[HN Gopher] The Buddhist history of moveable type before Gutenbe...
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The Buddhist history of moveable type before Gutenberg (2016)
Author : krig
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-04-09 07:01 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tricycle.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (tricycle.org)
| benjohnson wrote:
| This article missed the point. Gutenberg didn't invent metal
| movable type and that's not why we remember him. He invented
| making a repeatable casting method with appropriate alloys for
| metal type that had accurate enough uniform dimensions that he
| could to use a wine press mechanism to press paper onto the
| uniform surface.
|
| The molding method he made was astounding clever and went far
| beyond using basically metal coin minting process that has
| existed for thousands of years around the world.
| dbt00 wrote:
| Gutenberg's place in history is as the man who ushered in the
| printing press and commodity publishing in the west. Whether or
| not he was the first ever to do it isn't relevant to that
| history, but I do think knowing that other people were onto
| similar ideas is interesting. Just like in 100 years the iPhone
| will be "the first smartphone", and people will learn about
| blackberries and palmpilots in random little "did you know"
| snippets...
| jlg23 wrote:
| Or it's the place in history of a man who provided a tool
| that allowed dissemination of "heretic" ideas, thus enabling
| reformation.
| mymythisisthis wrote:
| He was interrupted printing the Bible, the Pope asked him to
| print indulgences. Indulgences were sold, to raise money for
| the Papacy. Enter Martin Luther and the Protestants
| Reformation.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's like the arguments that Edison didn't invent the
| lightbulb. Other inventors had made glowing wires before. But
| Edison's great insight was to pass high voltage but low current
| through the filament (previous inventors used low voltage and
| high current). Edison also used an effective vacuum machine to
| prevent the filament from burning.
|
| The result was a _practical_ light bulb, one that lasted more
| than moments, and did not consume vast amounts of power.
| Retric wrote:
| It's a little more complicated, lightbulbs where very much a
| useful thing before Edison and several other improvements
| occurred from 1802 to Edison's 1879 patent and the actual
| breakthrough of a cheap bulb reaching 1200 hours occurred
| after that patent. Warren de la Rue for example had an
| efficient and long lasting design that was simply to
| expensive for mass production. Henry Woodward is arguably the
| first inventor of a practical bulb using carbon rods in
| nitrogen filled bulbs, though his business failed and he sold
| the patent to Edison.
|
| Critically, it was really electric infrastructure more than
| the physical bulb design that resulted in GE's success. Arc
| lamp's had become very popular for street lighting through
| the 1870's, which really set the stage for lighting
| alternatives.
| hoophoop wrote:
| > that's not why we remember him
|
| 99% of people believe that he single-handedly invented the
| press with movable type. Ask around.
| bumbada wrote:
| The travels of Marco Polo(1300) talks about books in China so
| cheap that people could actually buy them as they are made from
| woodblocks.
|
| But "cheap" here is not the price of a book today. A book
| requires someone spending at least a year writing it, specially
| in the past, with very bad lighting after sunset or in bad
| weather. That usually meant a book costing the equivalent of a
| car today, or even more expensive.
|
| Chinese books were cheap compared to buying a car but way more
| expensive than today. And very few books could justify the
| investment of creating the woodblocks.
|
| Gutenberg probably got the idea from Marco Polo,woodblock was
| already used for graphics in Europe, but added his knowledge with
| metal working and invented an alloy that expands as it cools
| down. That is extremely rare in metals, almost all of them
| contract.
|
| That unique property gave Gutenberg type its incredible quality.
|
| Also, Gutenberg knowledge of metal made him create a method that
| let you recreate the type very easily again and again when the
| type wears out.
|
| And then he added the concept of the press and the distributor of
| ink that were taken from other professions like olive oil and
| wine makers(something as old as Romans in Europe).
| agumonkey wrote:
| was the expanding easy to control ? seems to me naive eyes that
| expanding on cooldown would lead to graphical issues too.
| a11r wrote:
| The timing is interesting. According to the article, one of the
| reasons this did not succeed more broadly was due to the large
| number of characters in the script adapted from the chinese
| writing system. The invention of Hangual a couple of centuries
| later did bring to Korea a script with dozens of letters instead
| of thousands. If the modern script was invented first, perhaps we
| would be crediting Korea as the birthplace of the printing press.
|
| edit:fixed typo
| selimthegrim wrote:
| - Uyghurs were Manichaeans too
|
| - pretty sure the neighboring Tangut (Western Xia) had printed
| books too (maybe courtesy of the Uyghurs?)
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auspicious_Tantra_of_All-Rea...
| sammalloy wrote:
| It seems the difference is that the Korean Jikji (1377) is
| considered the oldest extant book printed with movable metal
| type, while the Tangut book (1139?) found in China is the
| oldest extant book printed using wooden movable type.
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(page generated 2021-04-09 23:01 UTC)