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Speaker 1: Pushkin too quick. No, it's perfect push kit stuff. You got it.
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Speaker 2: Frank up the siege engine. Because we're going back to the Middle Ages.
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Speaker 3: I will wear my leather corset.
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Speaker 2: We're doing a biggie today. We are maybe the biggest one we've done yet. The printing press, the printing press. Love the printing press. Yes, it is everything, including a business.
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Speaker 3: I'm Jacob Goldstein, I'm Robert Smith, and this is business show about the history. So why don't we go way back.
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Speaker 2: Of business today on the show the invention of the printing press, which is a surprisingly modern story. There is debt, there is equity, there is a court case, competition, international branch offices, and the Protestant Reformation. Our show today begins with the man named Johannes gen Spleisch zuur Lauden.
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Speaker 3: Did not see that coming.
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Speaker 2: I'm probably saying it wrong because I don't speak German. Johannes Goose Flesh of the House of Laden was born around fourteen hundred to relatively rich parents in a town called Mainz in what's Germany today. At the time it was part of the Holy Roman Empire.
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Speaker 3: Which Fultaire said, of course, was neither holy nor Roman. Nor An Empire.
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Speaker 2: When Johannes is around twenty years old, his father dies and his mother comes into possession of a house called the hoff Zuom Gutenberg House of the Good Mountain, and Johannes becomes known as Johannes Zoom Gutenberg. I guess last names work differently back then.
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Speaker 3: There are many Johannases and you're like, oh, the Good Mountain one.
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Speaker 2: The one he's over at the Good Mountain House. So what do we know about Gutenberg. There's a famous engraving of him. If you've seen a picture of Gutenberg, it is from this engraving. He's got this long white beard, comes down to like two points on his chest like zz top, Yeah, like zezytop style. He's wearing a fur trimmed hat. Gutenberg didn't look like this. The picture was made like one hundred years after he died. There's no pictures of him as far as we know from his lifetime. And I love this right And as we'll see, there's all this myth, even as you get into the story sort of embroidered about him. I mean, we don't know what he thought or felt, you know, as far as we know, there's no diary or trove of letters. But of course he printed books, and a surprising number of the books still exist.
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Speaker 3: And also conveniently for.
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Speaker 2: Our purposes, he wound up in court a few times and the paperwork, the court records, actually still exist. And so a lot of what we know about Goot and the invention of the printing press and how it was used comes from these basically lawsuits over money, which is great for US business history. So here's this story we can put together. At some point, we know Gutenberg became an affiliate of the Master Goldsmith's.
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Speaker 3: Not an apprentice, but an affiliates.
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Speaker 2: Exactly, so it's different. So the Master Goldsmiths are a guild, which is, you know, the medieval version of a union. Guilds were a big deal. Maybe we should do a guild show. Actually he was not in the union. He worked with gold is basically what that means in some way. So we know that he's into metal, and we also know that he was an entrepreneur. And now here, I am this is like an anachronism, right, I'm sort of projecting backwards. There there were not entrepreneurs in the modern sense. The word didn't exist. But yet I think you'll see as we go through the story. He was a hustler, he was a guy who started businesses. His life is much more that way than I would have thought for someone who living in you know, the end of the Middle Ages basically. But then again, like he is the guy who is going to invent the thing that's gonna create the modern world, so maybe it makes sense. So the first kind of hustle, the first business that he starts that we know of, is mirrors. Gutenberg gets into the mirror game and he finds this great, you know, fourteen hundreds kind of niche, which is he's going to sell special mirrors to religious pilgrims.
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Speaker 3: What made the mirror special? They're special. They're like convex mirrors that are specially made for the pilgrims.
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Speaker 2: To take on their pilgrimage. And I'll explain why. I'll explain why. So what's going on is in fourteen thirty nine, there's going to be a pilgrimage to this German town to see these relics that are displayed just once every seven years, like a piece of the gown that Mary wore the night Jesus was born, the loincloth that Jesus wore, on the cross and is stained with blood, that kind of thing.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, this is like woodstock for religious pilgrims.
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Speaker 2: Yes, yes, And so the idea with these mirrors is, you know, when you get your moment before the holy relics looking at them, you hold up the mirror, and the mirror can somehow capture the holy power that the relics have. And to be clear, he didn't invent this idea.
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Speaker 3: This was a thing that people were doing, spread by mirror merchants perhaps perhaps, but he's he's going with it. He's going with it, and he actually gets a couple of investors who have equity in the project. Essentially what we would call equity, starts making the mirrors, as far as we can tell. And then when your classic pieces of medieval bad news arrives, the plague on the back of a rat, the back of a flea, on the back of a rat. It's like panics in the stories we tell the nineteennres. You know, everything's going fine, and then the plague.
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Speaker 2: The plague is the financial panic of the thirteen and fourteen hundred.
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Speaker 3: It's very good.
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Speaker 2: Pilgrimage is delayed until fourteen forty.
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Speaker 3: He must have been sad, looking out over one hundred convex mirrors, all staring back at him. One of Gutenberg's investors dies, oh man, could have been plague, could have been anything.
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Speaker 2: Fourteen thirties, You could die of anything at any time. And the investor's family, the investor's family, the guy who has died, His family sues Gutenberg over whatever, over that guy's stake.
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Speaker 4: In the business.
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Speaker 3: Come on act of God.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know what the details are. I think Gutenberg wins. But there is this really interesting, just kind of enticing detail mystery in the lawsuit, and it's just a few words. And what we know from the lawsuit paperwork is that Gutenberg is afraid that his trade secrets are going to get out. Of course, there's you know, no intellectual property as we know it in this era. You try and keep your secret secret. In particular, he says he is worried that visitors to the dead Man's house are going to see And this part is a direct quote, or at least a direct quote translated into English.
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Speaker 3: Four pieces lying in the press, the press, the press, the printing press. We don't know, we don't know, we don't know.
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Speaker 2: But he tells somebody to take these pieces apart so nobody can tell what they are. Historians, of course, have been speculating for hundreds of years about these six words. Was he already working on the printing press?
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Speaker 3: Unclear?
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Speaker 2: We don't actually know what happened with the mirror business for that matter. Next piece of evidence. Next time we have a clear view of what's going on with Gutenberg's actually ten years later, fourteen fifty. So Gutenberg, I will say, as a fifty something man, is fifty ish at this point. He's not a kid. Some might say is washed up, some might say he's at his peak. So it's fourteen fifty. Gutenberg is around fifty years old, and he makes another deal. He enters into another business arrangement. This time it's with a guy named Johann fuoh Ho, and Foust agreed to lend Gutenberg eight hundred guilders at six percent interest, collateralized by the apparatus sparatus. We're getting excited, Oh, apparatus, I like this. Out of that, it's like he has a code name das apparatus. Sorry to all our German speakers. So eight hundred guilders is a lot of money. It's enough to buy one hundred oxen or four houses at These figures, by the way, come from a book called Gutenberg, A Life in Books by Eric Marshall White, which is a good book, a really helpful book. It's relatively recent and it's really careful. It's a really careful biography of Gutenberg. So it was really helpful in kind of untangling the myth from what we know. So okay, so they make this deal. In two years later, Foust makes another investment, agrees to put in three hundred more guilders right away, up to eight hundred more overall. And here we know from the kind of documentary evidence that we'll get to that this is explicitly for the work of the books.
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Speaker 3: This is the work of the books. It's happening, and so there he is.
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Speaker 2: If we zoom out now, like we're right in the documents, really in the in the micro, if we zoom out to the macro for a sec it's interesting to think, why why is why? Why are they bringing a lot of money into this.
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Speaker 3: We don't have the aha moment, the big surprise story where you know he was I don't know, you left some type somewhere and his wife sat on it, and she gets up and he sees the impression there, yes, right, Or he falls in some inc and there happens to be a little coin on top of the inca that gets on his shirts and he thinks, ah.
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Speaker 2: We do know this, we do know this. Demand for books was really high in Europe at this point for some interesting reasons and kind of varied social and economic reasons. So and political actually, so you have governments are becoming more of a thing, right, It's not just kings occasionally going to war. You're having kind of bureaucrats, sort of modern governmental functions emerging. And for that you need people who are literate, who have gone to school and read books to learn how to read.
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Speaker 3: So there is demand for books.
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Speaker 2: You have the Renaissance getting going in Italy by this point, and all the rich guys in Italy want to build their libraries of books from classical antiquity. There's actually this little story that I love of a businessman in Florence, a guy named Vespasiano di Bistici.
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Speaker 3: One more time.
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Speaker 2: I love it, Vespasiano Dibistici, that's the name Babistici. I believe he started out as a paper merchant, but he winds up creating kind of like what to me seems like a book factory in the fourteen forties, no doctor without a printing press. So what happens is Cosimo di Medici, you know, of the Florentine Medici, decides he needs his library, his personal library, and he goes to the Bistichi and Bistici has like fifty five scribes writing for him, like you know, copying out manuscripts for Cosimo. And these fifty five guys create something like two hundred books in two years. So that's basically like if you round it to fifty, you know, it takes a guy six months to write a manuscript, huh. And of course these are beautiful whatever, but like that's a lot of labor.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's a lot of money for each book, and a lot of money for each book.
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Speaker 2: Now, there is something making books cheaper, and that is paper.
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Speaker 3: Paper.
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Speaker 2: I presume Cosimo's books would have been on parchment, which is what you know, they had been using in Europe for a long time and it was still the high class thing. And paper is profoundly cheaper than parchment. Parchment, of course, made from animal skins, costs a lot to grow an animal to make the parchment. And paper has been around in Asia for quite a long time by this point, but it has recently come to Europe and has become sort of industrialized, right, And the availability of paper is profound for the book business because when a scribe is writing a book on parchment, the parchment is a huge chunk of the cost, maybe most of the cost, but once you have paper, almost all of the cost of making the book is the cost of the labor, the cost of the scribes time.
