“Creation is the Lord’s providence; the man who made this invention was touched by God.”                                                           Peter Schoeffer

 August 1454 – Frankfurt, Germany: Johann Gutenberg took his Bibles to the Autumn Fair, a two-week trade fair, at St. Bartholomew’s Cathedral in Frankfurt. He rented a booth in the bookseller’s fine manuscripts section and waited for the world to notice his new Bible.

By 10 a.m., there was a steady stream of people, including clergy members. A priest stared at Gutenberg’s open Bible, “What manner of writing is this? What instrument has done these lines?” Gutenberg responded, “It is a new technique. It is a gift divine, a miracle from God.”

The priest glared, “A miracle? It is a Godless counterfeit of the blessed work done by monks. Only devilry could make this print. This is blasphemy.” The priest mumbled as he walked away. Despite the skeptics, Gutenberg sold 20 Bibles in the first three hours.

Gutenberg grew up in Mainz on the Rhine River, about 25 miles from Frankfurt. He loved books and read every one of them owned by his wealthy father, a cloth merchant. He was educated in reading and arithmetic and attended the University of Erfurt briefly before moving to Strasbourg, France.

While walking in an orchard in St. Arbogast parish in Strasbourg, Gutenberg first thought of printing letters on paper. “I knew then that was how I would make my mark,” he recalled. “Books were something everyone would need, but only the rich could afford.” At the time, books, which were mainly of a religious nature, were written by hand by monks in monasteries. It was a tedious, time-consuming, costly, error-prone process.

In the early 1440s, Gutenberg apprenticed as a metalsmith, working with copper, tin, and lead. He made and sold trinkets, rings, hooks, buckles, plates, and candle sticks while he tinkered with a machine to print books. After toiling for almost a decade to make his printing press work and spending all his money, Gutenberg returned to his hometown in 1450 looking for an investor.

Johann Fust, a prominent merchant, loaned Gutenberg 2,000 guilders (roughly $250,000 today) to hire four workers and set up a print shop in the basement of Gutenberg’s small house on Cobbler Lane. He decided to print the Latin Bible, the only book he could print without the approval of the Catholic church, so long as he adhered to the accepted version.

Although woodblock printing had existed in China for 500 years, Gutenberg’s design featured metal letters made from lead, tin, or copper in a movable tray. His machine was a modified grape press used by farmers, and he created a new kind of ink made from linseed oil and lampblack.

It took Gutenberg’s crew a year to make the estimated 20,000 letters they would need to print the Bible and two years to finalize the design of the printing machine. After working six days a week for almost two years and experiencing numerous trials and errors, on August 30, 1452, they were ready to begin printing. Gutenberg prayed, “May God Almighty bless this work.” They printed, “In principio creativ Deus caelum et terram,” (In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…)

Gutenberg only produced three pages in the first ten days. There were many rejects stacked high in the corner and lots of learning. In five months, he was only 10% complete. The crew built a second press and hired three more people to operate it. In August 1453, they began the New Testament. Day after day, the presses ground, and the excitement grew.

Finally, on August 22, 1454, as the sun set, 60-year-old Johann Gutenberg watched as the last page came off the press. Gutenberg’s Bible was two volumes totaling 1286 pages and weighing 14 pounds. A week later, Gutenberg headed for the Frankfurt trade fair.

Before the Autumn Fair ended, the old inventor had sold all 180 copies of the Bible from his initial run, including a Bible for the German Kaiser, Weiner Neustadt, who after examining the pages, proclaimed the work, “Miraculous!”

Gutenberg’s invention would change the world like nothing before it. Within 50 years, printing presses were in more than 250 large cities across Europe. By 1500, less than 50 years later, more than 20 million books had been printed. Gutenberg’s medieval machine was so capable that it remained virtually unchanged for 300 years.

In 1997, Life magazine chose Johann Gutenberg’s printing press as the most important invention and Gutenberg as the most important person of the second millennium. Today, two original copies of Gutenberg’s Bible can be found in the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz.