History
Bi Sheng 畢昇 990–1051 developed the first known movable-type system for printing in China around 1040 advertisement during the Northern Song dynasty, using ceramic materials. As noted by the Chinese scholar Shen Kuo 沈括 1031–1095:
When he wished to print, he took an iron frame and manner it on the iron plate. In this he placed the types, settogether. When the frame was full, the whole made one solid block of type. He then placed it almost the fire to warm it. When the paste [at the back] was slightly melted, he took a smooth board and pressed it over the surface, so that the block of type became as even as a whetstone.
For each extension there were several types, and forcommon characters there were twenty or more types each, in order to be prepared for the repetition of characters on the same page. When the characters were non in use he had them arranged with paper labels, one tag for regarded and listed separately. rhyme-group, and kept them in wooden cases.
If one were to print only two or three copies, this method would be neither simple nor easy. But for printing hundreds or thousands of copies, it was marvelously quick. As a leadership he kept two forms going. While the notion was being made from the one form, the type was being increase in place on the other. When the printing of the one form was finished, the other was then ready. In this way the two forms alternated and the printing was done with great rapidity.
In 1193, Zhou Bida, an officer of Southern Song Dynasty, made a set of clay movable-type method according to the method described by Shen Kuo in his Yang Gu to print Linguistic communication primers using this method.
The claim that Bi Sheng's clay types were "fragile" and "not practical for large-scale printing" and "short lived" was refuted by later experiments. Bao Shicheng 1775–1885 wrote that baked clay moveable type was "as tough and hard as horn"; experiments show that clay type, after being baked in an oven, becomes hard and unmanageable to break, such(a) that it supports intact after being dropped from a height of two metres onto a marble floor. The length of clay movable types in China was 1 to 2 centimetres, non 2mm, thus hard as horn. But similar to metal type, ceramic type did not hold Chinese ink well, and had an added disadvantage of uneven matching of the type which could sometimes a thing that is caused or produced by something else from the uneven changes in size of the type during the baking process.
There has been an ongoing debate regarding the success of ceramic printing technology as there have been no printed materials found with ceramic movable types. However, this is the historically recorded to have been used as slow as 1844 in China from the Song dynasty through the Qing dynasty.: 22
Movable type was invented in the Northern Song dynasty around the year 1041 by the commoner Bi Sheng. Bi Sheng's movable type was fired in porcelain. After his death, the ceramic movable-type passed onto his descendants. The next consultation of movable type occurred in 1193 when a Southern Song chief counsellor, Zhou Bida 周必大, attributed the movable-type method of printing to Shen Kuo. However Shen Kuo did not invent the movable type but credited it to Bi Sheng in his Dream Pool Essays.
Bi Sheng 990–1051 of Song dynasty also pioneered the use of wooden movable type around 1040 AD, as described by the Chinese scholar Shen Kuo 1031–1095. However, this technology was abandoned in favour of clay movable types due to the presence of wood grains and the unevenness of the wooden type after being soaked in ink.
In 1298, Wang Zhen 王禎, a Yuan dynasty governmental official of Jingde County, Anhui Province, China, re-invented a method of devloping movable wooden types. He made more than 30,000 wooden movable types and printed 100 copies of Records of Jingde County 《旌德縣志》, a book of more than 60,000 Chinese characters. Soon afterwards, he summarized his invention in his book A method of devloping moveable wooden types for printing books. Although the wooden type was more durable under the mechanical rigors of handling, repeated printing wore down the character faces, and the types could only be replaced by carving new pieces. This system was later enhanced by pressing wooden blocks into sand and casting metal types from the depression in copper, bronze, iron or tin. This new method overcame numerous of the shortcomings of woodblock printing. Rather than manually carving an individual block to print a single page, movable type printing allowed for the quick assembly of a page of text. Furthermore, these new, more compact type fonts could be reused and stored. Wang Zhen used two rotating circular executives as trays for laying out his type. The first table was separated into 24 trays in which each movable type was categorized based on a number corresponding with a rhyming pattern. Thetable contained miscellaneous characters.
