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The importance of the printing press
Great Innovators: "Gutenberg and the Printing Press
The importance of the printing press
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Every day people read newspapers, magazines, books, comics, etc. and a vast majority of them never stop to think of how these objects are designed and made.
The ways of print production have greatly improved over the years and is still evolving today.
Printing in a simple description is the duplication of images and text. The art of printmaking can be said to date all the way back to before 3000 BC with the Mesopotamians who created a cylindrical seal that could be used to imprint its images onto clay tablets by rolling it across the clay with a little pressure. Skipping along years and years ahead, wax seals to represent a family, guild, church, or nobility were used to seal letters using a carved stamp and imprinting it on hot wax applied to the folded parchment. Some time around 200 CE, in China; woodblock printing became the main method of printmaking and continued so until the 19th century. Woodblock printing works just as a stamp does, except it is made of wood, unlike the rubber stamps we use today. Woodblock printing was a very popular art form in Japan, however, was not held as high and prestigious as painting. One of the most recognizable pieces is from a set of 36 views of Mt. Fuji called: “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” by Hokusai.
Some time between 1041 and 1048, Bi Sheng created the very first device capable of moving type in China. This movable type method used single letterforms to recreate a document in a less painstakingly manner. In 1450, a German printer, by the name of Johannes Gutenberg, created an improved mechanical printing press. Gutenberg’s printing press made printing multiple books easier with its ability to mass-produce. Gutenberg, whom had been a goldsmith for some time, took what he knew an...
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...eryone is familiar with since just about everyone has one in their homes nowadays. Inkjet printers are the common household printer and the largest form of printing today. Inkjet printers replicate an image on paper by shooting droplets of ink onto paper. Most early inkjet printers only used two ink cartridges, one for black and one for color, but today a majority of inkjet printers use 4 cartridges; CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black). Then there are printers that are more intended for printing photos that can take up to 8 cartridges which include greys and lighter colors. From inkjet we move to laser printing, which is a digital process. Unlike inkjet printing which uses ink cartridges Laser uses larger cartridges called toner.
Printmaking has come so far and continues to evolve over time. Who knows what new methods we could be using 20 years from now.
To begin, Johannes Gutenberg was born 1395, in Mainz, Germany. He started experimenting with printing by 1438. He obtained backing in 1450 from the financier Johann Fust, whose impatience and other factors led to Gutenberg's loss of his establishment to Fust in 1455. Gutenberg's masterpiece, and the first book ever printed from movable type, is the “Forty-Two-Line” Bible, completed no later than 1455" (http://www.biography.com)". The first most important consequence of the printing press is that it chang...
This invention was a change to the Chinese because paper was invented in China around 105 CE. So the Chinese have paper and now it allowed an easy way for people to communicate. It caused a change in their culture because with paper they can now pass down culture easier than before. Before its invention the writing surfaces that were used were, bones, tortoise shells, and bamboo slips. But as the Chinese civilization started to grow they proved to themselves that these writing surfaces won’t work because of the bulk and weight.
A Lithograph was produced by firstly drawing the image on a flat stone surface in an oil based medium, the stone is then moistened with water which is repelled by the oil the surface is then inked with an oil based ink which is unable to adhere to the wet surface. A Chromolithograph is a coloured picture produced by making and superimposing multiple lithographic prints, each of which adds a different colour. The process of colour lithography was first experimented with in the early 1800s by Aloys Senefelder the inventor of lithography, while ‘chromolithography’ was patented in 1837 by a French printer Godefroy Engelmann.
Before the invention of the printing press, any writing done, whether it was a book, or drawing, or copies of the Bible had to be completed painstakingly by the hand. Every letter, every word, every sentence, had to be written down by hand. It took almost over an entire year to write a single book. In addition to the large amount of time spent, people often made mistakes delaying the publishing of the book. The effects of these scarce, handwritten copies were that education and learning was very limited. Desperate for fame and money, German Johannes Gutenberg changed all of that. In 1450, Gutenberg created the first ever printing press, built and improved existing printing methods. Soon, by the 1500’s printing shops were located everywhere in the major cities of Europe. People had a better way of spreading ideas and findings of new lands during the Age of Exploration, the period of time when Europeans began exploring the world by sea in search of new discoveries, trade routes, and goods found in other countries. The Age of Exploration was affected by the printing press more than the Protestant Reformation was, because it helped publicize recent findings, inspiring and
This new technology is not without its shortcomings. First, the printing press used limited materials. Next, as Mumford notes, the advent of print led calligraphers and manuscript copyists out of work. Furthermore, as Graff finds, it created “typographical fixity”—material once printed cannot be changed. Finally, mass production was dependent and limited to large markets (Mumford, 95)....
Invented during medieval times, engraving is the oldest form of intaglio printing (182). For the reproduction of art via engraving,
During the Song dynasty (A.D. 960-1280), silkscreening became widely popular in china, where they created masks, “i.e. the basis of the modern screen printing frames”, (Carnevale, M. History of Screenprinting) known modernly as screens. This allowed the printing of much more detailed designs. These masks, while making a long lasting way to preserve a perfect ink passage, were slow and complex to create, using human hair and rice paper to hold the stencil together.
Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440 to multiply written documents easily, making books cheaper and more nationally available. In 1798, Alois Senefelder invented Lithography to copy graphical designs, developing the culture of advertising (wet-canvas, no given date, Jules Cheret: the father of the modern poster). Ho...
The concept behind 3D printing is very similar to that of standard (paper) printing. Instead of ink, 3D printers deposit a plastic filament onto a hard surface and then apply layers over the original foundation, thus
The Evolution of Lithography In 1796 the Bavarian Aloys Senefelder invented Lithography, which is a cheap technique of printing text or artwork onto paper. (Meggs & Purvis, 2012) Lithography is a Greek homonymous word, (from lithos “stone” and graphein “to write”. It is a different type of printing, which focused on a chemical fact that oil and water cannot be mixed. (Meggs & Purvis, 2012)
Photocopiers have come a long way over the last couple of decades. From the early days of Chester Carlton’s kitchen experiments, to the rise of Xerox, followed by the subsequent explosion of new technology, it is clear that the modern photocopier has become a vital piece of office
Johannes Gutenberg who was a German goldsmith, developed the printing press “in Mainz, Germany between 1446 and 1450” (Ditttmar, 1133). The printing press was made to print books, newspapers, and flyers. The machine was made from wood and was based off screw presses, that worked with inked movable type heads that allowed the paper to be quickly and efficiently pressed with letters. The type head was made by pouring a
When it comes to photo-quality and/or museum quality printing, traditional inkjet gives you fantastic results. Normally, high-end graphics are printed on a machine that uses 8 or 12 different color channels. The extra colors provide a much wider color-space which allows the machine to accurately replicate millions of colors. However, these are not typically the types of plotters that you find in the average architect or construction office. Conversely, the standard, general-purpose plotter uses a 4-color profile: CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black).
The two main ways printers work is either impact or nonimpact. Impact printers have a device that touches the paper and then creates an image while nonimpact does not touch the paper. The type we use most often in our homes is the nonimpact printers; these include the ink-jet and laser printers. The ink-jet printer drops ink from a nozzle onto the paper. The laser printer is a bit more complicated because it uses toner, static electricity, and heat to get the ink where you want it on the paper. This is nice though because it decreases the drying time that may cause ink to smear, especially when you are printing pictures. (Tyson)