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Speaker 3: This is a classic business situation, right. You have a high demand for a product, and the demand is going up. The thing that you use to make the products, the input, the expensive input, is getting cheaper with paper, and so what you are left with is a bottleneck, a low productivity part of the process, and that is the scribes. And so we could talk about, oh, was it an insight? Did Gutenberg see something that no one else saw? Really, there were economic pressures. Somebody was going to do that, because it's obvious when you have a bottleneck, a very expensive bottleneck in the process, you should try to automate that. And there was printing in the world.
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Speaker 2: Woodblock printing had been used for hundreds of years in Asia, and it was it was in use in Europe somewhat.
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Speaker 3: You know.
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Speaker 2: Obviously, you carve sort of a single pages worth of typically an image, sometimes some words into a woodblock. But of course it's static, right, you got your block. You can print one page, but that's it.
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Speaker 3: We've all done this with potatoes when we were a kid.
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Speaker 2: Yes, it's that movable type, which is you know, as we know, what he's going to invent is way more dynamic, way better. And by this time, by the mid fourteen hundreds, movable type had been invented also in Asia. In Korea they had even used metal types. But both in China and Korea at the time they used pictograms. Each word was its own character.
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Speaker 3: So you'd need thousands of these little things in order to have a.
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Speaker 2: Book to have a book, right, much less practical than when you have an alphabet, and you can do whatever your upper case in your lower case and dozens. The order of magnitude is dozens, and you can print anything. And so there is this question. Was Gutenberg copying an Asian press? It doesn't seem like it. There's no evidence that he knew that people in Europe knew, you know, in any kind of a real way about these presses in Asia. It seems like when Gutenberg is doing this work around fourteen fifty, he's working from first principles.
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Speaker 3: And we know, you know, he.
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Speaker 2: Had done some kind of work related to goldsmithing. His dad was affiliated with the Mint, so maybe he knew something about the way coins were made. We know he's like a hustler, you know, he's entrepreneurial. And it seems like Gutenberg on his own invented or invented for Europe the movable type printing press, arguably the most important invention ever to come out of Europe. Up there, mean want the croissant, The steam engine.
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Speaker 3: Oh, the steam engine. Of course, internal combustion huge.
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Speaker 2: So there were a few other biggies, but one of the biggies Fondue, but certainly one of the biggies. The earliest image we have of press is not of Gutenberg's press in particular, but it's not that long after. It's from about fifty years later. It's this form of picture that was popular at the time called the dance macabre. You have pictures of people in everyday life and then you have death kind of dancing through I guess to remind you that everybody's going to die. Maybe they're taking away these people, yeah, Memento Moury. And so in this image you can see like a Gutenberg ish press.
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Speaker 3: Are you looking at it?
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Speaker 5: Yeah?
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Speaker 3: There are these kind of skeleton looking dudes. Yeah, and what's death? Those are death? Yeah, I got that. And one of them has his hand on the person who's picking out the type, who's putting the type too, right.
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Speaker 2: They call that guy the compositor, right, So for each page he arranges the letters, and the letters are backwards, right, you arrange it all backwards.
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Speaker 3: And there's a guy who's doing the actual press, which looks like one of those things where you pull the lever and it goes down like maybe you'd use to squeeze olive oil or something. Yes, they had used presses like this, and you're up for a long time.
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Speaker 5: Yeah.
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Speaker 3: And there's another skeleton dude like touching that man. That's amazing. And that's basically it.
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Speaker 4: Right.
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Speaker 2: The press is actually simple in its way, right, he's putting together these different things, but it's not that complicated. And that raises this question in my mind, right, which is we've talked before about simultaneous invention. It seems like all the big inventions that we've talked about, it is really not ultimately like one guy figuring it out. You know, well, Edison, we talked about it early on in the Edison and the Movies story. Lots of people were trying to figure out movies. Photography was out there. It was clear somebody who was going to figure out movies or telephone. Famously, like literally people racing to the patent office to get the first patent. I mean even calculus, calculus right, Leibnitz and Newton.
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Speaker 3: And the reason of course for simultaneous invention is what we talked about a little bit earlier. There is the need. You know, technology has come up to a certain point and people are using that as a launching pad for something else. And so it is natural when people are trying to solve the same problem, they know about the same information out there in the world, they're going to come up with a new solution.
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Speaker 2: And yet that doesn't happen in this case. Right like there is demand for books, there is paper, and nobody else in Europe does this. Like that seems pretty clear, and so I was singing, why is this too much plague always a good answer for this era. I have an idea, and my idea is, you know, if you think about these other periods we've talked about the eighteen hundreds, certainly the nineteen hundreds, the even the seventeen hundreds, everybody's reading what everybody else is doing. There are journals and books, and you know, in the eighteen hundreds there's a magazine printing all the new patents that Thomas Edison is reading. To keep up on things, what you need for these things.
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Speaker 3: Is a printing press.
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Speaker 2: Uh, you need a printing press to know what everybody else is working on. And so the reason maybe I'm making this up that Gutenberg is the only one to invent it is it hasn't been invented yet, so not everybody knows everything all the time the way we do.
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Speaker 3: Once you have a printing press, I think, I think that's a great idea because what would it take to spread this. You'd have to write letters to people. But even then not everybody who how to.
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Speaker 2: Write letters do become a thing, right and science letters are a big deal. But the journal, you know, the printed journal is a much more powerful tool than letters. It's a thought in any case. In any case, Gutenberg now has his press. What does he print first?
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Speaker 3: The Bible? Not the Bible? Okay, too expensive maybe, right, it's long. The Bible is long, and it has to start there, right, start. You don't start with the Word of God.
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Speaker 2: You love nightmare also you know, yes and yes and also high stakes.
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Speaker 3: You want to get it right.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, So he starts with things that are simpler, cheaper, shorter, a German poem, a grammar textbook for last, and then this is my favorite sort of pre Bible printing work that Gutenberg does, comes around fourteen fifty three, so not that long into this project, when there is actually this world historical event that's going to be good news for Gutenberg's printing business, and that is the Sultan Mehmed the Second captures Constantinople. Big news, big news in the religion. Teen emperor is decapitated, and now the Catholic Church needs money to fight the Sultan. How does the church raise money in.
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Speaker 3: Fourteen fifty three indulgences?
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Speaker 2: Indulgences, They sell indulgences and you know you know this from whatever from school. Yeah, if you give money to the church, they will remove the punishment that you owe.
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Speaker 3: For your sins. They would also allow you to get your relatives out of purgatory if they had died. Uh huh, that makes sense. That's the little extra, guess cost extra, but sure.
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Speaker 2: What I didn't realize until I was working on this show is indulgences were physical things. There was an indulgence which was basically like a nice receipt, a nice receipt often written out on vellum of fancy, like a very high grade parchment made from calfskin. And this fact that the receipt part of the indulgence thing becomes important when the Sultan captures Constantinople, because the Church suddenly needs to sell lots of indulgences. But they have a labor problem.
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Speaker 3: It's the problem we were talking about before, right, There's just not enough scribes to write out all the indulgences that you need to sell right now, plus so much sin. The demand was huge, The demand is huge. Who among us?
00:21:02
Speaker 2: And now here comes Johannes Gutenberg with a solution to your problem. You know, your grace, how many do you need? I'll just crank come out for you.
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Speaker 3: This was also a solution to Gutenberg's problem because he had just enlisted the richest customer on planet Earth, or one of them at least. Yes, Catholic, definitely a good customer to have. And you know, on indulgence, I believe it's a single page, right, so you said it once, and you know, the printing business, you want to make as many copies and sell as many copies of each thing as you can, so it's generic. They don't have the different ones for the different sins.
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Speaker 2: I guess over time they're different ones. But the basic thing is that there's a blank for the name of the buyer. There's a blank for the name of the buyer, and so he cranks out all these indulgences white that the guy who wrote that book that I mentioned says, they.
00:21:55
Speaker 3: Go out by the wagon load.
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Speaker 2: The money, I guess was supposed to go to defend Cypress Cypress, but apparently none of it, or almost none of it ever got to Cyprus got siphoned off along the way. But whatever, that's not Gutenberg's problem, truly, he got paid.
00:22:12
Speaker 3: Let's do the Biggie, Let's do the Bible.
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Speaker 4: We'll do it after the break, Robert.
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Speaker 2: We're back from the break, and it is October of fourteen fifty four. We're in Frankfurt at a diet.
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Speaker 3: A religious meeting of some sort of meeting of the cat. Not a conclave, but a diet.
00:22:51
Speaker 2: It's not as big as a conclave, I guess. And we're with an Italian bishop named Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. Piccolomini sees something that blows his mind. He sees some preliminary pages from a printed Bible, from what's going to be the Gutenberg Bible. And we know this because he wrote a letter to a cardinal about it. He describes a miraculous man who he encountered, who I hope was Gutenberg, but it could been somebody who worked with Gutenberg, we don't know. And he describes for the cardinal what the pages of this Bible were like, give it to us.
00:23:32
Speaker 3: He said. They were exceedingly clean and correct in their script and without error, which your Grace could read effortlessly even without glasses. I mean something. I know. I appreciate that large print. I learned from numerous witnesses that one hundred and fifty eight copies had been completed, although some others say the number is one hundred and eighty. I shall try if possible to buy a copy on your behalf and have it brought here. But I fear it will not be possible, both because of the distance and because they say that ready buyers had all been found even before the volumes had been finished. It's a hit.
00:24:05
Speaker 2: It's a hit that seems promising, right. It is wild to think of a guy seeing what's going to be the Gutenberg Bible. Do I remember that you went to see to see one at the New York Public Library?