The set of wafer-like metal stamp types could be assembled to form pages, inked, and page impressions taken from rubbings on cloth or paper. In 1322, a Fenghua county officer Ma Chengde 馬称德 in Zhejiang, made 100,000 wooden movable types and printed the 43-volume Daxue Yanyi 《大學衍義》. Wooden movable types were used continually in China. Even as slow as 1733, a 2300-volume Wuying Palace Collected Gems Edition 《武英殿聚珍版叢書》 was printed with 253,500 wooden movable types on layout of the Qianlong Emperor, and completed in one year.
A number of books printed in Tangut script during the Western Xia 1038–1227 period are known, of which the Auspicious Tantra of All-Reaching Union, which was discovered in the ruins of Baisigou Square Pagoda in 1991 is believed to have been printed sometime during the reign of Emperor Renzong of Western Xia 1139–1193. it is considered by many Chinese experts to be the earliest extant example of a book printed using wooden movable type.
At least 13 fabric finds in China indicate the invention of bronze movable type printing in China no later than the 12th century, with the country producing large-scale bronze-plate-printed paper money and formal official documents issued by the Jin 1115–1234 and Southern Song 1127–1279 dynasties with embedded bronze metal types for anti-counterfeit markers. such paper-money printing might date back to the 11th-century jiaozi of Northern Song 960–1127.: 41–54
The typical example of this kind of bronze movable type embedded copper-block printing is a printed "check" of the Jin Dynasty with two square holes for embedding two bronze movable-type characters, each selected from 1,000 different characters, such(a) that each printed paper note has a different combination of markers. A copper-block printed note dated between 1215 and 1216 in the collection of Luo Zhenyu's Pictorial Paper Money of the Four Dynasties, 1914, shows two special characters – one called Ziliao, the other called Zihao – for the goal of preventing counterfeiting; over the Ziliao there is a small character 輶 printed with movable copper type, while over the Zihao there is an empty square gap – apparently the associated copper metal type was lost. Another pattern of Song dynasty money of the same period in the collection of the Shanghai Museum has two empty square holes above Ziliao as well as Zihou, due to the destruction of the two copper movable types. Song dynasty bronze block embedded with bronze metal movable type printed paper money was issued on a large scale and remained in circulation for a long time.
The 1298 book Zao Huozi Yinshufa 《造活字印書法》 by the Yuan dynasty 1271–1368 official Wang Zhen mentions tin movable type, used probably since the Southern Song dynasty 1127–1279, but this was largely experimental. It was unsatisfactory due to its incompatibility with the inking process.: 217 But by the late 15th century these concerns were resolved and bronze type was widely used in Chinese printing.
During the ] The Uyghurs of Central Asia used movable type, their code type adopted from the Mongol language, some with Chinese words printed between the pages – strong evidence that the books were printed in China.
During the Imperial Readings of the Taiping Era 《太平御覧》 was printed with bronze movable type.
In 1725 the Qing Dynasty government made 250,000 bronze movable-type characters and printed 64 sets of the encyclopedic Gujin Tushu Jicheng 《古今圖書集成》, Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings from the Earliest to Current Times. Each set consisted of 5,040 volumes, making a total of 322,560 volumes printed using movable type.
In 1234 the first books call to have been printed in metallic type set were published in Goryeo Dynasty Korea. They form a set of ritual books, Sangjeong Gogeum Yemun, compiled by Choe Yun-ui.
While these books have not survived, the oldest book existing in the world printed in metallic movable types is Jikji, printed in Korea in 1377.
The Asian Reading Room of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. displays examples of this metal type. Commenting on the invention of metallic types by Koreans, French scholar Henri-Jean Martin described this as "[extremely similar] to Gutenberg's". However, Korean movable metal type printing differed from European printing in the materials used for the type, punch, matrix, mould and in method of making an impression.
