When you think about really important people in history there are always the usual people who pop up. Why, who wouldn't immediately envision Christopher Columbus standing there smugly with a captain's hat on and a globe at his side just to help you remember he discovered half of the blue ball we call home. Maybe you see George Washington in his white powdered wig sitting in the middle of an early congressional meeting. Galileo looking up towards the stars or Martin Luther pouring over books in his snuggie like robes. Don't get me wrong, all these guys are really important and have played big parts in how our world came to be what it is. There is one person though who without him none of this could have ever happened and I almost guarantee you don't know his name unless you are a history nut like me. That man is Johannes Gutenberg.
Who Is Johannes Gutenberg?
With a name like Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, it isn't hard to see why a lot of people lose his name in the others we hear in History classes. The German native was born in the year 1400, a short time before the Renaissance, Martin Luther's Reformation and the discovery of the New World. We really don't know too much about his personal life aside from the fact that before becoming possibly the most important person who people haven't considered a Messiah yet. What we do know is that he was a Goldsmith, meaning that he knew a lot about the process of forgery and other metal skills. This was an exceptionally important trade at the time and would eventually lead to him developing a machine that would not just put him in textbooks, but be the reason we even have textbooks.
What Did He Do?
In 1450, Gutenberg would amaze the people of Germany when he presented them with his "little secret", a machine that for a year now he had been working on that he claimed the idea of had just popped into his head like a ray of light. This machine was a wooden machine that used moving parts to press letters onto paper and through this machine, he was able to effectively print a poem. After this success, Gutenberg would pursue a new project of using his machine to print a copy of the Bible and he ended up printing at least 180 copies of what has become known as the Gutenberg Bible. Up until this time writing was done by hand and took an extremely long time due to this fact. This also meant that books were in short supply and as is typical when there isn't much of something only the richest or most notable actually get it. For Gutenberg's time this meant that most of the population of Europe could not actually read or write with them instead learning from books that were read to them by nobles and especially members of religious clergies. Gutenberg's machine meant that books could now be produced literally 1000 times faster than before and would end up spurring literacy for the public, a general increase in knowledge for all and be the driving force of almost all of the soon to occur major events such as the Renaissance, Martin Luther's Reformation, and the discovery of the New World. Gutenberg did not get to see this come to light though as he ended up losing a court case over money he borrowed to create his printing press. He would die in 1468 as a financially unsuccessful man who barely anyone knew the name of.
Why Should I Care?
It always amazes me that we are taught so little about Gutenberg and what he did. I maybe heard his name twice during high school with those times being brief mentions in world history textbooks or as the answer to a trivia question. Without Gutenberg, almost none of the major events of the late 1400's and early 1500's could not have occurred and without them, nothing after them could have occurred like it did! Remove Gutenberg and literally all of human history in the past 500 years is changed. Just take a second from reading this and imagine for a second a world where you couldn't be reading this nice article with its standard fonts that took me at most a few hours to create including my research time and instead were reading it in a handwritten form that would have took me days to write after research considering I would also have to write down all of the notes I took researching and the works I would be researching were also handwritten! Heck, chances are you wouldn't even be able to read unless you were someone exceptionally important. Without Gutenberg, we almost literally go back to the Dark Ages with us living in a world that is plagued by ignorance and lack of communication. So please, next time you want to think of someone who changed the world maybe don't point to the guy with a million portraits and a funny hairdo with his name engraved in gold, and instead remember the poor German who had to come up with a way to write the other guys name so you could know it.