00:24:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, for Planet Money. I went to It was on display in they have a special display case for these kind of things. There's also one at the Morgan Library, I should say JP. Morgan bought one, no big surprise, and I recall it was much larger than I thought it was going to be. It was probably the largest Bible I'd ever seen. It looked like one of those giant dictionaries that you have to put on a stand. And the other thing I remember about it is that the margins were very Why it was just it was these these columns, these two columns, and the print was that old fashioned sort of Gothic Germany, very German looking. It was very orderly. I will say, these large margins these very straight columns and this very dense writing. Did was there color in the part that you looked at, Yeah, there's there were some color that clearly someone had filled in or painted right right. Yeah, they actually left blank like the where there would be a big colored first letter at the start of a chapter or a paragraph or something. They actually didn't print that on the press. They left it to be hand inscribed.
00:25:23
Speaker 4: One off.
00:25:23
Speaker 3: The scribes were afraid of the printing press, and then saw that in fact they could do their favorite part. You know, it's no fun to print every little letter, but to make the giant g with the flowers and the colors. They must have loved that, and now they could do one hundred and eighty.
00:25:39
Speaker 2: Maybe Gutenberg was like, no, no, I'm not going to automate your work out of existence. I'm just going to take away the drudgery. I'll leave you to do the creative fun part.
00:25:46
Speaker 3: It's a compliment familiar.
00:25:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you've described the book very well. It's remarkable how many still exist there. I believe twenty one complete copies still in existence, which is a very large percentage given how long ago it was and how it just happened In Europe since then.
00:26:02
Speaker 3: It shows you how valuable, how.
00:26:03
Speaker 2: Valuable they were, and how special they must have seemed even then. Right, One fun business detail about the printing of the book itself. It's referred to typically as the forty two line Gutenberg Bible because they are forty two lines per page, and as you say, it seems quite spacious and like not crammed. In the first few pages. They were actually doing forty lines of page, and so presumably they must have figured out like, oh, we could do two more lines per page, and that means less paper, less parchment.
00:26:35
Speaker 3: That's just profit right there. By the time you get to Revelations, it's tiny, tiny, tiny writing. No it isn't.
00:26:42
Speaker 2: So he's cranking them out. He's Gutenberg is making the Gutenberg Bible. And there's this great detail. So some of the Bibles were printed on parchment, some on paper. And there's a belief, a kind of a theory based I believe on the different watermarks on the different pieces of paper, which I love, like scholarly work like this, a belief that at some point Gutenberg might have had six different presses going just kind of a factory. Right, he's becoming a publisher a printer and then it feels sudden looking back, but we don't know. Something goes wrong.
00:27:15
Speaker 3: There's a big problem.
00:27:15
Speaker 2: It's going to happen right now, and that is this Johann Fust, the guy who put up the money to get the project going investor decides he wants.
00:27:24
Speaker 4: His money back.
00:27:25
Speaker 3: We don't know why there was fight.
00:27:27
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe Fust needs the money for something else, but we know that they wound up in court on Thursday, November sixth, fourteen fifty five. I love court documents as a reporter. I've always loved them. I covered cops and courts and Bozeman, Montana twenty many years ago when I started out.
00:27:48
Speaker 3: It's amazing because we wouldn't know anything about this really.
00:27:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there is this one document that describes this whole thing in detail, written by one Ulrich Helmus Perger, cleric of the Diocese of Bamberg, notary public and laid judge of the Holy Seed at Mainz by Imperial authority, who wrote out this beautiful, detailed document that explains a lot about the first printing press in Europe. The document is called the Helmusperger Notarial Instrument. No tarial instrument is one beautiful logword in German. And it lays this out kind of as a story, and it starts with Feust's version. It's like he said, he said, So Foust tells a story like this. He says, I loaned Gutenberg eight hundred guilders at six percent interest. And by the way, I borrowed that money from somebody else at interest.
00:28:42
Speaker 3: Oh, good job, Foust, FoST.
00:28:45
Speaker 2: He's like a private credit, right. He's like, I don't know, Apollo or something in the market today. And then Fuss says, Gutenberg came back to me later and said, actually I need another eight hundred guilders, so I loaned him eight hundred more.
00:28:58
Speaker 3: Which remember is a lot of money at the time.
00:29:01
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, And now Foost is saying, I want repayment of that sixteen hundred plus interest, which comes to over two thousand guilders. And as you it out, like eight hundred guilders was four houses, so two thousand there's a lot of houses. We don't know why he's demanding the repayment, but it's happening. Gutenberg doesn't show up at the hearing weirdly, don't know why, but he wasn't there, but he sends a statement which somebody reads on his behalf, and Gutenberg disputes.
00:29:33
Speaker 3: A lot of what Fus says.
00:29:34
Speaker 2: Unsurprisingly so at court, I guess he says, Okay, yes, that first eight hundred guilders that was alone. But even though the contract might say and the fine print that at six percent interest, we actually agreed that I wasn't.
00:29:50
Speaker 3: Going to pay interest on that.
00:29:52
Speaker 2: Not his strongest argument, not his strongest argument. Get it in writing, Gutenberg, come on. The second part is more interesting. He says, the part of the money Foots put up after that, the other eight hundred that wasn't alone. That was investment as a partner, to share in the profit or loss of the business. In other words, Gutenberg is saying, in our language today, he wouldn't have said it this way, that first eight hundred was debt, but the second eight hundred was equity.
00:30:16
Speaker 3: That's the he said.
00:30:17
Speaker 4: He said.
00:30:17
Speaker 2: Then kind of third beat of the document, there is a sworn affidavit from Fust.
00:30:22
Speaker 3: Remember who was there in the room.
00:30:24
Speaker 2: In this part, Fust actually seems to back off his original claim a little. You know, we don't know what was said in the room, but it seems like in the course of the hearing, maybe he reduced his claim because in this affidavit he basically says, Okay, Gutenberg should go back through his accounts, figure out how much of the money that I gave him actually went into this printing business, and he should pay me back with interest for whatever part of the money did not go into the printing business. If he took my money and spent on something else, come on, he's got to pay me back with interest for that. So Robert, actually we have it in Fousse words translated into English.
00:30:57
Speaker 3: Give it to a nice on the borrowed money which he Gutenberg received and did not use for our common undertaking. I demand from him the interest due under the terms of the verdict.
00:31:08
Speaker 2: And the court basically seems to agree with this, which I have to say, seems reasonable, right. It does seem like a very common sense thing. And the court sends Gutenberg back to produce evidence on what he actually spent on the project. I guess they're saying, like, show.
00:31:21
Speaker 3: Us your books and if in fact you took his mond existed, Ye, the.
00:31:26
Speaker 2: Ledgers, Yes, books existed. The Codex is the book, and it is a useful technology. But it's been around for a long time at this point. Otherwise you got to use a scroll much less convenient. Let me tell you from experience, So a little burnt'szod joke.
00:31:39
Speaker 4: I see.
00:31:39
Speaker 2: So the court says, Gutenberg, go back, look at your records, pay him with interest for whatever you didn't put into the project. And that's the end of what we know from this document. It ends there, which is interesting given the myth that has arisen around this part of the story. The myth is basically, the evil financier Foost drove the noble and brilliant inventor Gutenberg into bankruptcy. Everybody will say they made him go bankrupt. Ye, just like people talk about private equity and private credit today. Yeah, fair, fair, and yeah maybe for similar reasons, right, Like it's a classic villain. Financiers are classic villains. Now, there is no evidence that Gutenberg went bankrupt, and in fact, he kept printing things after this. My favorite is he printed a wall calendar for doctors. Why do doctors need a wall calendar? I'll tell you. In the fourteen whatever I think it was sixties or so, mid fourteen hundreds, it tells you, based on astrology, when is the best time to do your bloodletting for the year. There were bad days and good days. There's a goodness to drain the blood of your patients to help them.
00:32:49
Speaker 3: I'm doing it to them.
00:32:51
Speaker 2: Of course, he prints some more indulgences, always a good business. He may have printed this giant Latin dictionary. He definitely didn't print anything as far as we know, as beautiful as the Bible. Maybe because he didn't have access to capital anymore.
00:33:06
Speaker 3: But he was he was, you know, he was so negad. But it is a little sad, right, I mean away, the man who invents the most amazing invention in Europe at the time is reduced to, you know, basically running a Kinko's in Harrisburg. Right. He's doing calendars, he's doing flyers, this sort of thing, buy one, get one free. It doesn't seem as miraculous. It just seems like a little business he has.
00:33:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, in a way, as a story, you want him to either have wild success or crushing failure. Not personally, not as human being, but just for narrative purposes. The middle is unsatisfying. One thing that is true is Foost the lender. I'm not gonna call him a banker, but the lender, the financier seems to have surpassed Gutenberg in the printing business.
00:33:59
Speaker 3: Well, he's gotten some of the money back and he's gonna invest it in something else.
00:34:02
Speaker 2: Well, and furthermore, and we know this again from like really careful scholarship, I guess we know that he got some of the types, some of the metal letters that had been in Gutenberg's shop, because I guess, you know, you can match the books that he printed with what Gutenberg had printed before, and some.
00:34:17
Speaker 3: Of the letters are Gutenberg's letters. They were sort of unique at the time.
00:34:21
Speaker 2: Yes, because they were sort of unique at the time, that's right. And you know, maybe remember that loan was the original loan was collateralized by the apparatus, right, So maybe these letters are him collecting on the debt. We don't know, but that seems totally plausible to me. He also hires a guy from a Gutenberg shop, this really talented guy.
00:34:41
Speaker 3: I guess no non competes then.
00:34:42
Speaker 4: Which is good.
00:34:43
Speaker 3: It's good for the proliferation of technology. I suspect the employee walked out with a few letters in his pocket.
00:34:50
Speaker 2: Right, right, Is that an exclamation mark in your pocket? Or are you a tiny bit happy to see me. I don't know if they had the exclamation mark then, actually with.
00:34:59
Speaker 3: The joke, it's a good joke.
00:35:01
Speaker 2: So this this worker's name was Peter Schaeffer, I believe is pronounced and Fust, and Schaeffer did great and maybe Feust was a better businessman than Gutenberg, no idea.
