Researchers question Gutenberg's role in developing printing press

Scholars everywhere owe their livelihood to the invention that is commonly attributed to Johann Gutenberg. But two University researchers are trying to rewrite the story of the man who made printing history.

Paul Needham, librarian at Firestone's Scheide Library, and library research specialist Blaise Aguera y Arcas '98 have been studying the original printed works of 15th century printer Gutenberg using new computer techniques for the past two years. They have discovered that the man who has been made famous for creating the first printing press may not have been the originator after all.

Aguera said they began their study to find the shapes of the original types Gutenberg used to create the letters on the works he printed.

"The goal is to try to reconstruct the content of the printer's type box," Aguera said.

Gutenberg, historians believed, used the same mold to create the many blocks for each letter. The letters should have been identical.

"A year ago it was very clear to both of us that there was a real problem with the original explanation," Needham said.

Their digital images of the Gutenberg bible and other documents from the mid-1400s indicated that many molds were used to cast the letters.

Gutenberg's method was thought to be "punch and matrix," Needham said. In this scheme, each letter is created from the same mold. A letter is crafted on the end of a shaft of steel, the steel is pushed into a copper mold, and the copper is used over and over again to cast the metal letters.

This method had been used for centuries. Needham said, "We came to the conclusion that the first European printing types were made in a completely different way than had always been assumed."

If one mold had been used, each letter would have appeared nearly identical. Instead, Aguera found that there were perhaps hundreds of types of each letter — hundreds of molds must have been used for each letter.

"How many archetypal 'a's' are we actually talking about here?" he asked.

Aguera and Needham call this newly discovered method cuneiform typography because it resembles the ancient Mesopotamian system of writing.

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But, if Gutenberg did not invent the modern type, the question is who did.

History professor Anthony Grafton — who teaches a course on the origins of printing — does not see this as revealing one of history's blunders.

Because there are no documents of the time that recorded the development of printing, it is difficult for historians to be sure of the origins of modern methods.

Though Gutenberg can no longer be credited with certainty for the development of the printing press as we know it, "It doesn't detract anything from Gutenberg," Grafton said.

There is no other printer in Gutenberg's time that could have brought together press technology with multiple characters in a locked form, he said.

"This insight takes us into the worlds of these early [printing houses]," Grafton said.

The technique used to examine the texts had never been employed before, Needham said. The texts are scanned into a computer and then the shape of each letter is mathematically analyzed.

"This is really a massive development based on years of mathematical and analytical and software writing capabilities," Needham said.

Aguera — who became interested in the subject after taking Grafton's course on the origins of printing — said the documents must be scanned at an extremely high resolution and under the right conditions.

He said the program that he wrote analyzes the "jigsaw puzzle" of letters on the page. It identifies the letters and categorizes them by similarity. Grafton called it "a kind of computer-aided archeology."

Needham said he still feels that there is more work to be done. More alternatives need to be ruled out by examining more documents, he said.