Bi Sheng, Not His Type

Illustration by Sirichai

Contrary to fourth-grade teachings in schools across America, Johannes Gutenberg of 15th century German printmaking fame was not the first person to come up with the idea of movable type.

That honor goes to Bi Sheng, a cloth vendor who lived in China during the Song Dynasty and invented movable type in the years between 1041 A.D. and 1048 A.D.

According to the Meng Xi Bi Tan, or Dream Stream Essays, written by Bi Sheng’s contemporary, Shen Kuo, the father of movable type hand-carved commonly-used Chinese characters into some 3000 individual clay pieces. He then baked, used, and reused the pieces to print numerous publications. Rare characters were slowly added to the set, created as needed. Pieces were typeset and leveled in a layer of a resin, wax, and paper ash mixture on a framed iron sheet, after which the plate was ready for printing.

Bi Sheng’s new process was extolled for its speed in producing large print runs. Copies of the Buddhist Teaching Sutra and The Sequel of All Happiness, texts that used his technique, still exist today. However, it could be said that movable type was introduced in the wrong place at the wrong time. In 11th century China, the cost and time benefits of movable type were offset by the fact that the clay broke easily, and with an extensive character-based written language, creating the requisite number of pieces was often more labor-intensive than woodblock printing. As a result, movable type in its first incarnation was more of a novelty than a burgeoning industry.

Still, as with many innovations ahead of their time, movable type did not simply climb into a metaphorical storage space to wait for a better day. Over the next few hundred years, significant improvements were made in the process, particularly on the Korean peninsula. In the 13th century during the Koryo Dynasty, movable type reached a new level with metal casting, and in the 14th century the Choson Dynasty saw the first metal printing press. These advances were instrumental in the successful adoption of the 40-letter Korean alphabet, Hangul, by mid-15th century Korean scholars who at the time wrote in Chinese; they allowed King Sejong, the father of Hangul, to publish and disseminate throughout his kingdom copies of Hunmin Choeng’uem (Correct Sounds to Instruct People) and Explanations and Examples of Hunmin Choeng’uem which explained the correlation between verbal Korean and the new phonetic alphabet, as well as dual-language Chinese-Korean texts such as Yongbioech’oenka (Songs of Flying Dragons), Soekbosangjoel (Paraphrased Accounts of Buddha’s Life), and Tongguk Choeng’uem (The Dictionary of Proper Korean Pronunciations).

Whether or not goldsmith Henne Gänsfleisch zur Laden, aka Johannes Gutenberg, had any contact with Eastern printing techniques prior to setting up his first press, or if he developed the idea on his own, has 66yet to be determined by historians. It was around the time that Hangul was created in Korea—in the mid-1400s—that Gutenberg introduced movable type to Germany with the printing of his famous Gutenberg Bible, making it Europe’s first “bestseller,” and set off the Western media revolution.

Unlike in China, where woodblock continued to trump all printing methods, movable type spread like wildfire across Europe. With the alphabet-based Latin language requiring far less characters than written Chinese, movable type brought costs of printing down in Europe, which in turn caused an explosion of information that no longer excluded the masses. Within 50 years, print shops were operating in every major city in Europe, and 23,000 titles and eight million volumes had been printed.

Movable type’s impact on the evolution of literacy and publishing has been profound. By the 17th century, approximately 600 years after its true invention, it finally conquered its arch nemesis, woodblock printing. Four hundred years later the descendents of the first printing presses can be seen not only in the form of larger presses with their fancy roll paper, digital, photographic, and laser capabilities, but in the form of personal computers, home laser printers, all-in-ones, PDAs, PDFs, text messaging, Paris Hilton’s Sidekick, the Internet, and Six Apart’s blog software named after the first ancestor. The cloth vendor and the goldsmith would be proud.