Great Innovators

Johannes Gutenberg, a creator of the Renaissance, invented one of the greatest devices of all time, the printing press. Gutenberg was born in 1398 in Mainz, Germany to his parents, Friele and Else Gensfliesch. He also had two brothers. Not many people during Gutenberg’s time could read. But he was determined to be able to read. The only books back then were written by hand by monks and were very hard to come by. These books were also very expensive and would take a couple months to make. Because of this inconvenience, all books were preordered ahead of time so that the monks could have enough time to write them and get them to the person buying them when they needed the book. Gutenberg had a few other jobs before he became an inventor. He was a gemstone cutter and polisher and he was also a goldsmith before his inventing days. He also made designs in metal; this is where all his ideas and thinking began.

When Gutenberg began his thinking he wanted to create something that would help everyone around the world spread their ideas and make copies of books faster than the monks. In the years of 1436 to 1460, he spent all his time and basically “devoted his life to the invention of printing.” During this time, Gutenberg encountered many problems and was faced with so many failures that he nearly chose to give up on his “quest” to invent one of the world’s greatest inventions, the printing press. Even though he did invent the printing press and it was very successful and spread rapidly, he was not given credit for it.

In 1434 he taught stone-cutting, wood-carving, and mirror-polishing in Strasburg, Germany. Then, in 1448, he returned to Mainz to form a partnership with Johannes Faust. They were going to join forces a...

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...ibutions to analytic geometry, algebra, and calculus. In particular, he discovered the binomial theorem, original methods for expansion of never-ending series, and his “direct and inverse method of fluxions.”

Newton’s inventive years with mathematics were from 1664 to 1696. Even though his companions also had likely various elements of the calculus, Newton summed everything up and included these ideas of his while developing new and more exact methods. The necessary elements of his thought were on hand in three tracts, De analysi (On Analysis), which went unpublished until 1711. In 1671, Newton developed a more absolute account of his course of infinitesimals, which appeared nine years after his death as “Methodus fluxionum et serierum infinitarum”.

Issac Newton was a great contributor to the mathematics and physics we use today and he is a well respected man.