Movable Type

Movable type—the process of using interchangeable parts to create a page rather than carving/casting an entire page—revolutionized the production of the written word.

Prior to using movable type, pages were printed by carving an entire wooden block...backwards. One mis-carved letter would prompt the carver to start with a new block. Even without typos the process was time-consuming, and a block could only be used for that one page. Moreover, the ink would eventually soak into the wood, not just sit on it, softening the wood so that the letters lost their sharpness.

The invention of movable type is credited to Bi Sheng, whose process was described by a Chinese scholar, Shen Kuo:

During the reign of Chingli ..., 1041–1048, Bi Sheng, a man of unofficial position, made movable type. His method was as follows: he took sticky clay and cut in its characters as thin as the edge of a coin. Each character formed, as it were, a single type. He baked them in the fire to make them hard. He had previously prepared an iron plate and he had covered his plate with a mixture of pine resin, wax, and paper ashes. When he wished to print, he took an iron frame and set it on the iron plate. In this, he placed the types, set close together. When the frame was full, the whole made one solid block of type. [Dream Pool Essays, 11th century]

As seen in the illustration above, Chinese needed many more individual blocks to accommodate the characters in the Chinese writing system.

Korea developed movable type, but the process was more laborious than Bi Sheng's carving into clay:

At first, one cuts letters in beech wood. One fills a trough level with fine sandy [clay] of the reed-growing seashore. Wood-cut letters are pressed into the sand, then the impressions become negative and form letters [moulds]. At this step, placing one trough together with another, one pours the molten bronze down into an opening. The fluid flows in, filling these negative moulds, one by one becoming type. Lastly, one scrapes and files off the irregularities, and piles them up to be arranged. [Thomas Christensen (2007). "Did East Asian Printing Traditions Influence the European Renaissance?" Arts of Asia Magazine. 2006-10-18.]

The large number of individual characters needed for Korean—Korean used Chinese characters in a system they called hanja—made this process laborious. A solution was found several years before Gutenberg: Sejong the Great created a simplified alphabet of only 24 characters—called hangul—that would speed up the process of setting type. This did not catch on, however, as the elite refused to give up hanja in favor of making things easier for the masses. Another reason why movable type did not take off in Korea as it would in Europe under Gutenberg was a Confucian prohibition: the new printing method was only to be applied to government publications.

Johannes Gutenberg is described as having perfected movable type because of his experience with metals: he figured more efficient ways to make the numerous letters he needed to be able to compose many pages at once.

Although the oldest books extant made with movable type are Asian—the oldest extant book printed with movable type is Korean, made 78 years prior to Gutenberg's invention—there is no evidence that Asia influenced Europe. Gutenberg's method that produced cheap copies of books revolutionized scholarship and learning.

There was one more thing Gutenberg did that changed printing, and it never gets mentioned although in its way it is significant as part of the printing process. Tomorrow I'll tell you about something you see and use every day and don't give a moment's thought: ink.

The Abacus

After mentioning Fibonacci's work, the Liber Abacus, it occurred to me that the place of the abacus in history deserved a little attention.

The Salamis Tablet, 300 BCE

Like the etymology for book, the word "abacus" does not start out to "mean" a frame with wires and beads. The word "abacus" first enters print in the English language in 1387. The Latin word from which it is lifted refers to a sandboard, a counting board covered in sand that allows you to draw with your finger. Latin took the word from the Greek abax, abakos, a board covered with sand for the purpose of drawing figures and calculating. At some point, the sand was replaced with counters of wood or stone that were moved from column to column for calculations, and the board itself was designed to facilitate calculations

In 1846, on the island of Salamis, a white marble counting board was discovered. The Salamis Tablet has been studied extensively, and one scholar has made a video of its proper use.

But when did abacus come to refer to the wooden frame with beads on wires? A reconstruction of a 1st century Roman abacus shows a board with grooves to keep the round beads in line. Visually, it resembles the abacus with which we are familiar. Gerbert of Aurillac (c.946-1003), one of the most influential scientific minds of his era, pushed the use of the abacus as a method of calculating much more swiftly than when using Roman numerals. He was able to promote its use even more when he became Pope Sylvester II.

The abacus in the form we think of it seems to come from China in the 2nd century BCE. Called a suanpán ("counting tray"), it was built with rods that held beads, 2 on an upper deck and 5 on a lower. Now called the "2/5 abacus," the two decks allowed the user to use larger numbers without adding 1+1+1+1, etc. Other versions had different numbers of rods, and different numbers of beads on them.

Abacus showing 87,654,321

Visually, it is very much like the Roman abacus mentioned above. Commerce between Rome and China was not unknown, but a direct influence cannot be proven. Still, the wooden-framed Chinese suanpán was so much like the Roman abacus that it was natural that the West would use the same name for the new device. In fact, no one type of the many objects used for calculating universally replaced the others. Counting boards of clay or wax were used well past the Middle Ages. In fact, until just after 2000, some accounting schools in China required proficiency in using the bead abacus.