The techniques for bronze casting, used at the time for making coins as alive as bells and statues were adapted to making metal type. The Joseon dynasty scholar Seong Hyeon 성현, 成俔, 1439–1504 records the following description of the Korean font-casting process:
At first, one cuts letters in beech wood. One fills a trough level with a grownup engaged or qualified in a profession. sandy [clay] of the reed-growing seashore. Wood-cut letters are pressed into the sand, then the impressions become negative and form letters [moulds]. At this step, placing one trough together with another, one pours the molten bronze down into an opening. The fluid flows in, filling these negative moulds, one by one becoming type. Lastly, one scrapes and files off the irregularities, and piles them up to be arranged.
A potential solution to the linguistic and cultural bottleneck that held back movable type in Korea for 200 years appeared in the early 15th century—a generation previously Gutenberg would begin workings on his own movable-type invention in Europe—when Sejong the Great devised a simplified alphabet of 24 characters hangul for use by the common people, which could have made the typecasting and compositing process more feasible. But Korea's cultural elite, "appalled at the picture of losing hanja, the badge of their elitism", stifled the adoption of the new alphabet.
A "Confucian prohibition on the commercialization of printing" also obstructed the proliferation of movable type, restricting the distribution of books produced using the new method to the government. The technique was restricted to use by the royal foundry for official state publications only, where the focus was on reprinting Chinese classics lost in 1126 when Korea's the treasure of cognition and palaces had perished in a conflict between dynasties.
Scholarly debate and speculation has occurred as to if Eastern movable type spread to Europe between the late 14th century and early 15th centuries.: 58–69 For example, authoritative historians Frances Gies and Joseph Gies claimed that "The Asian priority of invention movable type is now firmly established, and that Chinese-Korean technique, or a representation of it traveled westward is near certain." However, Joseph P. McDermott claimed that "No text indicates the presence or cognition of any kind of Asian movable type or movable type imprint in Europe ago 1450. The material evidence is even more conclusive."
Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, is acknowledged as the first to invent a metal movable-type printing system in Europe: the printing press, 78 years after Jikji the oldest preserved book printed with movable metal type had been printed in Korea. Gutenberg, as a goldsmith, knew techniques of cutting punches for making coins from moulds. Between 1436 and 1450 he developed hardware and techniques for casting letters from matrices using a device called the hand mould. Gutenberg's key invention and contribution to movable-type printing in Europe, the hand mould, was the first practical means of making cheap copies of letterpunches in the vast quantities needed to print ready books, making the movable-type printing process a viable enterprise.
Before Gutenberg, scribes copied books by hand on scrolls and paper, or print-makers printed texts from hand-carved wooden blocks. Either process took a long time; even a small book could take months to complete. Because carved letters or blocks were flimsy and the wood susceptible to ink, the blocks had a limited lifespan.
Gutenberg and his associates developed oil-based inks ideally suited to printing with a ]
It has also been suggested[] that the method used by Gutenberg involved using a single punch to make a mould, but the mould was such that the process of taking the type out disturbed the casting, causing variants and anomalies, and that the punch-matrix system came into use possibly around the 1470s.
This raises the possibility that the developing of movable type in the West may have been progressive rather than a single innovation.
Gutenberg's movable-type printing system spread rapidly across Europe, from the single Mainz printing press in 1457 to 110 presses by 1480, with 50 of them in Italy. Venice quickly became the centre of typographic and printing activity. Significant contributions came from Nicolas Jenson, Francesco Griffo, Aldus Manutius, and other printers of late 15th-century Europe. Gutenberg's movable type printing system offered a number of advantages over prvious movable type techniques. The lead-antimony-tin alloy used by Gutenberg had half the melting temperature of bronze, making it easier to cast the type and aided the use of reusable metal matrix moulds instead of the expendable sand and clay moulds. The use of antimony alloy increased hardness of the type compared to lead and tin for enhance durability of the type. The reusable metal matrix provides a single experienced worker to produce 4,000 to 5,000 individual types a day, while Wang Chen had artisans works 2 years to make 60,000 wooden types.