50 Things That Made the Modern Economy · BBC World Service

Gutenberg press

March 2, 2020·10 min·1 clip

A 1438 plague death triggered a court case over Johannes Gutenberg's secret art and massive debts.

The episode opens with the death of Andreas Dritzain from the plague on Christmas Day 1438 and the lawsuit his brothers filed against his business partners, which produced court documents referring to a mysterious 'secret art' — the earliest surviving evidence of Gutenberg's work on the printing press. Gutenberg had been in a secretive partnership in Strasbourg and was deeply in debt despite substantial income, concerned that competitors would copy his methods. The host explains that the fundamental challenge of movable type was not printing itself but producing enough identical metal letter forms at scale — a single page requiring roughly 3,000 characters. Gutenberg's solution came from his goldsmith background in punch-making for coins: he carved each letter as a raised punch in hard metal, stamped it into a matrix, and used a hand mould to cast the type rapidly in quantity. Oil-based ink and slightly dampened paper completed the system. In 1455, Enea Silvio Piccolomini — the future Pope Pius II — saw Gutenberg's Latin Bible and praised the quality of the type as readable without glasses. The host then shifts to the economic argument: the press's true revolution was not aesthetics but price collapse. A manuscript had cost around six months' wages for centuries; printing brought this to six days' wages, and by the early 1600s to six hours' wages. More books were printed in the first century after Gutenberg than had been hand-copied in all of European history previously. The printing business also introduced a new commercial model: unlike guild-regulated crafts such as weaving, printers operated as for-profit firms funded by merchant bankers who also organised distribution. Venice, the early industry's centre, had twelve printers in 1469 and only three by 1472. Printers learned that grammar books, papal indulgences, and short religious pamphlets were more profitable than expensive illustrated Bibles. Martin Luther's 95 Theses of 1517 are presented as a turning point, with the host and historian Elizabeth Eisenstein arguing that Luther's arguments were not unusual but that the press spread them across Europe at unprecedented speed. Wittenberg became a printing hub; Luther's German New Testament was widely reproduced; and the resulting pamphlet wars — including vicious caricatures of the Pope with a wolf's head — filled printers' pockets while sparking the Reformation and ultimately the Thirty Years' War. The host draws an explicit parallel to the internet's amplification of inflammatory rhetoric. Despite his world-historical achievement, Gutenberg could not profit from it: accumulating debt since the 1430s, he lost a court case in 1455 and was stripped of his printing press. The British Library's designation of Gutenberg as man of the millennium is acknowledged before the host notes dryly that a focus on grammar books might have served him better financially.

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