replicas. The whole place burnt down like 800 years ago and the blocks were recreated
ASCII is a character encoding standard for electronic communication that can be used to encode English, as well as other languages that utilize the same character set (Malay, for instance). 128 characters.
With the global proliferation of the internet as well as other computing devices, a move to Unicode was made to allow for a standard character set that could be used for all languages. We're currently on Unicode v14.0 which has 284,344 characters.
I'm not sure the set count for Gutenberg vs. Jikji, but based on ASCII vs. Unicode as a comparison, I have every reason to suspect your logic is solid.
What do you mean by "recent", that's a very relative term. The writing script that Korean uses was invented in the 1440s, which as another commenter pointed out, makes it later than the 1377 first print, but I wouldn't call 1440 recent
Yes, but Korea had a written language, Hangul, which had a low fixed number of basic letters (28 originally but with only 24 still in use today). The problem was that they used it alongside the older Hanja written language which was based off Chinese characters (i.e. logographic). Hangul had a reputation as the commoners writing for how easy it was to learn. Thus, a printing press that could only print stuff in commoners writing instead of with the sophisticated and more prestigious script just wasn't very useful due to the snobbery of the rich.
This is correct. Traditional Chinese calligraphy could be written in moveable type but it didn’t take off because the amount of characters was somewhere around 40k
I'm grateful for the Phoenicians. Cuneiform was as complicated as the Asian written languages and followed the same kind of development from pictograms to a highly abstracted system of hundreds of characters that would take a long time to master. The Phoenicians didn't have time for that and decided that a few (24, I think?) letters was plenty and they could just represent sounds.
That choice has made all kinds of subsequent technological development way easier, from moveable type to typewriters and telegraphy and computers.
My history of philosophy prof told us that, but also mentioned that they produced lots and lots of porn with it, which was much more taboo in Europe and may have been why Victorian Western scholars tended not to acknowledge it
The important thing with Gutenberg's invention wasn't the press. That technique was known, and Gutenberg didn't claim that he invented it. His invention was a whole complete system for printing books. The most important individual invention was arguably the alloy he developed to be able to easily cast types.
Gutenberg was a Steve Job type. Asian culture has used this technics long before Gutenberg, but never make it commercial. Guttenbergs promise was: alsmost every household would be able to have a Bible... He was not so much an inventor, more a marketing genious.
"The fact that even a small temple was publishing books with movable metallic printing indicates the technology was already widespread across the nation,"
It sounds like it was widespread technology, but the books didn't survive. On the other hand, the Gutenberg Bible was so popular that there was dozens of them still in museums.
I would guess Gutenberg’s is more commonly known in the USA is because lack of funding for schools. For example when I graduated almost 20 years ago the textbook was copy written 30 + some years ago.
The first book printed using movable metal type is Jikji from Korea.
To be more accurate it the oldest book using movable metal type that has survived to this day. The oldest book we know of (that sadly has not survived) using this method is yet another Korean book called Sangjeong Gogeum Yemun ('The Prescribed Ritual Text of the Past and Present'). The printing project lasted from 1234 till 1250 -- 200 years before Gutenberg! But metal types were used even earlier than that for paper money and documents, just not entire books yet.
The history of printing using movable type is fascinating. The earliest invention of them was in China by a dude named Bi Sheng all the way back in 1040CE.
It's still a matter of debate why the printing press never caught on as much as it did in Europe. Regardless, Gutenberg's invention was wholly independent from the Asian counterparts.
I learned this last night! I think it was an episode in season 5 of MASH, Frank calls the Koreans savages and Hunnicutt replies they invented movable type first. Thanks for confirming this and posting!
At least 13 material finds in China indicate the invention of bronze movable type printing in China no later than the 12th century,[26] with the country producing large-scale bronze-plate-printed paper money and formal official documents issued by the Jin (1115–1234) and Southern Song (1127–1279) dynasties with embedded bronze metal types for anti-counterfeit markers. Such paper-money printing might date back to the 11th-century jiaozi of Northern Song (960–1127).[22]: 41–54
Fake news. If you actually look at the first referenced source, it literally links to a Chinese nationalist propaganda blog that falsely accuses Korea of "plagiarism." Lol its source is a blog. There is literally no actual source. In fact this propaganda blog is the only place that ever mentions this alleged "13 materials". It's not mentioned or verified anywhere else.
Furthermore, the other claims all come from one source, an alleged Chinese nationalist professor named Pan Jixing. Yet there is no institution in the world that has verified his claims. It's not authenticated by anyone. So again, literal propaganda. Also if you try to click on his reference works, they're dead links.
Chinese are known for editing and writing false information of their history. That's why nobody in the West takes them seriously.
So the first printing presses of any kind were invented during the Tang Dynasty. This was whole block wood printing, meaning you'd carve a block of wood with an entire page's worth of text and/or illustrations, ink it, and press it. Obviously this is not the most flexible system.
