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The History of Printing

Writer's picture: Patrick HarlowPatrick Harlow


We are going to be talking about the history of printing, but we would be remiss if we didn’t start at the very beginning of it all. Images weren’t words in the beginning, but art, so let’s start there.


Images painted, drawn or carved onto rocks and cave walls—which have been found across the globe—reflect one of humans’ earliest forms of communication, with possible connections to language development. The earliest known images often appear abstract, and may have been symbolic, while later ones depicted animals, people and hybrid figures that perhaps carried some kind of spiritual significance.


The oldest known prehistoric art wasn't created in a cave. Drawn on a rock face in South Africa 73,000 years ago, it predates any known cave art. However, caves themselves help to protect and preserve the art on their walls, making them rich historical records for archaeologists to study. And because humans added to cave art over time, many have layers—depicting an evolution in artistic expression.




PAPYRUS – 4,000 BC

The Egyptians began using papyrus to create art and print back as far as 4000 BC. Papyrus is the ancient Egyptians’ invention for writing paper, and it was the most important writing material in the ancient world. The word “paper” is derived from “papyrus” - an ancient Egyptian term that originally meant “that which belongs to the house” or the bureaucracy of ancient Egypt.


Papyrus is a common marsh plant having a triangular reed that used to grow along the banks of the river Nile. The paper was made from the pith of a papyrus. Each stem was stripped of it is rind and cut into short pieces which were then cut lengthwise into narrow strips. The papyrus pith was kept soaked in water until the fibers become flexible and translucent.

Two layers of papyrus strips arranged at right angles were put on a hard flat object and beaten or pressed to desorb the water until they fused together. The resulting sheets were left to dry in the direct sun for several days, then they were polished and glued together to form scrolls. Interesting, huh?



SUMERIANS – 3,000 BC

The Sumerian civilization wrote on clay tablets as early as 3000 BC, long after the Egyptians. Other early forms of printing include block seals, hammered coinage, pottery imprints, and cloth printing. Cuneiform is also attributed to the Sumerians. Because some of these items were kept or passed around, coins for example, this may be the first example of commercial printing.




MONKS – 4TH Century AD

It wasn’t until the fourth century AD that the Medieval world was introduced to monastic life, in the form of a devout Egyptian Christian named Pachomius who thought it was a good idea to have an isolated space to be humbly miserable and to worship God at the same time. His concept spread rapidly throughout the Eastern Roman Empire, and with it, his expectation for all monks to be literate.


About two hundred years later in 529 AD, Benedict established Monte Cassino, a soon to be famous Italian monastery close to Rome and Naples and took literacy one step further than his predecessors. His Rule of Saint Benedict provides some guidelines for monastic life at Monte Cassino, including a section called “On Daily Manual Labor,” where reading is one of the compulsory activities built into a monk’s very regimented schedule. Soon after, Cassiodorus founded Vivarium in South Italy, and pushed for more than just idly reading texts--he made copying them yet another compulsory task. Suddenly, as per popular adoption of Cassiodorus’ Institutes rule book, copying texts of all kinds became an important (and highly pretentious) part of life in monasteries. He saw copying Biblical texts as spreading the message of the Christian religion and “fighting with pen and ink against the unlawful snares of the devil”, which seems as noble a purpose as any for devout monks to perform daily as part of their grueling manual labor. And trust me, it was grueling.



CHINA and TANG DYNASTY – 7th Century

Initially a method of printing patterns on cloth such as silk, woodblock printing for texts on paper originated in China by the 7th century during the Tang dynasty, leading to the spread of book production and woodblock printing in other parts of Asia such as Korea and Japan. The Chinese Buddhist Diamond Sutra, printed by woodblock on 11 May 868, is the earliest known printed book with a precise publishing date.




MOVABLE TYPE – 11th Century

Movable type was invented by Chinese artisan Bi Sheng in the 11th century (circa 1040) during the Song dynasty, but it received limited use compared to woodblock printing. Nevertheless, the technology spread outside China, as the oldest printed book using metal movable type was the Jikji, printed in Korea in 1377 during the Goryeo era.



