So, this just passed by on my RSS feed and jumpped out at me. Seems like Gutenberg wasn’t actually first at creating the printing press.
It is important to recognize what this means. The innovation that Johannes Gutenberg is said to have created was small metal pieces with raised backwards letters, arranged in a frame, coated with ink, and pressed to a piece of paper, which allowed books to be printed more quickly. But Choe Yun-ui did that — and he did it 150 years before Gutenberg was even born.
Gutenberg’s creation of the process did spread much faster. The Korean printing press was hampered by a number of factors.
Notably, Korea was under invasion, which hampered their ability to disseminate their innovation. In addition, Korean writing, then based closely on Chinese, used a large number of different characters, which made creating the metal pieces and assembling them into pages a slow process. Most importantly, Goryeo rulers intended most of its printing projects for the use of the nobility alone.
Very interesting story.
LINK: So, Gutenberg Didn’t Actually Invent the Printing Press
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