00:35:10
Speaker 3: Don't know.
00:35:11
Speaker 2: They start out with this beautiful psalter a book of Psalms, you know, and they actually printed it in multiple colors, which must have required, you know, you got to put the same page through multiple times and get the alignment right, like elegant technical work. And as a business move they do a really clever thing that Gutenberg didn't do. They put their names in the book, just like publishers do today, although although at greater length, Robert read to us what they put in that book.
00:35:38
Speaker 3: The present Book of the Psalms has been fashioned by the artful invention of printing, by means of letter forms made without the driving of the pen, and in praise of God, it has been brought faithfully and industriously to completion by Johann Fust, citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schaeffer of Gernsheim, in the year of the Lord fourteen fifty seven. It's early branding. They put their name on it. They put their name on it. People are like, you know what I need. I need a feust. We got to get fous to do our next book. These guys do great. This book does great. Their business does great.
00:36:09
Speaker 2: They expand to Paris, which is home of a big university, big book town. They're printing broadsheets. Of course, they're printing indulgences, and they print Bibles. And their Bibles are clearly modeled on the Gutenberg Bible because the words are the same. And you might say, of course the words are the same. But in the era of the manuscript, right, something as long as a Bible manuscript, meaning people are literally writing out every book by hand. Something as long as a Bible, there's always going to be a few little errors, omissions, you leave out one word, whatever, change an end to a butt, and print changes that right print. Once you set the press, every book that comes out of that edition is the same.
00:36:51
Speaker 3: And that is.
00:36:51
Speaker 2: Actually a new thing in the world.
00:36:54
Speaker 3: I mean, it becomes more like the unerring word of God. Even though I know Gutenberg put it together, it has that feel that this is more than the work of man. This is something eternal.
00:37:06
Speaker 4: I like that.
00:37:07
Speaker 2: I believe that so fust and Schaeffer are growing, and printing itself is grown. People who worked with Gutenberg and with Fusen Schaeffer go to other towns, set up their shops, and you just see this rapid spread across Europe of printing presses in other German cities, but also in Rome and Venice and Paris and Basel and small towns. It's just happening fast. So there is the end of the Gutenberg story. Of Gutenberg the man. We know that in fourteen sixty five, when he's around sixty five years old, the Archbishop of Mainz gives him this basically this high status lifetime pension, and we have the formal announcement that proclaimed it.
00:37:49
Speaker 4: It read us a little of that.
00:37:50
Speaker 3: From the Archbishop. We will clothe him every year always like our noble men, and give him our court dress. Also we grant him twenty bushels of grain and two large barrels of wine for the use of his house, free of duty, upon its arrival in Mainz every year as long as he lives, on condition that he will not sell it or give it away as has been promised in good faith by Johann Gutenberg himself.
00:38:14
Speaker 2: Tax free wine has free wine. That is the happy ending, I guess that we were looking for in.
00:38:21
Speaker 3: A way right. Well, that and you know, school children don't learn about the Foost printing press. Gutenberg's name, even if he didn't put it on the book itself, is famous. He is one of the greatest inventors of all time.
00:38:35
Speaker 2: We've got one last idea I want to talk about before the end of the show, which is really I think the first moment when you see the printing press transform society.
00:38:47
Speaker 3: We'll talk about that.
00:38:47
Speaker 5: In just a minute, Robert.
00:39:10
Speaker 2: This last idea, we're doing this kind of epilogue to the show. It's about indulgences. Indulgences, of course, were one of the first things Gutenberg printed, one of the first things Fustin Schaeffer printed. And it's really remarkable when you look at the spread of printing across Europe, you see this boom in the indulgence business because like remember, the church was constrained before by the actual labor of the scribes to write out each receipt for each indulgence. But by fifteen hundred you see a bishop in Sicily paying a publisher to print one hundred and thirty thousand indulgences.
00:39:51
Speaker 3: Do we know if sin went up to people like set on their spouses more because there were just like piles of indigence.
00:39:58
Speaker 2: Like that, or if the price went down, right, I don't know, in a competitive market. The price went down, but there was a monopoly around the same time. You see near Barcelona a monastery commissions more than two hundred thousand indulgences.
00:40:10
Speaker 3: The line is around the plank.
00:40:12
Speaker 2: Actually, don't know if there was a monopoly maybe different like local you know, archbishops were competing, good question, don't know. So the printing press itself is enabling this explosion in indulgences, but a backlash is building.
00:40:25
Speaker 3: A backlash of people who want reform, who.
00:40:29
Speaker 4: Want to protest.
00:40:31
Speaker 2: In fifteen seventeen, Martin Luther, yes, Martin Luther, that Martin Luther, professor priest in the German town of Wittenberg, because it's Wittenberg in German. He decides that the indulgence thing has gone too far.
00:40:46
Speaker 3: Like it is, he sees it everywhere, It's all over the place.
00:40:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's too much, And he writes this kind of academic argument in Latin, basically against indulgences, you know, famously his ninety five theces which get posted on the church door and just posted he hammered them. Well that's the myth again, that's the yes, I was, I was actually reading about that. I guess like the church store was like the bulletin board, and everybody.
00:41:13
Speaker 3: Pust it everything down. But whatever, it just sounds better, it does.
00:41:15
Speaker 2: So his ninety five theses ninety five propositions are largely an argument against indulgences, and so I've grabbed a few here for.
00:41:23
Speaker 1: You to read.
00:41:23
Speaker 3: Give me a couple, all right, Well we'll skip over some and go to number thirty two. Those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned together with their teachers. Serious. Okay, let's go to thirty six. Any truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt even without indulgence letters. Save your money, Bro's coming right at them.
00:41:50
Speaker 2: Yeah so yeah, So this, of course, famously right is the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, and it's happening like you could argue, it has been argued it is happening partly because the invention of the printing press led to this proliferation of indulgences. And if you didn't know what was going to happen next, you might think this would be bad for business for the printers. But no, because first of all, the ninety five theses are suddenly reprinted everywhere. Everybody loves list. It's a very interesting idea. It's very much of the moment.
00:42:23
Speaker 3: Number thirty six will shock you.
00:42:25
Speaker 2: And really interestingly, in the next few years after this, Luther starts writing a lot, not just in Latin for this kind of academic and religious audience or priestly audience, but he's writing also in German for a much more popular audience. And in fact, the public goes wild for his work and it becomes almost like news. Like he writes these short sermons that are just a few pages long, and he'll take them to the printer and they'll be out on the streets in a few days. Like it's very dynamic, and it's enabled by the printing press. When he's getting going, there's just one printer in Wittenberg. It's a small town and It's amazing the way Luther keeps complaining about the printer to his friends.
00:43:08
Speaker 3: At one point he writes.
00:43:10
Speaker 2: You would not believe how I regret and how I am disgusted by his work. Writers love complaining about their publishers. To Sloppy, He's not promoting.
00:43:20
Speaker 3: He wasn't complaining.
00:43:21
Speaker 2: Nobody's complained about the marketing department yet. So he actually invites another printer to come and set up shop in town and soon, because Luther is this kind of proto best selling author, there is this little industry of print shops in this small town, so they can just get Luther's stuff out fast.
00:43:41
Speaker 3: This is like the invention of the media. There's a whole ecosystem developing. People want the newest stuff now, you know, it's a clear line from here all the way to TikTok.
00:43:51
Speaker 2: So there is now this print industry, this media industry, you could say, if you want to be a little anachronistic. In Wittenberg, and over the course of Luther's lifetime, it just proliferates. Like he translates the Bible into German, so of course a big deal. Historically in his lifetime, these local printers print over one hundred thousand copies of this German translation.
00:44:14
Speaker 3: Of the Bible. And in his lifetime, you know, more broadly, in the German speaking world, printing is proliferating, and something like six or seven million evangelical pamphlets are printed in German throughout the region. It's amazing because it's not just a product. Gutenberg didn't invent something that just fulfilled one need. It created a million needs. The moment the printing press is there, you don't just want to print one thing the Bible. You want to print arguments about the Bible and arguments back and competing views.
00:44:48
Speaker 2: Of this well, and it changes the dynamics of like, well, now you can have more intelligences. Now one random priest can have an audience of millions in a way that is almost unimaginable without the printing press.
00:45:00
Speaker 3: And if you didn't know how to read, you would have incentive to learn how to read in order to read these things, which creates more demand.
00:45:07
Speaker 2: Yes, so maybe one idea to land on is like new technology is a new tool, and what nobody ever knows is how are people going to use that tool.
00:45:18
Speaker 3: These guys Gutenberg thought they were just making a cheaper, more efficient way to make bibles. They didn't know what else you could print beyond this, And then it goes beyond religion. It changes politics, war, philosophy, science, everything I want to.
00:45:33
Speaker 2: Say as we roll into the credits today, I want to say thank you to the listener who wrote to us to say that whenever he tells his friends about our show, they say that doesn't sound like you, but it is a nice thought to tell your friends about the show, and we encourage all of our listeners to at least bring someone along. Truly, I am very grateful to anyone who recommends the show to a friend. If you write to us and tell us that you told a friend, I will personally write back to you and thank you for whatever that's worth. We're at Business History at Pushkin FM. Our show today was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang was engineered by Sarah Bruguier. Our video editor is Matt Nielsen. Our showrunner and editor is Ryan Dilly. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and.
00:46:18
Speaker 3: I'm Robert Smith. This is Business History. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Pushkin too quick. No, it's perfect push kit stuff. You got it.
00:00:33
Speaker 2: Frank up the siege engine. Because we're going back to the Middle Ages.
00:00:38
Speaker 3: I will wear my leather corset.
00:00:40
Speaker 2: We're doing a biggie today. We are maybe the biggest one we've done yet. The printing press, the printing press. Love the printing press. Yes, it is everything, including a business.
00:00:54
Speaker 3: I'm Jacob Goldstein, I'm Robert Smith, and this is business show about the history. So why don't we go way back.
