Why Was The Printing Press Important

The printing press is an invention that has been made by Johannes Gutenberg in 1455. This invention is described as the moment when the monks no longer had to recopy books and manuscripts by hands because it was now possible to reproduce those works with a machine. This is one of the most significant event in history because of the many consequences this innovation has caused. The most important consequences of the invention of the printing press were the massive dissemination of knowledge and new ideas all around the world, the increase of instruction for the population because of the ending of the Church’s monopoly on many works and the leading to the reformation and scientific revolution.

To begin, the printing press is an invention that

In other words, the level of instruction increased because people wanted to know how to read and how to write to be able to understand sayings in the newspapers or books. The critical thinking of the population was developing more and more because people started to view the world differently since new ideas and concepts were disseminate. Although the church controlled much of the knowledge in the past, it was now impossible for them to control everything and prevent the population from accessing it. Therefore, these works were now available for everyone and the population figure it out rapidly. This is why people started to realize that they had rights and that the Church will no longer dominated them. Printing had so spread knowledge that even people from lower classes understood better their rights and their liberties so they started refusing to be dominate by the church. Books were no corrupt anymore and people were now able to criticize, study, compare or update many works. The printing press has helped to overcome the ignorance of the population on many subjects that concerned them like their rights, their possibilities, the religion or new discoveries. It was now possible for several people to judge and give their opinions on a knowledge that was completely inaccessible to them

The reformation appears because the population started to reject the authority of the Pope and to question religious ideas. The printing press has been helpful for the reformation because people were able to print in multiple copies their propaganda against religious institution. People could also reproduce their writings as many times as they wanted and they could give them to the population to inform others. After the reformation, appeared the scientific revolution and we could characterize it by a moment in history when many advances have been done in several fields of science, such as physics, mathematics, biology and astronomy. In other words, it is the moment when people decided to share their scientific ideas to explain many phenomenon with another way than with the religion. It permitted the unification of the society against the church because scientists and intellectuals began to prove with their books and their writings that religious ideas will no longer be necessary to rule the society. All classes of society began to read and think about science to realize that science could explain many more things than religion. To be honest, if the printing press had not been created, there would not have been as much dissemination of knowledge, so that people would not have been as well educated and the scientific revolution probably