586 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



commercially feasible method of casting type. This discovery, which 

 enabled printing to become a business success, he communicated to Fust, 

 and the two, after getting rid of Gutenburg by a legal device, then 

 printed the famous " Great Bible " of 1456. 



The story of the invention of printing thus shows clearly that with- 

 out a strong money-making stimulus, the years of thought, labor and 

 expense necessary to make a business success of the art would not have 

 been hazarded. This money-making stimulus existed in the fifteenth 

 century but was lacking in ancient times. The first printers came on 

 the scene at the beginnings of the renaissance, when in Germany, where 

 the awakening took a religious direction, there was a strong commer- 

 cial demand for bibles and works of devotion, which was not supplied by 

 the manuscript output. Moreover, eager readers for the literature of 

 Greece and Eome and for the writings of the Church fathers could be 

 found in every European country touched by the early Eenaissance. 

 This antique and religious literature and the bible, in the Vulgate and in 

 translations, furnished the materials for the first printers till the contro- 

 versies of the Reformation brought more grist to the mill. Between 

 1456 and 1478 the new art had been exercised in Germany, the Nether- 

 lands, Italy, France, Spain and Scandinavia. By the beginning of 

 the sixteenth century it is computed that 16,000 editions of books had 

 been printed. 



On the other hand, in the Roman Empire, the popular old books 

 were already in sufficiently large manuscript circulation and what there 

 was of new material was amply cared for by the few publishing houses 

 of Alexandria and Rome. In the Roman Empire the demand either for 

 new books or for new copies of the old was too well supplied for in- 

 ventor after inventor to take up some thirty-five years in perfecting 

 movable type. It was the insight that the demand for more books 

 would afford great gain if gratified which induced the long labors which 

 ended in a practicable method of producing and using movable type. 

 No such prospect existed in antiquity. To a Roman of the Empire a 

 printing press would have seemed a commercially useless contrivance. 



Whether, of course, fragmentary printing with some rude and easily 

 produced sort of movable type, such as would be made of carved wood, 

 ever occurred at all in ancient times can not be said. Not improbably, 

 it did; the Cretan inscription, noticed above, had it been impressed on 

 papyrus by ink, would have been an example of rudimentary typog- 

 raphy. Possibly, for all we know, attempts of this sort, made for the 

 amusement or for the novelty of the thing, may have occurred time and 

 time again. 



