Another excellent audioslide here from the BBC. This one looks at the Gutenberg Bible and the student notes of Sir Isaac Newton (and how writing helped make the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment possible).
As a school boy I can remember my history teacher setting up a class debate “what was the most important invention in History ?” In the end the printing Press used for teh Gutenberg Bible beat penicillin and the Atom bomb. This was because, and the audio slideshow states, “it was the first real book to be mass-produced using movable type printing techniques – and so could be made in a fraction of the time it had previously taken scribes to write by hand.” Soon knowledge would not be just for the rich…
Mr Kydd.
