Moveable type uses individual components that can be ordered to produce a printed document. The earliest examples date back to China’s Northern Song Dynasty at the turn of the last millennium, but the enormous number of characters in scripts based on the Chinese writing system made it unwieldy. Gutenberg therefore benefited from the much smaller number of characters in the Latin alphabet, but also invented a reliable way to cast large quantities of individual metal letters using a device called the hand mould. Furthermore, he developed an oil-based ink that was optimised for metal-type printing onto paper.
Consisting of 1,286 pages, a complete copy of the Gutenberg Bible is now estimated to be worth up to $35 million dollars. The value of the printing press itself is immeasurable as Gutenberg’s creation was responsible for an intellectual revolution. Although there is no definitive evidence for this publication date, numerous independent secondary sources state 23 February.