00:01:00
Speaker 2: Of business today on the show the invention of the printing press, which is a surprisingly modern story. There is debt, there is equity, there is a court case, competition, international branch offices, and the Protestant Reformation. Our show today begins with the man named Johannes gen Spleisch zuur Lauden.
00:01:25
Speaker 3: Did not see that coming.
00:01:26
Speaker 2: I'm probably saying it wrong because I don't speak German. Johannes Goose Flesh of the House of Laden was born around fourteen hundred to relatively rich parents in a town called Mainz in what's Germany today. At the time it was part of the Holy Roman Empire.
00:01:42
Speaker 3: Which Fultaire said, of course, was neither holy nor Roman. Nor An Empire.
00:01:46
Speaker 2: When Johannes is around twenty years old, his father dies and his mother comes into possession of a house called the hoff Zuom Gutenberg House of the Good Mountain, and Johannes becomes known as Johannes Zoom Gutenberg. I guess last names work differently back then.
00:02:07
Speaker 3: There are many Johannases and you're like, oh, the Good Mountain one.
00:02:10
Speaker 2: The one he's over at the Good Mountain House. So what do we know about Gutenberg. There's a famous engraving of him. If you've seen a picture of Gutenberg, it is from this engraving. He's got this long white beard, comes down to like two points on his chest like zz top, Yeah, like zezytop style. He's wearing a fur trimmed hat. Gutenberg didn't look like this. The picture was made like one hundred years after he died. There's no pictures of him as far as we know from his lifetime. And I love this right And as we'll see, there's all this myth, even as you get into the story sort of embroidered about him. I mean, we don't know what he thought or felt, you know, as far as we know, there's no diary or trove of letters. But of course he printed books, and a surprising number of the books still exist.
00:02:58
Speaker 3: And also conveniently for.
00:03:00
Speaker 2: Our purposes, he wound up in court a few times and the paperwork, the court records, actually still exist. And so a lot of what we know about Goot and the invention of the printing press and how it was used comes from these basically lawsuits over money, which is great for US business history. So here's this story we can put together. At some point, we know Gutenberg became an affiliate of the Master Goldsmith's.
00:03:30
Speaker 3: Not an apprentice, but an affiliates.
00:03:31
Speaker 2: Exactly, so it's different. So the Master Goldsmiths are a guild, which is, you know, the medieval version of a union. Guilds were a big deal. Maybe we should do a guild show. Actually he was not in the union. He worked with gold is basically what that means in some way. So we know that he's into metal, and we also know that he was an entrepreneur. And now here, I am this is like an anachronism, right, I'm sort of projecting backwards. There there were not entrepreneurs in the modern sense. The word didn't exist. But yet I think you'll see as we go through the story. He was a hustler, he was a guy who started businesses. His life is much more that way than I would have thought for someone who living in you know, the end of the Middle Ages basically. But then again, like he is the guy who is going to invent the thing that's gonna create the modern world, so maybe it makes sense. So the first kind of hustle, the first business that he starts that we know of, is mirrors. Gutenberg gets into the mirror game and he finds this great, you know, fourteen hundreds kind of niche, which is he's going to sell special mirrors to religious pilgrims.
00:04:42
Speaker 3: What made the mirror special? They're special. They're like convex mirrors that are specially made for the pilgrims.
00:04:48
Speaker 2: To take on their pilgrimage. And I'll explain why. I'll explain why. So what's going on is in fourteen thirty nine, there's going to be a pilgrimage to this German town to see these relics that are displayed just once every seven years, like a piece of the gown that Mary wore the night Jesus was born, the loincloth that Jesus wore, on the cross and is stained with blood, that kind of thing.
00:05:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is like woodstock for religious pilgrims.
00:05:19
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, And so the idea with these mirrors is, you know, when you get your moment before the holy relics looking at them, you hold up the mirror, and the mirror can somehow capture the holy power that the relics have. And to be clear, he didn't invent this idea.
00:05:38
Speaker 3: This was a thing that people were doing, spread by mirror merchants perhaps perhaps, but he's he's going with it. He's going with it, and he actually gets a couple of investors who have equity in the project. Essentially what we would call equity, starts making the mirrors, as far as we can tell. And then when your classic pieces of medieval bad news arrives, the plague on the back of a rat, the back of a flea, on the back of a rat. It's like panics in the stories we tell the nineteennres. You know, everything's going fine, and then the plague.
00:06:12
Speaker 2: The plague is the financial panic of the thirteen and fourteen hundred.
00:06:16
Speaker 3: It's very good.
00:06:17
Speaker 2: Pilgrimage is delayed until fourteen forty.
00:06:20
Speaker 3: He must have been sad, looking out over one hundred convex mirrors, all staring back at him. One of Gutenberg's investors dies, oh man, could have been plague, could have been anything.
00:06:31
Speaker 2: Fourteen thirties, You could die of anything at any time. And the investor's family, the investor's family, the guy who has died, His family sues Gutenberg over whatever, over that guy's stake.
00:06:43
Speaker 4: In the business.
00:06:44
Speaker 3: Come on act of God.
00:06:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know what the details are. I think Gutenberg wins. But there is this really interesting, just kind of enticing detail mystery in the lawsuit, and it's just a few words. And what we know from the lawsuit paperwork is that Gutenberg is afraid that his trade secrets are going to get out. Of course, there's you know, no intellectual property as we know it in this era. You try and keep your secret secret. In particular, he says he is worried that visitors to the dead Man's house are going to see And this part is a direct quote, or at least a direct quote translated into English.
00:07:21
Speaker 3: Four pieces lying in the press, the press, the press, the printing press. We don't know, we don't know, we don't know.
00:07:28
Speaker 2: But he tells somebody to take these pieces apart so nobody can tell what they are. Historians, of course, have been speculating for hundreds of years about these six words. Was he already working on the printing press?
00:07:40
Speaker 3: Unclear?
00:07:41
Speaker 2: We don't actually know what happened with the mirror business for that matter. Next piece of evidence. Next time we have a clear view of what's going on with Gutenberg's actually ten years later, fourteen fifty. So Gutenberg, I will say, as a fifty something man, is fifty ish at this point. He's not a kid. Some might say is washed up, some might say he's at his peak. So it's fourteen fifty. Gutenberg is around fifty years old, and he makes another deal. He enters into another business arrangement. This time it's with a guy named Johann fuoh Ho, and Foust agreed to lend Gutenberg eight hundred guilders at six percent interest, collateralized by the apparatus sparatus. We're getting excited, Oh, apparatus, I like this. Out of that, it's like he has a code name das apparatus. Sorry to all our German speakers. So eight hundred guilders is a lot of money. It's enough to buy one hundred oxen or four houses at These figures, by the way, come from a book called Gutenberg, A Life in Books by Eric Marshall White, which is a good book, a really helpful book. It's relatively recent and it's really careful. It's a really careful biography of Gutenberg. So it was really helpful in kind of untangling the myth from what we know. So okay, so they make this deal. In two years later, Foust makes another investment, agrees to put in three hundred more guilders right away, up to eight hundred more overall. And here we know from the kind of documentary evidence that we'll get to that this is explicitly for the work of the books.
00:09:23
Speaker 3: This is the work of the books. It's happening, and so there he is.
00:09:26
Speaker 2: If we zoom out now, like we're right in the documents, really in the in the micro, if we zoom out to the macro for a sec it's interesting to think, why why is why? Why are they bringing a lot of money into this.
00:09:38
Speaker 3: We don't have the aha moment, the big surprise story where you know he was I don't know, you left some type somewhere and his wife sat on it, and she gets up and he sees the impression there, yes, right, Or he falls in some inc and there happens to be a little coin on top of the inca that gets on his shirts and he thinks, ah.
00:09:59
Speaker 2: We do know this, we do know this. Demand for books was really high in Europe at this point for some interesting reasons and kind of varied social and economic reasons. So and political actually, so you have governments are becoming more of a thing, right, It's not just kings occasionally going to war. You're having kind of bureaucrats, sort of modern governmental functions emerging. And for that you need people who are literate, who have gone to school and read books to learn how to read.
00:10:32
Speaker 3: So there is demand for books.
00:10:34
Speaker 2: You have the Renaissance getting going in Italy by this point, and all the rich guys in Italy want to build their libraries of books from classical antiquity. There's actually this little story that I love of a businessman in Florence, a guy named Vespasiano di Bistici.
00:10:52
Speaker 3: One more time.
00:10:53
Speaker 2: I love it, Vespasiano Dibistici, that's the name Babistici. I believe he started out as a paper merchant, but he winds up creating kind of like what to me seems like a book factory in the fourteen forties, no doctor without a printing press. So what happens is Cosimo di Medici, you know, of the Florentine Medici, decides he needs his library, his personal library, and he goes to the Bistichi and Bistici has like fifty five scribes writing for him, like you know, copying out manuscripts for Cosimo. And these fifty five guys create something like two hundred books in two years. So that's basically like if you round it to fifty, you know, it takes a guy six months to write a manuscript, huh. And of course these are beautiful whatever, but like that's a lot of labor.
00:11:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's a lot of money for each book, and a lot of money for each book.
00:11:48
Speaker 2: Now, there is something making books cheaper, and that is paper.
00:11:55
Speaker 3: Paper.
00:11:56
Speaker 2: I presume Cosimo's books would have been on parchment, which is what you know, they had been using in Europe for a long time and it was still the high class thing. And paper is profoundly cheaper than parchment. Parchment, of course, made from animal skins, costs a lot to grow an animal to make the parchment. And paper has been around in Asia for quite a long time by this point, but it has recently come to Europe and has become sort of industrialized, right, And the availability of paper is profound for the book business because when a scribe is writing a book on parchment, the parchment is a huge chunk of the cost, maybe most of the cost, but once you have paper, almost all of the cost of making the book is the cost of the labor, the cost of the scribes time.
