1Before the fifteenth century, every book in Europe was copied by hand, a slow and expensive process.
2Monks spent months producing a single Bible, and only the wealthy could ever own books.
3Johannes Gutenberg, a skilled goldsmith from the German city of Mainz, changed this situation forever with movable metal type.
4His press could print hundreds of pages in the time one scribe finished a single page.
5The famous Gutenberg Bible, printed around the year fourteen fifty-five, remains a true masterpiece of early printing.
6Within just fifty years, printing presses had spread from Mainz to nearly every major city across Europe.
7As books became dramatically cheaper, ordinary townspeople and farmers slowly began to learn how to read.
8Bold new ideas about science, religion, and politics could now travel faster than ever before in human history.
9The Protestant Reformation spread with astonishing speed because pamphlets and translated Bibles reached millions of ordinary readers.
10Many historians today regard the printing press as the single most important invention of the last millennium.
11Without Gutenberg's quiet breakthrough, the modern world of newspapers, schools, and mass communication would be simply unthinkable.