Who invented printers

You do have to accept some differences between author and translator: a Black writer who grew up in Italy will not have the same life experiences as a Black American. History is filled with divisive translations — some made accidentally, some maliciously — all of which highlight the vital role translators play in the world of writing. Thanks to a societal obsession with youth, the generation constantly under the spotlight right now is Gen Z, or the Zoomers.

Is the youngest generation really so different from the ones that came before, though? Why is this the case? There are a complex set of factors, including age, technology and changing demographics. This is roughly accurate, though other places might vary the definition by a few years. As of this writing, that means the age group spans anywhere from 9 to 24 years old. The younger side is preoccupied with getting through elementary school, while the older is entering the workforce.

This might not sound entirely intuitive, but research into different age cohorts shows that people really do speak differently based on their age. Not politically, but linguistically. It was first used mostly by young people, and so it may have been assumed that as those young people grew up, quotative like might just become the norm. The real problem is that it changes constantly. As mentioned above, Gen Z is more racially diverse and more gender diverse than the other generations, so it makes sense they would have a vocabulary to reflect that.

If you break it down by age cohorts, though, that percentage more than doubles when you look at the group of to year-olds. And while less than 1 percent of people over the age of 65 had even heard the term before, 42 percent of to year-olds were aware of it.

We could keep going through examples, but you get the point. Facebook launched in , only seven years after the oldest millennials were born, and the first iPhone was sold only three years after that. Gen Z is growing up online — 95 percent of to year-olds have access to a smartphone, 97 percent are on social media — and so is their language. The talk of likes, faves, retweets, subscriptions and more are all decisions some company made when creating the vocabulary for their products.

Yet when young people come online, they build their own vocabulary. Whereas in the past, words usually had slow, convoluted paths into pop culture, today a single TikTok can launch a phrase into virality. This was a somewhat extreme case, but the interconnectedness of youths does allow for slang to move very differently than it did before.

The medium is different, but the message is essentially the same. The English language is filled with colorful turns of phrase. There can be many reasons as to why some phrases make no sense.

Maybe their original meaning has been lost to time, or the definitions of individual words have shifted. This one might seem to make sense. They have a few sweat glands like other mammals, yes, but their preferred method of cooling down is to find a nice mud bath. Why do we say someone sweats like a pig, then? As it cooled, it would gather droplets of water that made the iron look sweaty.

In all of recorded weather history, there have been a few occasions of animals falling from the sky. But never has there ever been a report of cats and dogs raining down. Lewis Carroll played around with a lot of English idioms in his Alice in Wonderland series.

Their origins are often lost. August is the time of year when it feels like fall and winter will never come again. Yes, those are the dog days of summer. And sure, the image of a dog sweltering in the heat captures the feeling of the month pretty well. It does seem like at least a bit of a stretch to call them dog days, however, especially when all the animals are suffering under the sun. The Greeks believed that during the times of year when Sirius and the Sun rose in the sky at the same time July into August , the combined intensity of the two stars is what caused the summer heat.

They were wrong, of course, but the phrase stuck around. What could it mean to kick the bucket? Is the water in the bucket the symbol of your life? Woodtype made a comeback in when Ching-te magistrate Wang Chen printed a treatise on agriculture and farming practices called Nung Shu. Wang Chen devised a process to make the wood more durable and precise. He then created a revolving table for typesetters to organize with more efficiency, which led to greater speed in printing.

It was exported to Europe and, coincidentally, documented many Chinese inventions that have been traditionally attributed to Europeans. Goldsmith and inventor Johannes Gutenberg was a political exile from Mainz, Germany when he began experimenting with printing in Strasbourg, France in He returned to Mainz several years later and by , had a printing machine perfected and ready to use commercially: The Gutenberg press.

In order to make the type available in large quantities and to different stages of printing, Gutenberg applied the concept of replica casting, which saw letters created in reverse in brass and then replicas made from these molds by pouring molten lead.

Researchers have speculated that Gutenberg actually used a sand-casting system that uses carved sand to create the metal molds. The letters were fashioned to fit together uniformly to create level lines of letters and consistent columns on flat media.

Gutenberg was also able to perfect a method for flattening printing paper for use by using a winepress, traditionally used to press grapes for wine and olives for oil, retrofitted into his printing press design.