00:12:41
Speaker 3: This is a classic business situation, right. You have a high demand for a product, and the demand is going up. The thing that you use to make the products, the input, the expensive input, is getting cheaper with paper, and so what you are left with is a bottleneck, a low productivity part of the process, and that is the scribes. And so we could talk about, oh, was it an insight? Did Gutenberg see something that no one else saw? Really, there were economic pressures. Somebody was going to do that, because it's obvious when you have a bottleneck, a very expensive bottleneck in the process, you should try to automate that. And there was printing in the world.
00:13:22
Speaker 2: Woodblock printing had been used for hundreds of years in Asia, and it was it was in use in Europe somewhat.
00:13:29
Speaker 3: You know.
00:13:29
Speaker 2: Obviously, you carve sort of a single pages worth of typically an image, sometimes some words into a woodblock. But of course it's static, right, you got your block. You can print one page, but that's it.
00:13:40
Speaker 3: We've all done this with potatoes when we were a kid.
00:13:42
Speaker 2: Yes, it's that movable type, which is you know, as we know, what he's going to invent is way more dynamic, way better. And by this time, by the mid fourteen hundreds, movable type had been invented also in Asia. In Korea they had even used metal types. But both in China and Korea at the time they used pictograms. Each word was its own character.
00:14:04
Speaker 3: So you'd need thousands of these little things in order to have a.
00:14:08
Speaker 2: Book to have a book, right, much less practical than when you have an alphabet, and you can do whatever your upper case in your lower case and dozens. The order of magnitude is dozens, and you can print anything. And so there is this question. Was Gutenberg copying an Asian press? It doesn't seem like it. There's no evidence that he knew that people in Europe knew, you know, in any kind of a real way about these presses in Asia. It seems like when Gutenberg is doing this work around fourteen fifty, he's working from first principles.
00:14:40
Speaker 3: And we know, you know, he.
00:14:41
Speaker 2: Had done some kind of work related to goldsmithing. His dad was affiliated with the Mint, so maybe he knew something about the way coins were made. We know he's like a hustler, you know, he's entrepreneurial. And it seems like Gutenberg on his own invented or invented for Europe the movable type printing press, arguably the most important invention ever to come out of Europe. Up there, mean want the croissant, The steam engine.
00:15:11
Speaker 3: Oh, the steam engine. Of course, internal combustion huge.
00:15:14
Speaker 2: So there were a few other biggies, but one of the biggies Fondue, but certainly one of the biggies. The earliest image we have of press is not of Gutenberg's press in particular, but it's not that long after. It's from about fifty years later. It's this form of picture that was popular at the time called the dance macabre. You have pictures of people in everyday life and then you have death kind of dancing through I guess to remind you that everybody's going to die. Maybe they're taking away these people, yeah, Memento Moury. And so in this image you can see like a Gutenberg ish press.
00:15:52
Speaker 3: Are you looking at it?
00:15:53
Speaker 5: Yeah?
00:15:53
Speaker 3: There are these kind of skeleton looking dudes. Yeah, and what's death? Those are death? Yeah, I got that. And one of them has his hand on the person who's picking out the type, who's putting the type too, right.
00:16:04
Speaker 2: They call that guy the compositor, right, So for each page he arranges the letters, and the letters are backwards, right, you arrange it all backwards.
00:16:10
Speaker 3: And there's a guy who's doing the actual press, which looks like one of those things where you pull the lever and it goes down like maybe you'd use to squeeze olive oil or something. Yes, they had used presses like this, and you're up for a long time.
00:16:20
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:16:20
Speaker 3: And there's another skeleton dude like touching that man. That's amazing. And that's basically it.
00:16:25
Speaker 4: Right.
00:16:25
Speaker 2: The press is actually simple in its way, right, he's putting together these different things, but it's not that complicated. And that raises this question in my mind, right, which is we've talked before about simultaneous invention. It seems like all the big inventions that we've talked about, it is really not ultimately like one guy figuring it out. You know, well, Edison, we talked about it early on in the Edison and the Movies story. Lots of people were trying to figure out movies. Photography was out there. It was clear somebody who was going to figure out movies or telephone. Famously, like literally people racing to the patent office to get the first patent. I mean even calculus, calculus right, Leibnitz and Newton.
00:17:12
Speaker 3: And the reason of course for simultaneous invention is what we talked about a little bit earlier. There is the need. You know, technology has come up to a certain point and people are using that as a launching pad for something else. And so it is natural when people are trying to solve the same problem, they know about the same information out there in the world, they're going to come up with a new solution.
00:17:30
Speaker 2: And yet that doesn't happen in this case. Right like there is demand for books, there is paper, and nobody else in Europe does this. Like that seems pretty clear, and so I was singing, why is this too much plague always a good answer for this era. I have an idea, and my idea is, you know, if you think about these other periods we've talked about the eighteen hundreds, certainly the nineteen hundreds, the even the seventeen hundreds, everybody's reading what everybody else is doing. There are journals and books, and you know, in the eighteen hundreds there's a magazine printing all the new patents that Thomas Edison is reading. To keep up on things, what you need for these things.
00:18:10
Speaker 3: Is a printing press.
00:18:12
Speaker 2: Uh, you need a printing press to know what everybody else is working on. And so the reason maybe I'm making this up that Gutenberg is the only one to invent it is it hasn't been invented yet, so not everybody knows everything all the time the way we do.
00:18:26
Speaker 3: Once you have a printing press, I think, I think that's a great idea because what would it take to spread this. You'd have to write letters to people. But even then not everybody who how to.
00:18:35
Speaker 2: Write letters do become a thing, right and science letters are a big deal. But the journal, you know, the printed journal is a much more powerful tool than letters. It's a thought in any case. In any case, Gutenberg now has his press. What does he print first?
00:18:51
Speaker 3: The Bible? Not the Bible? Okay, too expensive maybe, right, it's long. The Bible is long, and it has to start there, right, start. You don't start with the Word of God.
00:19:00
Speaker 2: You love nightmare also you know, yes and yes and also high stakes.
00:19:03
Speaker 3: You want to get it right.
00:19:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, So he starts with things that are simpler, cheaper, shorter, a German poem, a grammar textbook for last, and then this is my favorite sort of pre Bible printing work that Gutenberg does, comes around fourteen fifty three, so not that long into this project, when there is actually this world historical event that's going to be good news for Gutenberg's printing business, and that is the Sultan Mehmed the Second captures Constantinople. Big news, big news in the religion. Teen emperor is decapitated, and now the Catholic Church needs money to fight the Sultan. How does the church raise money in.
00:19:49
Speaker 3: Fourteen fifty three indulgences?
00:19:51
Speaker 2: Indulgences, They sell indulgences and you know you know this from whatever from school. Yeah, if you give money to the church, they will remove the punishment that you owe.
00:20:03
Speaker 3: For your sins. They would also allow you to get your relatives out of purgatory if they had died. Uh huh, that makes sense. That's the little extra, guess cost extra, but sure.
00:20:12
Speaker 2: What I didn't realize until I was working on this show is indulgences were physical things. There was an indulgence which was basically like a nice receipt, a nice receipt often written out on vellum of fancy, like a very high grade parchment made from calfskin. And this fact that the receipt part of the indulgence thing becomes important when the Sultan captures Constantinople, because the Church suddenly needs to sell lots of indulgences. But they have a labor problem.
00:20:46
Speaker 3: It's the problem we were talking about before, right, There's just not enough scribes to write out all the indulgences that you need to sell right now, plus so much sin. The demand was huge, The demand is huge. Who among us?
00:21:02
Speaker 2: And now here comes Johannes Gutenberg with a solution to your problem. You know, your grace, how many do you need? I'll just crank come out for you.
00:21:13
Speaker 3: This was also a solution to Gutenberg's problem because he had just enlisted the richest customer on planet Earth, or one of them at least. Yes, Catholic, definitely a good customer to have. And you know, on indulgence, I believe it's a single page, right, so you said it once, and you know, the printing business, you want to make as many copies and sell as many copies of each thing as you can, so it's generic. They don't have the different ones for the different sins.
00:21:39
Speaker 2: I guess over time they're different ones. But the basic thing is that there's a blank for the name of the buyer. There's a blank for the name of the buyer, and so he cranks out all these indulgences white that the guy who wrote that book that I mentioned says, they.
00:21:55
Speaker 3: Go out by the wagon load.
00:21:57
Speaker 2: The money, I guess was supposed to go to defend Cypress Cypress, but apparently none of it, or almost none of it ever got to Cyprus got siphoned off along the way. But whatever, that's not Gutenberg's problem, truly, he got paid.
00:22:12
Speaker 3: Let's do the Biggie, Let's do the Bible.
00:22:15
Speaker 4: We'll do it after the break, Robert.
00:22:39
Speaker 2: We're back from the break, and it is October of fourteen fifty four. We're in Frankfurt at a diet.
00:22:46
Speaker 3: A religious meeting of some sort of meeting of the cat. Not a conclave, but a diet.
00:22:51
Speaker 2: It's not as big as a conclave, I guess. And we're with an Italian bishop named Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. Piccolomini sees something that blows his mind. He sees some preliminary pages from a printed Bible, from what's going to be the Gutenberg Bible. And we know this because he wrote a letter to a cardinal about it. He describes a miraculous man who he encountered, who I hope was Gutenberg, but it could been somebody who worked with Gutenberg, we don't know. And he describes for the cardinal what the pages of this Bible were like, give it to us.
00:23:32
Speaker 3: He said. They were exceedingly clean and correct in their script and without error, which your Grace could read effortlessly even without glasses. I mean something. I know. I appreciate that large print. I learned from numerous witnesses that one hundred and fifty eight copies had been completed, although some others say the number is one hundred and eighty. I shall try if possible to buy a copy on your behalf and have it brought here. But I fear it will not be possible, both because of the distance and because they say that ready buyers had all been found even before the volumes had been finished. It's a hit.
