10 Lost Inventions: That Might Have Changed The World As We Know It (How Bizarre! With No End In Sight!) by Michael Arangua & Pat Perrin & Wim Coleman

Author:Michael Arangua & Pat Perrin & Wim Coleman [Arangua, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

6. Sixty Thousand Moving Pieces

Gunpowder, the navigational compass, and the printing press …

The great English thinker Sir Francis Bacon wrote glowingly about these inventions in his 1620 book Novum Organum. “For these three,” he said, “have changed the whole face and stage of things throughout the world … insomuch that no empire, no sect, no star, seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these three mechanical discoveries.”

The thing was, Sir Francis didn’t know where any of these inventions had come from. He only knew that they were “unknown to the ancients,” namely the Greeks and Romans, and were of recent but “obscure” origin. As for printing, it seems a bit surprising that the name Johannes Gutenberg didn’t pop into Bacon’s mind. Gutenberg had perfected the use of movable type and printed his famous edition of the Bible in the 1450s. But printing really originated much longer ago in the Far East, as did those other two game-changing inventions, gunpowder and the compass.

During the Han Dynasty sometime before AD 220, the Chinese used wooden blocks to press images of flowers onto silk. Around the seventh century, they started printing on paper, another world-altering Chinese invention that had appeared in AD 105.

The oldest complete printed book that still exists is a copy of the Diamond Sutra, a classic first-century Buddhist text. Issued on May 11, 868, its text and images were printed entirely from large, meticulously carved wooden blocks. It was a troublesome process, because individual blocks had to be carved for every single page, and whole new sets of blocks for every new book that came along. Nevertheless, whole-block printing had a great impact on Chinese culture, lowering the price of books, spreading literacy, and helping the growth of drama and other forms of popular entertainment.

A couple of hundred years later during the Ch’ing-li period (1041-1048), an obscure alchemist named Bi Sheng devised the world’s first movable type. He began by shaping individual characters from glue and clay and baking them into hard porcelain. Then he smeared a mixture of turpentine, resin, wax, and paper ash onto a metal sheet, positioned the ceramic characters onto it, fastened them with an iron strap, and baked them into place over a low fire. He then had a printing plate, which was inked and pressed against paper. By re-heating the plate he could loosen and remove the characters to use again for another text. A few books printed by this method survive, including Zhou Bida’s Notes of The Jade Hall, published in 1139. The Chinese also used wooden movable type, starting around 1297.

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