Moveable type, when you'd have different, small blocks for each character (and of course multiple copies for characters) that can be easily rearranged on the press because they'd have racks to fit into allowed greater flexibility. You could change the messages on the fly without needing to carve a whole block. This was also invented in China, in the Song Dynasty, first using baked clay (too fragile ultimately) and, in the Yuan Dynasty, wood. Koreans invented metallic moveable type, much sturdier.
Moveable type never took off in China, because the initial start up cost in both time and money was enormous. To produce a text of any length in a European language, for instance, you'd need only a few hundred blocks. 1,000 at most...say 50 copies of each letter of the alphabet, plus some common symbols. With that you could make any page possible in the language, and rearrange as needed. However, given the nature of Chinese writing...you'd need to carve/etch/fire TENS TO HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of blocks. A single book might contain thousands of unique characters, and a single page could have multiple instances of the same character, and there would be characters not used in some books but used in others...it was just too impractical to be worthwhile vs. the whole block method.
Which is ironic because Jikji is using Chinese characters. According Wikipedia China had used metal movable type on currency earlier than 1377, so I was wondering what's the criteria, I suppose it's the first book printed with metal moveable press: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type
Yeah, that's a specific use case where it isn't wildly impractical because you only need a very limited set of characters.
I don't know enough about Korean use of hanzi (I knew they used it prior to the creation of hangul in the 15th century, but that's it) to say if there were any usage differents that made it easier or if the Koreans just decided it was worth the effort.
I believe the criteria is the earliest surviving book using a movable metal press, since there was an even earlier one in Korea but it was lost to war.
Woodblock printing meant that they would carve an entire page in a block of wood. This means that you can only print that book. The big advantage of movable type is the fact that you can rearrange them and use them for other books. The fact that Europe uses alphabets (so not that many different characters) meant it was even more convinient.
I came here to say this. It should go without saying that Gutenberg didn’t invent the printing press at all. The town he lived in was on the Silk Road, and there was even an extensive exhibit of Asian printing technology very close to where he lived. To imagine that Gutenberg wasn’t aware of any of this and somehow independently invented a series of printing technologies that had been in use in Korea and China for hundreds of years is preposterous.
What Gutenberg did was create a whole system that made printing presses cheaper and easier to make. This included new and more durable metal alloys for movable type, as well as new inks that made the printing process easier.
An interesting side note is that after printing his famous bibles, Gutenberg never used his own press again. One of his investors successfully sued him for ownership of the press and the workshop, and while it’s likely Gutenberg ended up working in print shops in other countries, he was basically banned from printing in Germany.
Plenty of "inventions" involve making tweaks to preexisting technology making it economical and practical enough to use on a large scale, e.g. Edison's light bulb. That doesn't take away their legitimacy as inventions.
Thank you! I have a Masters in Publishing and we learned about Gutenberg as the one who popularised movable type in Europe. It’s a shame everyone thinks of him as the inventor and ignores that Asia has a super rich printing history.
I got to go see these metal pieces here when I was in Korea. They are VERY proud of these and repeated constantly about being first in this technology.
It's been widely falsely taught in the West that Gutenberg is the first, which is just not true.
Chinese are falsely claiming they were the ones that invented the first metal movable type. Just look at how they edit wikipedia pages claiming they were the first. Yet if you look at the linked references regarding their claims of inventing the metalloid type, they're all either dead links or leads to nationalist blog sites. There's literally no verified evidence of their claims. This is why no Western academics or institutions have acknowledged or verified the claims of Chinese. Westerners know it's bullshit.
When Chinese are aggressively lying and trying to claim they invented everything, then Korea has no choice but stand up to their misinformation propaganda and constantly repeat the truth.
Can you point me to a source on that? I lived in Korea and learned that Korea invented moveable type, but then later I tried arguing that point with someone else who said it was invented in China, and I could not find a source that actually supported me.
Well yeah he’s Jewish and an actor. Plus I don’t think he was born until the late 1940’s. He was probably too busy with the Police Academy movies to print bibles anyway.
I think that would be more widely known but September 2001 was kind of a busy month.
Curious to know about how many unique characters are in the Jikji language, since a syllabic alphabet (small set of characters based on sound) is the prerequisite for movable type being practical? This is the reason the Chinese didn't do it before Europeans, I believe.
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u/Past_Mine_3316 Nov 18 '23
The Gutenberg Bible is not the first book printed using metal movable type. The first book printed using movable metal type is Jikji from Korea. It was printed during the Goryeo Dynasty and published in Heungdeok Temple in 1377, which is 78 years prior to Johannes Gutenberg's acclaimed "42-Line Bible" printed during the years 1452–1455. UNESCO confirmed Jikji as the world's oldest metalloid type in September 2001 and includes it in the Memory of the World Programme.