Gutenberg’s family was involved with the striking of imperial coins in
the local mint, and he grew up acquainted with the tools of the trade,
including punches, molds, and dies. “The startling conclusion is that
Johannes Gutenberg, from his childhood, was in the company of men who
could carve a letter in steel that had at least six, and perhaps sixty, times
the resolution of a modern laser printer, just at the time that King
Sigismund gave Mainz the right to make imperial coins, with a consequent
demand for new designs, and new punches.”^11
All of the constituent parts needed to craft a printing press were
available to a tinkerer in the Rhineland in the early 15th century. Presses,
with their massive wooden screws and crank arms, had been used since
ancient times to make wine and extract oil, and more recently to squeeze
paper dry. Punches were common among craftsmen for making medals,
coins, armor, and decorations. Paper had arrived several centuries earlier
from China and ink was well known to textile manufacturers. The time
was ripe for an innovator who could connect the dots and start a
revolution.
Gutenberg grew up in a family of goldsmiths, and would have witnessed
the painstaking graving of individual letter punches. It is estimated that it
would take a skilled punch-maker an entire day to make a single punch; it
would require about three thousand punches for a standard printed page.^12
That would require a coterie of ten punch-makers working an entire year
to make enough punches to print a single page. “A complete nightmare,
economically a nonstarter, totally impractical, ten times worse than
working with Chinese.”^13 Johannes Gutenberg’s big idea was not
moveable type itself, and not even the punch: his breakthrough
contribution was the ingenious idea to make a mold and to make the mold
reusable.
The fabrication of a recyclable form, or mold, saved breaking the mold
every time a letter was cast. Two blocks, in the three-dimensional shape of
the letter L were nestled together around the matrix. An iron spring held
the divisible form together, and this mitered type had the additional
advantage of creating letters that had the same dimensions, thus creating a
visually appealing print. The basis of Gutenberg’s media revolution was
therefore the process of: punch (patrix), matrix, hand mold, and type. He
changed the world—not by “inventing the printing press,” as is commonly