Gutenberg borrowed money from Johannes Fust to fund his project and in , Fust joined Gutenberg as a partner to create books. They set about printing calendars, pamphlets and other ephemera. In , Gutenberg produced the one book to come out of his shop: a Bible. Each page of the Bible contained 42 lines of text in Gothic type, with double columns and featuring some letters in color. For the Bible, Gutenberg used separate molded letter blocks and 50, sheets of paper. Many fragments of the books survive.

There are 21 complete copies of the Gutenberg Bible, and four complete copies of the vellum version. In , Fust foreclosed on Gutenberg. Gutenberg is believed to have continued printing, probably producing an edition of the Catholicon , a Latin dictionary, in But Gutenberg ceased any efforts at printing after , possibly due to impaired vision. Access to mass-produced books revolutionized Europe in the late s, with advancing literacy altering religion, politics, and lifestyles worldwide.

At least, this is how the story is rendered in most books, including, for the most part, The Lost Gutenberg. The first overtures towards printing that began around roughly AD, in China, where early printing techniques involving chiseling an entire page of text into a wood block backwards, applying ink, and printing pages by pressing them against the block. Around AD, printers in Zhejiang, China, produced a print of a vast Buddhist canon called the Tripitaka with these carved woodblocks, using , blocks one for each page.

Later efforts would create early movable type—including the successful but inefficient use of ideograms chiseled in wood and a brief, abortive effort to create ceramic characters. Meanwhile, imperial imports from China brought these innovations to Korean rulers called the Goryeo the people for whom Korea is now named , who were crucial to the next steps in printing history.

Their part of the story is heavy with innovation in the face of invasion. First, in AD, a group of nomads called the Khitans attempted to invade the Korean peninsula. This prompted the Goryeo government to create its own Tripitaka with woodblock printing, perhaps with the aim of preserving Korean Buddhist identity against invaders. The attempt would be prescient; it preserved the concept and technique for later years, when more invaders eventually arrived.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan had created the largest empire in human history, which stretched from the Pacific coast of Asia west to Persia.

As part of their conquering, they burned the Korean copy of the Tripitaka to ash. The Goryeo dynasty immediately recreated the book. This was important; attacks by Mongols would continue for the next 28 years.

The Tripitaka reboot was scheduled to take Korean monks until AD to complete, and, meanwhile, the rulers began expanding into printing other books. But the lengthy book would have required an impossibly large number of woodblocks, so Choe came up with an alternative.

His first production books were the now famous Gutenberg Bible. Over are thought to have been printed but only 22 survive to the modern day. Few records exist from this time about Gutenberg but his invention is first recorded in a lawsuit testimony from a former financial backer, Johan Fust, over repayment. This testimony describes his type, inventory of metals and types of molds and the case would ultimately be lost by Gutenberg and his press was seized by Furst as collateral.

The impact of the printing press is, almost, impossible to really quantify. On the surface it allowed for the much more rapid spread of accurate information but, more elusively, it had an enormous impact on the nations and population in Europe at large. Thanks, in no small part to the press, literacy began to rise as well as the types of information people could be exposed to.

Around this time Europe was recovering from the devastating impact of the Black Death. This had decimated the population and had led to the decline in the rise of the church, the rise of the money economy, and subsequent birth of the Renaissance.

On the back of this, the printing press was 'in the right place at the right time' to help in the secularisation of Western culture.

Of course, many early texts were of a religious nature but more and more were beginning to be more secular in nature. Science was able to flourish at this time with early scientists suddenly being offered an incredible tool to collaborate with each other around the continent.

It also ripped absolute control of the contents of religious texts from the hands of the church. No longer would it be possible to centrally control and censor what was written on topics of the Christian, and other, faiths.

By the 's the Scientific Revolution of the Enlightenment was in full force, which would radically alter how Europeans viewed the world and universe forever.

A process of thinking that would ultimately culminate in the Industrial Revolution - Thank you, Gutenberg et al! As we have seen the printing press had an enormous impact on the distribution of information around Europe after its invention by Gutenberg in The technology, and printed texts, quickly spread around Europe at this time.

It is no coincidence that was also a time of enormous change in cultural and religious change across the continent. These would ultimately change the course of Europe's history and culminate in the Protestant Reformation. Never before had intellectual and religious leaders had a means of spreading their teachings beyond a limited congregation at any one time. Martin Luther , the founder of the Protestant movement, would quickly take advantage of this.

According to Mark U.