WOODBLOCK PRINTING/Gutenberg Bible – 15th Century

Woodblock printing was also used in Europe until the mid-15th century. Late medieval German inventor Johannes Gutenberg created the first printing press based on previously known mechanical presses and a process for mass-producing metal type. By the end of the 15th century his invention and widescale circulation of the Gutenberg Bible became responsible for a burgeoning economical book publishing industry across Renaissance Europe and eventually among the colonial publishers and printers that emerged in the British-American colonies. This industry enabled the communication of ideas and sharing of knowledge on an unprecedented scale, leading to the global spread of the printing press during the early modern period. Alongside the development of text printing, new and lower-cost methods of image reproduction were developed, including lithography, screen printing and photocopying.


Johannes Gutenberg was an innovator of his time. He revolutionized the mechanics of the printing press, allowing it to apply a rapid but steady downward pressure. A former goldsmith, Gutenberg also pioneered the manufacture of movable type in metal pieces. His first publication is a full-length Bible in Latin (the Vulgate). No date appears in this book, which was printed simultaneously on six presses during the mid-1450s. In 1457, his first dated book is even more impressive. Known as the Mainz psalter, it achieves outstanding color printing in its two-color initial letters.


These first two publications from Germany’s presses are of an extraordinary standard, caused no doubt by the commercial need to compete with manuscripts. The new technology, so brilliantly launched, spreads rapidly.



TYPEWRITER – 1868

An American printer, Christopher Scholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is credited with inventing the first mass-produced typewriter, in 1868. Scholes’ concept was to mount printer’s type on long rods that swung towards a glass surface, which was covered with a layer of carbon paper and regular paper. When a telegraph-like key was pressed, the rod struck the carbon and left a carbon impression of the letter on the paper. Unfortunately, the keys, which were originally in alphabetical order, tended to jam when two were struck in rapid succession. Scholes’ solution was to devise a keyboard with the most common letters spread out to slow down typing; his “qwerty” keyboard is still the standard today.




OFFSET PRESS – 1875

In 1875, Robert Barclay invented the offset press for printing on metal. Then, in 1904, Ira Washington Rubel adapted the technology for paper. This indirect method of printing is based on a very simple chemical phenomenon: the repulsion between oil and water.


The printing process is anything but simple though. An offset plate is divided into two areas: the image area, which is lipophilic and therefore attracts the ink; and the non-image area, which is hydrophilic, and repels the ink. The plate is dipped in a solution that binds to the non-image area, and then inked. In this way, the ink only adheres to the image, which is then transferred first to a rubber cylinder and then printed onto the paper. The advantages of offset printing is that it generates very sharp, clean images and is high-quality printing on any type of paper, even if that paper isn’t perfectly smooth. On the other hand, the presses are bulky and need lots of maintenance.




LASER PRINTER – 1971

In 1971, the Xerox Corporation developed laser technology. In a laser printer, the content to be printed is generated by electronic processes and printed directly onto the sheet of paper. To be more precise, the laser transfers the image to a photosensitive selenium cylinder (called a “drum”) and from there, using toner, it’s directly applied to the paper. With this system, it’s possible to print around 20,000 lines a minute. Record breaking. But more importantly, from this point on, anyone could print whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, in their office or home.


Bulky, complicated and very expensive, the first laser printers were quite different from those we’re used to today. And we had to wait until 1982 for the first desktop laser printer to be released by Canon. However, its high cost meant few could afford one. It wasn’t until the beginning of the 1990s that laser printers became widely accessible to the public, along with inkjet, dot matrix and dye-sublimation printers. Ever since, printers have become ever cheaper, more compact and efficient.




3D PRINTING – 2023

We’ve reached the present day. We end our journey through time in the era of the 3D printer. This printing technology was actually developed some years ago, in 1983 to be exact, when Chuck Hull used UV rays to harden varnishes. The engineer baptized his invention “stereolithography”: a method that allows solid objects to be created by adding overlapping layers of a photosensitive liquid polymer which has been struck by UV light. But where does it start from? From a 3D model produced by modelling software, like Blender, AutoCAD or OpenSCAD.


Today, there are various technologies for 3D printing. They mainly differ in the way that they assemble different layers: they can use materials that are melted by heat, liquid materials that are hardened or materials that are laminated and bound together.

It has taken years for 3D printing to become widely used. Why? Because the cost of this technology was initially extremely high. But now 3D printing is used in many fields – from architecture to archaeology, from art to healthcare – with more being added all the time.

What will the next step in the history of printing be? We can’t wait to find out and continue this journey with you.



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