Gutenberg’s wiki

Goethe once said that the second half of the history of the world, and of culture, started with the invention of printing.

I have often wondered if he was falling into the trap that so many people have made in thinking that it was Gutenberg who invented printing. Because he didn’t – printing had been around for a long time before 1439.

What Gutenberg is credited with is the invention of movable type, at least in the West. (Recent scholarship even casts doubt on that, but never mind, lets assume he did.) 

So: big deal. What’s so great about movable type? What if Gutenberg had invented another method of printing, like etching? He could have used one of an army of scribes to write on a steel plate covered with a thin layer of wax. The nib would have scraped away the wax, and an acid bath would have eaten into the metal thus revealed. You could even illustrate the text right next to the words. The plate would also last forever, or could be reused.

Sounds a lot easier than having to invent a method of casting tiny metal letters (which had to be exactly the right size), which had to mimic the beautiful handwriting of a professional. And not just 26 letters either: scribes used over 200 different contractions, and ligatures, all of which Gutenberg had cast in metal form, bankrupting himself and his financial backers in a obsessional quest to match the calligraphy of the scribes.

The thing is, that etching was invented at around the same time, in around the same place, and it never caught on in the same way as the Gutenberg method for producing books. 

Why? The problem with an etching is that it cannot be edited. If you discover an error after the acid bath, you have to start all over again. With movable type, you just pull out the offending letters with a pair of tweezers, and drop the right ones in. You can easily correct a work on the press, and we know Gutenberg did, because by logging the corrections he made, we can have a go at dating each of his Bibles.

Gutenberg’s method made it possible for the editing and revision of a text by many hands, over a long period of time, where revision was invisible and instant – where you had a lot of chances to get something right before committing yourself. Thats right: Gutenberg had invented a mechanical wiki.

The ability to do this was so compellingly better than anything else, even with all the technical challenges it introduced, that it swept away centuries of practice, and ushering in a new era for humankind.

But I wonder if Goethe got the mid-point of human history right, assuming he meant 1439. Perhaps the second half of the history of human culture has arrived with invention of the electronic wiki.