The Printing Press
Before the middle of the fifteenth century, books in Europe were copied by hand. A single book could take a skilled scribe months to complete, so books were rare and expensive, and most of them were owned by churches, universities, and wealthy families.
Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg, a craftsman in the German city of Mainz, developed a printing press that used movable metal type. Individual letters could be arranged to form a page, inked, and pressed onto paper. After printing, the letters could be taken apart and used again for a different page. This made it possible to produce hundreds of identical copies of a text far more quickly than any scribe could.
The effects were enormous. Within fifty years, printing presses were operating in more than two hundred European cities, and millions of books had been printed. As books became cheaper, more people learned to read, and new ideas in science, religion, and politics spread faster than ever before. For this reason, many historians consider the printing press one of the most important inventions in history.