Inventions in Reading and Writing by MacPherson Cory;

Author:MacPherson, Cory; [MacPherson, Cory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing LLC

BI SHENG: MOVABLE TYPE MOVES ON

In 1045 CE, Bi Sheng had the idea to inscribe each character into a token, made out of clay, for printing. He applied wax and paper ash to an iron plate, then carefully arranged each tile side by side across the wax. After he warmed the whole plate, he could use another flat surface to press the tiles evenly into the malleable wax, ensuring that the tiles were set at a uniform depth. The ingenuity of this design solved the major problem in wood-block printing—printers no longer needed to recarve characters for each page. But China continued to use the more economical—if less efficient—wood-blocking method, perhaps partly because of the unwieldy nature of having to create and store thousands of characters for Chinese movable type, and perhaps because Bi Sheng was a commoner, not part of the imperial court. Later advances—like Hua Sui’s invention of bronze movable type in 1490—were roughly parallel to the Gutenberg press. Consequently, Western historical accounts tend to overlook Bi Sheng’s invention of movable type in favor of the more sensational story about Gutenberg and his revolutionary printing press. Movable type may have been an experiment at the time, but it was a major breakthrough in printing technology, instrumental to Gutenberg’s press.

By virtue of location, Korea’s literary development was highly influenced by China’s cultural and technological advancements—Korean script and paper were both adapted from China. Around the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Korean court called for a new writing system that was easier to use than the bulky Chinese script. Streamlined to twenty-eight fundamental signs, the new script, Hangul, was easier to learn and read. In order to accommodate the growing demand for books, Korea engineered a more functional version of Bi Sheng’s model with durable casts made out of bronze instead of clay. A Korean Buddhist text, the Jikji, which roughly means “collection of Buddhist Zen teachings,” was printed with metal movable type in 1377, and is certified by UNESCO as the world’s oldest extant (surviving) book printed with metalloid type, seventy-eight years prior to Gutenberg’s famous Bible. Because of this innovation, print production flourished in Korea and lay the groundwork for the future of print in the West.

Korean script, or Hangul, has a square design so that the characters can be written and read easily.

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