Johannes Gutenberg

Life and work

Gutenberg was born in Mainz to a patrician family and trained in metalworking, likely as a goldsmith. Around 1440, working in Strasbourg and later Mainz, he began developing a system of movable metal type, an adjustable mold for casting individual letters, oil-based ink, and a modified wine press for printing.

Financed by the businessman Johann Fust, Gutenberg produced his masterpiece around 1455: a Latin Bible printed with movable type, of stunning quality that rivaled hand-copied manuscripts. Roughly 180 copies were produced, of which around 49 survive today, some complete.

A legal dispute with Fust in 1455 stripped Gutenberg of his press and much of his equipment, and he died in relative obscurity in 1468, receiving little of the credit or profit for an invention that would transform European society.

Printing spread with extraordinary speed across Europe in the following decades, radically lowering the cost of books, accelerating literacy, and — crucially for church history — enabling the rapid, wide distribution of vernacular Bibles and Reformation pamphlets that Martin Luther and others would exploit within a generation.

Further reading

• Encyclopedia Britannica: Johannes Gutenberg