Highlands Ranch High School - Mr. Sedivy
Highlands Ranch, Colorado

- World History -
The Most Important Invention
of the Renaissance

The Printing Press

The printing press was invented by Johann Gutenburg, a German, in the 1450s. The printing press allowed the Renaissance to spread because it made new ideas available to a much larger audience. More books were written in the vernacular, rather than in Latin.

Johann Gutenberg inspects a printed sheet that has just come off his new press.
Click the illustration for an enlargement.

Johann Gutenberg (1395 - 1468)
Johann Gutenberg was a German goldsmith. In his day, people slowly copied books by hand or printed them from wooden blocks where each letter of every page had to be carved separately. Gutenberg learned to make metal letters that he called "type." He could pick up the letters and place them in rows to build pages. Each page was held together by a frame. Gutenberg fixed the frame to a press and pressed the inky surface of his type onto sheets of paper. Gutenberg's movable type helped him to make copies of books faster and more cheaply than ever before. Despite the importance of his achievenent, he never made much money from it.

One of Gutenberg's first books was a Bible, printed in Latin in 1455.