Knowledge and Blood: Lessons from the First Information Revolution

In 1453, a shadowy, disagreeable man brought his new invention to a recently established commercial fair in Frankfurt.  He had toiled tirelessly on his breakthrough idea in total secrecy for more than twenty years and gone deeply into debt to produce the prototype, forced repeatedly to ward off his creditors with assurances that he, and they, were on the verge of amassing a great fortune. 

Near the end of his quest, this innovator worked even more furiously, fearing that another among the dozens of would-be competitors would create a device to satisfy the burgeoning demand for similar products.  On that score, he need not have been concerned.  Not only was he first, but his process was so ingenious, so unique, that his technology remained the standard for more than five hundred years.  Still, while the fortune he had promised his investors was realized, this man, of whom we know very little, including what he looked like, his date of birth, and where and when he died, did not see a penny of it. 

He was, of course, Johann Gutenberg and his invention was the means to print books using movable type. 

In the wake of the plague-ridden 14^th century, Europe had seen an explosion of commerce and new-found wealth among those lucky enough to survive, which in turn created a need for a more lettered merchant and clerical class.  Although literacy had vastly increased, for all but a few, reading did not come easily.  Books, the vast majority of which were owned by the Church, could only be laboriously fashioned, either one at a time by scribes, or even more inefficiently with block printing.  With supply limited by antiquated methods, finding reading material was no easy task for anyone in secular society.

Gutenberg changed all that. 

There was not a single element of the printing process he did not revolutionize.  Gutenberg created the design of the type and then a mold to produce the actual letters, a sliding-walled box that would ensure that each letter was the exact same height while accommodating the letters’ different widths.  He developed a linseed oil-based lampblack ink that would adhere to the typeface, transfer to the paper without smearing, and then dry uniform and black.  He invented a jig to hold a page of letters, and then a press, modeled on a wine press, to hold the paper against the type and create a clear, sharp image.

When Gutenberg took a sample of his work, pages of, what else, the Bible, to Frankfurt, the reaction was amazement.  By November 1455, his Bible was complete, 42 lines to a page, and Gutenberg had ushered in a new age.  Unfortunately, before the riches began rolling in, one of his creditors, Johann Fust, sued to foreclose on the outstanding loans and, after installing his son-in-law, Peter Schoeffer, to run the business, kicked Gutenberg out and left him penniless, which is how Gutenberg remained until his death sometime around 1468.

Fust and Schoeffer raked in the revenue that should have been Gutenberg’s, but they could not prevent imitators from springing up all through Europe.  Although the printed word had become more widely available, however, books remained large, clumsy, and unwieldy to transport.  That was because the standard piece of printing paper was roughly 26x21 inches, which Gutenberg folded once to create a “folio,” with, after trimming, four 12x18 pages per sheet.   Not exactly something one could curl up with in bed.

As demand increased, especially among the non-clerical classes, some printers began to fold the paper twice to create a “quarto,” which produced an eight page “gathering,” the edges of which were sliced open where appropriate.  While quartos could be transported more easily and therefore got wider distribution, they were still not an item that the average person would consider convenient to tote around.

If the folio could be thought of as a large mainframe computer and the quarto a desktop, the next natural step would be to create the equivalent of the personal computer, something easily carried and transported.

In 1500, an Italian named Aldo Manuzio, who had Latinized his name to Aldus Manutius, did just that.  Folding the paper three times, he produced a gathering of sixteen 6x9 inch pages, an “octavo,” a design that should be familiar to today’s readers, as it is the size of a modern hardcover.  Aldus was interested in content, not flourishes, so, to fit more words on a page and thus get more content into each book, he developed a slanted script, which he called “italics.”

These new, elegant editions produced by the Aldine Press were marked with a dolphin and anchor printers mark, still in use by Doubleday, which meant “make haste slowly.”  They were the first books that could fit in saddlebags, and almost immediately found their way across Europe to be devoured by eager readers who, like early internet users, now had access to content previously unavailable to them. 

But, also like the early internet, it would be the content itself that would make the biggest impact.  At first, Aldus restricted his output to Greek and Latin classics, such as the works of Aristotle and The Story of Hero and Leander.  Print runs began at 250 and, when virtually everything he printed immediately sold out, he upped his runs to one thousand and soon afterward doubled that.

Within a few years, a strange phenomenon occurred.  While taking in information had lost none of its allure, some wondered, why not also put it out?  Why restrict printing to what long dead Greeks and Romans had written?  Why not publish our own authors as well?

The idea took.  Like bloggers, any number of wits, philosophers, and commentators were able to use this new medium to get their opinions out into the population.  Many were trivial and soon forgotten but others became famous as what today would be termed “influencers.”  The most famous of these was Desiderius Erasmus, whose books, such as In Praise of Folly, were filled with pithy aphorisms, including “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” “Fortune favors the bold,” and “He who allows oppression, shares the crime.”  He was soon one of the best-known figures in Europe.

But, like internet content, publishing soon turned deadly serious.  In late 1517, a young theology professor, Martin Luther, disgusted at the profligacy he had witnessed on a visit to Rome, wrote his “95 Theses,” in Latin, which he then delivered to the archbishop of Mainz, which, ironically, had been Gutenberg’s home city.  Luther had not sought to make his scathing criticism of the Catholic church public—a century earlier, another critic, Jan Hus, had been burned at the stake for a similar endeavor.

But Jan Hus did not have printed books to protect him.  Luther did. 

An insignificant local printer named Hans Lufft got hold of the text. He translated the Latin into the vernacular, and, working round the clock, produced more than two-thousand copies.  Within weeks, Luther’s work had spread across Germany, and soon through the rest of Europe.  Erasmus became one his great defenders.  “Luther was guilty of two great crimes,” he wrote.  “He struck the Pope in his crown, and the monks in their belly.”  He later warned, “By burning Luther’s books, you may rid your bookshelves of him, but you will not rid men's minds of him.”

And so, when Emperor Charles V summoned Luther and demanded he repent, Luther, by then a celebrity, was able to reply, “Here I stand”—effectively, “go jump in the lake”—and escape punishment.

And so began the Protestant Reformation.

It did not take long for the adherents of the new religion and the old religion to begin killing one another, a bloodletting that would last more than a century and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.  And, although the Wars of Religion have largely ended—at least the wars of those religions—the mutual loathing of Catholics and Protestants often persists today, five centuries later.

But information technology had other effects as well.  Science, medicine, agriculture, and industry all leapt forward, powered by the ability of great ideas to spawn even greater ideas through the power of the printed word.

The advances were not limited to hard science.  Social philosophers began to raise questions about nature of humankind and the need for government to serve the people as well as to exploit them.  Some, such as John Locke, spurred a movement we have come to know as the Enlightenment, populated by brilliant, penetrating thinkers like Voltaire and Montesquieu, whose ideas made their way across the Atlantic and helped spark the American Revolution…and us.

In today’s world, electronic communication has created similar extremes.  The advances in science, medicine, and commercial technology have been nothing short of astonishing.  But, alas, they walk side by side with renewed and deepened hatred, just as they did half a millennium ago.  Even the wars of religion have been reborn, with radical Islam one of the players.

The effects of the first information revolution took centuries to play out, but the modern world moves much, much faster, with far more people and far more destructive weapons.  The very existence of larger populations crammed into smaller spaces, surrounded by a deteriorating environment, has produced a frighteningly combustible brew. 

But we should also have come to understand how to harness the good that modern technology can do and use it to fight the bad. 

Our survival may depend how well those lessons have been learned.