The Printing Press − 1 January, 1450
(submitted by Gregory Allen)
The written word is the crowning achievement of the human race. It allows us to take our individual knowledge and commit it to a permanent form that can be shared with other communities and other generations. For millenia, this sharing was like a trickle of water coming through a crack in a dam. The difficulties of manually copying a text, a process that could take up to a year and involve multiple people, made books a great way to preserve knowledge but a miserable way to spread it.
In the late 1440's, an unusual combination of skills came together in a single person and turned the trickle into a flood. By 1450, Johannes Gutenberg had combined a knowledge of chemistry, metallurgy and wine production into a working printing press that could turn out books in a fraction of the time required by labor-intensive hand copying. (To be specific, Gutenberg created his own ink, produced his own metallic type and was familiar with the design of wine presses.) This invention would revolutionize not only printing and education but would make possible the scientific advances that would make the modern interpretation of distance learning possible.
Johannes Gutenberg. Retrieved January 28, 2007, from Wikipedia Web site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg
Comments:
DistEd (January 29, 2007. 02:35am)
Trends in Technology c. 1450.
(posted by Gregory Allen)
In the mid-fifteenth century distance education was limited to itinerant monks traveling between cities and villages. The immediate impact of Gutenberg's press on distance education was minimal. His books were less expensive but still not cheap. They took less time to produce but were still relatively labor intensive. Over the course of the next century, however, printing would quickly become an established industry. The easy access to research that it afforded would be a major catalyst for the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, ultimately giving rise to the technological innovations, e.g. computers, video and the Internet, that are cornerstones of modern distance education.
Johannes Gutenberg. Retrieved January 28, 2007, from Wikipedia Web site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg