Discovery of Printing

The discovery of making paper or papyrus in Egypt had spurred great enthusiasm among the ancient scribes because it imparts ease and speed of transcribing their pictographic scripts which previously were done clumsily through carving into wooden tablets, stones and wet clay pads.

But with papyrus’ potential as an excellent transcribing medium, it still was in those days “writing” in its purest sense of the word was still an arduous task for those scribes.

It takes more than 3000 years until the Chinese Cai Lun, a government official of the Eastern Han dynasty’s invention of the progenitor to our modern paper that another very important discovery which was being developed which eliminated the arduous undertaking of writing scripts came into being.

The discovery of printing during that time though in its infancy was at the time had already automated the process of writing scripts. Block printing which was the earliest process of printing still had so many inconveniences aside from being very time-consuming because this required carving a whole block for each page.

The need for a faster and more convenient way to print spurred the discovery and development of the movable type method of printing which was discovered by Pi Sheng during the Ch’ing-li period (1041 AD - 1048 AD).

This method is done by carving into wood only all of the more than two thousand Chinese characters instead of a whole non reusable block for each page and thus greatly simplified the printing process because it needs only to carve and assemble the carved characters which could now be rearranged and reused many times over and thus hastened the spread of knowledge among the Chinese literates during those days but did not have significant impact on the majority of the people and was only confined within their society.

It was not until three hundred years later on the early part of the 15th century that the development of the movable type in Germany by John Guttenberg spurred the further development of the printing press because it has now made knowledge universal and thus revolutionized the Western World more than what happened in China few hundred years earlier.

Most people today would agree that the discovery of printing dwarfs into inferiority every human invention when compared to it.