00:24:05
Speaker 2: It's a hit that seems promising, right. It is wild to think of a guy seeing what's going to be the Gutenberg Bible. Do I remember that you went to see to see one at the New York Public Library?
00:24:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, for Planet Money. I went to It was on display in they have a special display case for these kind of things. There's also one at the Morgan Library, I should say JP. Morgan bought one, no big surprise, and I recall it was much larger than I thought it was going to be. It was probably the largest Bible I'd ever seen. It looked like one of those giant dictionaries that you have to put on a stand. And the other thing I remember about it is that the margins were very Why it was just it was these these columns, these two columns, and the print was that old fashioned sort of Gothic Germany, very German looking. It was very orderly. I will say, these large margins these very straight columns and this very dense writing. Did was there color in the part that you looked at, Yeah, there's there were some color that clearly someone had filled in or painted right right. Yeah, they actually left blank like the where there would be a big colored first letter at the start of a chapter or a paragraph or something. They actually didn't print that on the press. They left it to be hand inscribed.
00:25:23
Speaker 4: One off.
00:25:23
Speaker 3: The scribes were afraid of the printing press, and then saw that in fact they could do their favorite part. You know, it's no fun to print every little letter, but to make the giant g with the flowers and the colors. They must have loved that, and now they could do one hundred and eighty.
00:25:39
Speaker 2: Maybe Gutenberg was like, no, no, I'm not going to automate your work out of existence. I'm just going to take away the drudgery. I'll leave you to do the creative fun part.
00:25:46
Speaker 3: It's a compliment familiar.
00:25:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you've described the book very well. It's remarkable how many still exist there. I believe twenty one complete copies still in existence, which is a very large percentage given how long ago it was and how it just happened In Europe since then.
00:26:02
Speaker 3: It shows you how valuable, how.
00:26:03
Speaker 2: Valuable they were, and how special they must have seemed even then. Right, One fun business detail about the printing of the book itself. It's referred to typically as the forty two line Gutenberg Bible because they are forty two lines per page, and as you say, it seems quite spacious and like not crammed. In the first few pages. They were actually doing forty lines of page, and so presumably they must have figured out like, oh, we could do two more lines per page, and that means less paper, less parchment.
00:26:35
Speaker 3: That's just profit right there. By the time you get to Revelations, it's tiny, tiny, tiny writing. No it isn't.
00:26:42
Speaker 2: So he's cranking them out. He's Gutenberg is making the Gutenberg Bible. And there's this great detail. So some of the Bibles were printed on parchment, some on paper. And there's a belief, a kind of a theory based I believe on the different watermarks on the different pieces of paper, which I love, like scholarly work like this, a belief that at some point Gutenberg might have had six different presses going just kind of a factory. Right, he's becoming a publisher a printer and then it feels sudden looking back, but we don't know. Something goes wrong.
00:27:15
Speaker 3: There's a big problem.
00:27:15
Speaker 2: It's going to happen right now, and that is this Johann Fust, the guy who put up the money to get the project going investor decides he wants.
00:27:24
Speaker 4: His money back.
00:27:25
Speaker 3: We don't know why there was fight.
00:27:27
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe Fust needs the money for something else, but we know that they wound up in court on Thursday, November sixth, fourteen fifty five. I love court documents as a reporter. I've always loved them. I covered cops and courts and Bozeman, Montana twenty many years ago when I started out.
00:27:48
Speaker 3: It's amazing because we wouldn't know anything about this really.
00:27:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there is this one document that describes this whole thing in detail, written by one Ulrich Helmus Perger, cleric of the Diocese of Bamberg, notary public and laid judge of the Holy Seed at Mainz by Imperial authority, who wrote out this beautiful, detailed document that explains a lot about the first printing press in Europe. The document is called the Helmusperger Notarial Instrument. No tarial instrument is one beautiful logword in German. And it lays this out kind of as a story, and it starts with Feust's version. It's like he said, he said, So Foust tells a story like this. He says, I loaned Gutenberg eight hundred guilders at six percent interest. And by the way, I borrowed that money from somebody else at interest.
00:28:42
Speaker 3: Oh, good job, Foust, FoST.
00:28:45
Speaker 2: He's like a private credit, right. He's like, I don't know, Apollo or something in the market today. And then Fuss says, Gutenberg came back to me later and said, actually I need another eight hundred guilders, so I loaned him eight hundred more.
00:28:58
Speaker 3: Which remember is a lot of money at the time.
00:29:01
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, And now Foost is saying, I want repayment of that sixteen hundred plus interest, which comes to over two thousand guilders. And as you it out, like eight hundred guilders was four houses, so two thousand there's a lot of houses. We don't know why he's demanding the repayment, but it's happening. Gutenberg doesn't show up at the hearing weirdly, don't know why, but he wasn't there, but he sends a statement which somebody reads on his behalf, and Gutenberg disputes.
00:29:33
Speaker 3: A lot of what Fus says.
00:29:34
Speaker 2: Unsurprisingly so at court, I guess he says, Okay, yes, that first eight hundred guilders that was alone. But even though the contract might say and the fine print that at six percent interest, we actually agreed that I wasn't.
00:29:50
Speaker 3: Going to pay interest on that.
00:29:52
Speaker 2: Not his strongest argument, not his strongest argument. Get it in writing, Gutenberg, come on. The second part is more interesting. He says, the part of the money Foots put up after that, the other eight hundred that wasn't alone. That was investment as a partner, to share in the profit or loss of the business. In other words, Gutenberg is saying, in our language today, he wouldn't have said it this way, that first eight hundred was debt, but the second eight hundred was equity.
00:30:16
Speaker 3: That's the he said.
00:30:17
Speaker 4: He said.
00:30:17
Speaker 2: Then kind of third beat of the document, there is a sworn affidavit from Fust.
00:30:22
Speaker 3: Remember who was there in the room.
00:30:24
Speaker 2: In this part, Fust actually seems to back off his original claim a little. You know, we don't know what was said in the room, but it seems like in the course of the hearing, maybe he reduced his claim because in this affidavit he basically says, Okay, Gutenberg should go back through his accounts, figure out how much of the money that I gave him actually went into this printing business, and he should pay me back with interest for whatever part of the money did not go into the printing business. If he took my money and spent on something else, come on, he's got to pay me back with interest for that. So Robert, actually we have it in Fousse words translated into English.
00:30:57
Speaker 3: Give it to a nice on the borrowed money which he Gutenberg received and did not use for our common undertaking. I demand from him the interest due under the terms of the verdict.
00:31:08
Speaker 2: And the court basically seems to agree with this, which I have to say, seems reasonable, right. It does seem like a very common sense thing. And the court sends Gutenberg back to produce evidence on what he actually spent on the project. I guess they're saying, like, show.
00:31:21
Speaker 3: Us your books and if in fact you took his mond existed, Ye, the.
00:31:26
Speaker 2: Ledgers, Yes, books existed. The Codex is the book, and it is a useful technology. But it's been around for a long time at this point. Otherwise you got to use a scroll much less convenient. Let me tell you from experience, So a little burnt'szod joke.
00:31:39
Speaker 4: I see.
00:31:39
Speaker 2: So the court says, Gutenberg, go back, look at your records, pay him with interest for whatever you didn't put into the project. And that's the end of what we know from this document. It ends there, which is interesting given the myth that has arisen around this part of the story. The myth is basically, the evil financier Foost drove the noble and brilliant inventor Gutenberg into bankruptcy. Everybody will say they made him go bankrupt. Ye, just like people talk about private equity and private credit today. Yeah, fair, fair, and yeah maybe for similar reasons, right, Like it's a classic villain. Financiers are classic villains. Now, there is no evidence that Gutenberg went bankrupt, and in fact, he kept printing things after this. My favorite is he printed a wall calendar for doctors. Why do doctors need a wall calendar? I'll tell you. In the fourteen whatever I think it was sixties or so, mid fourteen hundreds, it tells you, based on astrology, when is the best time to do your bloodletting for the year. There were bad days and good days. There's a goodness to drain the blood of your patients to help them.
00:32:49
Speaker 3: I'm doing it to them.
00:32:51
Speaker 2: Of course, he prints some more indulgences, always a good business. He may have printed this giant Latin dictionary. He definitely didn't print anything as far as we know, as beautiful as the Bible. Maybe because he didn't have access to capital anymore.
00:33:06
Speaker 3: But he was he was, you know, he was so negad. But it is a little sad, right, I mean away, the man who invents the most amazing invention in Europe at the time is reduced to, you know, basically running a Kinko's in Harrisburg. Right. He's doing calendars, he's doing flyers, this sort of thing, buy one, get one free. It doesn't seem as miraculous. It just seems like a little business he has.
00:33:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, in a way, as a story, you want him to either have wild success or crushing failure. Not personally, not as human being, but just for narrative purposes. The middle is unsatisfying. One thing that is true is Foost the lender. I'm not gonna call him a banker, but the lender, the financier seems to have surpassed Gutenberg in the printing business.
00:33:59
Speaker 3: Well, he's gotten some of the money back and he's gonna invest it in something else.
00:34:02
Speaker 2: Well, and furthermore, and we know this again from like really careful scholarship, I guess we know that he got some of the types, some of the metal letters that had been in Gutenberg's shop, because I guess, you know, you can match the books that he printed with what Gutenberg had printed before, and some.
00:34:17
Speaker 3: Of the letters are Gutenberg's letters. They were sort of unique at the time.
00:34:21
Speaker 2: Yes, because they were sort of unique at the time, that's right. And you know, maybe remember that loan was the original loan was collateralized by the apparatus, right, So maybe these letters are him collecting on the debt. We don't know, but that seems totally plausible to me. He also hires a guy from a Gutenberg shop, this really talented guy.
00:34:41
Speaker 3: I guess no non competes then.
00:34:42
Speaker 4: Which is good.
00:34:43
Speaker 3: It's good for the proliferation of technology. I suspect the employee walked out with a few letters in his pocket.
00:34:50
Speaker 2: Right, right, Is that an exclamation mark in your pocket? Or are you a tiny bit happy to see me. I don't know if they had the exclamation mark then, actually with.
00:34:59
Speaker 3: The joke, it's a good joke.
00:35:01
Speaker 2: So this this worker's name was Peter Schaeffer, I believe is pronounced and Fust, and Schaeffer did great and maybe Feust was a better businessman than Gutenberg, no idea.
00:35:10
Speaker 3: Don't know.
00:35:11
Speaker 2: They start out with this beautiful psalter a book of Psalms, you know, and they actually printed it in multiple colors, which must have required, you know, you got to put the same page through multiple times and get the alignment right, like elegant technical work. And as a business move they do a really clever thing that Gutenberg didn't do. They put their names in the book, just like publishers do today, although although at greater length, Robert read to us what they put in that book.
00:35:38
Speaker 3: The present Book of the Psalms has been fashioned by the artful invention of printing, by means of letter forms made without the driving of the pen, and in praise of God, it has been brought faithfully and industriously to completion by Johann Fust, citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schaeffer of Gernsheim, in the year of the Lord fourteen fifty seven. It's early branding. They put their name on it. They put their name on it. People are like, you know what I need. I need a feust. We got to get fous to do our next book. These guys do great. This book does great. Their business does great.
00:36:09
Speaker 2: They expand to Paris, which is home of a big university, big book town. They're printing broadsheets. Of course, they're printing indulgences, and they print Bibles. And their Bibles are clearly modeled on the Gutenberg Bible because the words are the same. And you might say, of course the words are the same. But in the era of the manuscript, right, something as long as a Bible manuscript, meaning people are literally writing out every book by hand. Something as long as a Bible, there's always going to be a few little errors, omissions, you leave out one word, whatever, change an end to a butt, and print changes that right print. Once you set the press, every book that comes out of that edition is the same.
00:36:51
Speaker 3: And that is.
00:36:51
Speaker 2: Actually a new thing in the world.
00:36:54
Speaker 3: I mean, it becomes more like the unerring word of God. Even though I know Gutenberg put it together, it has that feel that this is more than the work of man. This is something eternal.
00:37:06
Speaker 4: I like that.
00:37:07
Speaker 2: I believe that so fust and Schaeffer are growing, and printing itself is grown. People who worked with Gutenberg and with Fusen Schaeffer go to other towns, set up their shops, and you just see this rapid spread across Europe of printing presses in other German cities, but also in Rome and Venice and Paris and Basel and small towns. It's just happening fast. So there is the end of the Gutenberg story. Of Gutenberg the man. We know that in fourteen sixty five, when he's around sixty five years old, the Archbishop of Mainz gives him this basically this high status lifetime pension, and we have the formal announcement that proclaimed it.
00:37:49
Speaker 4: It read us a little of that.
00:37:50
Speaker 3: From the Archbishop. We will clothe him every year always like our noble men, and give him our court dress. Also we grant him twenty bushels of grain and two large barrels of wine for the use of his house, free of duty, upon its arrival in Mainz every year as long as he lives, on condition that he will not sell it or give it away as has been promised in good faith by Johann Gutenberg himself.
00:38:14
Speaker 2: Tax free wine has free wine. That is the happy ending, I guess that we were looking for in.
00:38:21
Speaker 3: A way right. Well, that and you know, school children don't learn about the Foost printing press. Gutenberg's name, even if he didn't put it on the book itself, is famous. He is one of the greatest inventors of all time.
00:38:35
Speaker 2: We've got one last idea I want to talk about before the end of the show, which is really I think the first moment when you see the printing press transform society.
00:38:47
Speaker 3: We'll talk about that.
00:38:47
Speaker 5: In just a minute, Robert.
00:39:10
Speaker 2: This last idea, we're doing this kind of epilogue to the show. It's about indulgences. Indulgences, of course, were one of the first things Gutenberg printed, one of the first things Fustin Schaeffer printed. And it's really remarkable when you look at the spread of printing across Europe, you see this boom in the indulgence business because like remember, the church was constrained before by the actual labor of the scribes to write out each receipt for each indulgence. But by fifteen hundred you see a bishop in Sicily paying a publisher to print one hundred and thirty thousand indulgences.
00:39:51
Speaker 3: Do we know if sin went up to people like set on their spouses more because there were just like piles of indigence.
00:39:58
Speaker 2: Like that, or if the price went down, right, I don't know, in a competitive market. The price went down, but there was a monopoly around the same time. You see near Barcelona a monastery commissions more than two hundred thousand indulgences.
00:40:10
Speaker 3: The line is around the plank.
00:40:12
Speaker 2: Actually, don't know if there was a monopoly maybe different like local you know, archbishops were competing, good question, don't know. So the printing press itself is enabling this explosion in indulgences, but a backlash is building.
00:40:25
Speaker 3: A backlash of people who want reform, who.
00:40:29
Speaker 4: Want to protest.
00:40:31
Speaker 2: In fifteen seventeen, Martin Luther, yes, Martin Luther, that Martin Luther, professor priest in the German town of Wittenberg, because it's Wittenberg in German. He decides that the indulgence thing has gone too far.
00:40:46
Speaker 3: Like it is, he sees it everywhere, It's all over the place.
00:40:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's too much, And he writes this kind of academic argument in Latin, basically against indulgences, you know, famously his ninety five theces which get posted on the church door and just posted he hammered them. Well that's the myth again, that's the yes, I was, I was actually reading about that. I guess like the church store was like the bulletin board, and everybody.
00:41:13
Speaker 3: Pust it everything down. But whatever, it just sounds better, it does.
00:41:15
Speaker 2: So his ninety five theses ninety five propositions are largely an argument against indulgences, and so I've grabbed a few here for.
00:41:23
Speaker 1: You to read.
00:41:23
Speaker 3: Give me a couple, all right, Well we'll skip over some and go to number thirty two. Those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned together with their teachers. Serious. Okay, let's go to thirty six. Any truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt even without indulgence letters. Save your money, Bro's coming right at them.
00:41:50
Speaker 2: Yeah so yeah, So this, of course, famously right is the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, and it's happening like you could argue, it has been argued it is happening partly because the invention of the printing press led to this proliferation of indulgences. And if you didn't know what was going to happen next, you might think this would be bad for business for the printers. But no, because first of all, the ninety five theses are suddenly reprinted everywhere. Everybody loves list. It's a very interesting idea. It's very much of the moment.
00:42:23
Speaker 3: Number thirty six will shock you.
00:42:25
Speaker 2: And really interestingly, in the next few years after this, Luther starts writing a lot, not just in Latin for this kind of academic and religious audience or priestly audience, but he's writing also in German for a much more popular audience. And in fact, the public goes wild for his work and it becomes almost like news. Like he writes these short sermons that are just a few pages long, and he'll take them to the printer and they'll be out on the streets in a few days. Like it's very dynamic, and it's enabled by the printing press. When he's getting going, there's just one printer in Wittenberg. It's a small town and It's amazing the way Luther keeps complaining about the printer to his friends.
00:43:08
Speaker 3: At one point he writes.
00:43:10
Speaker 2: You would not believe how I regret and how I am disgusted by his work. Writers love complaining about their publishers. To Sloppy, He's not promoting.
00:43:20
Speaker 3: He wasn't complaining.
00:43:21
Speaker 2: Nobody's complained about the marketing department yet. So he actually invites another printer to come and set up shop in town and soon, because Luther is this kind of proto best selling author, there is this little industry of print shops in this small town, so they can just get Luther's stuff out fast.
00:43:41
Speaker 3: This is like the invention of the media. There's a whole ecosystem developing. People want the newest stuff now, you know, it's a clear line from here all the way to TikTok.
00:43:51
Speaker 2: So there is now this print industry, this media industry, you could say, if you want to be a little anachronistic. In Wittenberg, and over the course of Luther's lifetime, it just proliferates. Like he translates the Bible into German, so of course a big deal. Historically in his lifetime, these local printers print over one hundred thousand copies of this German translation.
00:44:14
Speaker 3: Of the Bible. And in his lifetime, you know, more broadly, in the German speaking world, printing is proliferating, and something like six or seven million evangelical pamphlets are printed in German throughout the region. It's amazing because it's not just a product. Gutenberg didn't invent something that just fulfilled one need. It created a million needs. The moment the printing press is there, you don't just want to print one thing the Bible. You want to print arguments about the Bible and arguments back and competing views.
00:44:48
Speaker 2: Of this well, and it changes the dynamics of like, well, now you can have more intelligences. Now one random priest can have an audience of millions in a way that is almost unimaginable without the printing press.
00:45:00
Speaker 3: And if you didn't know how to read, you would have incentive to learn how to read in order to read these things, which creates more demand.
00:45:07
Speaker 2: Yes, so maybe one idea to land on is like new technology is a new tool, and what nobody ever knows is how are people going to use that tool.
00:45:18
Speaker 3: These guys Gutenberg thought they were just making a cheaper, more efficient way to make bibles. They didn't know what else you could print beyond this, And then it goes beyond religion. It changes politics, war, philosophy, science, everything I want to.
00:45:33
Speaker 2: Say as we roll into the credits today, I want to say thank you to the listener who wrote to us to say that whenever he tells his friends about our show, they say that doesn't sound like you, but it is a nice thought to tell your friends about the show, and we encourage all of our listeners to at least bring someone along. Truly, I am very grateful to anyone who recommends the show to a friend. If you write to us and tell us that you told a friend, I will personally write back to you and thank you for whatever that's worth. We're at Business History at Pushkin FM. Our show today was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang was engineered by Sarah Bruguier. Our video editor is Matt Nielsen. Our showrunner and editor is Ryan Dilly. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and.
00:46:18
Speaker 3: I'm Robert Smith. This is Business History. Thanks for listening.
