Back to the Future: The Story Of Printing

For four thousand years after the invention of writing in Iraq, all writing was done by hand, a character at a time. When people needed a copy of a book, they had to pay a scribe to copy it out for them by hand. Of course this made books very expensive, and only the richest people could have them.

Then a faster method was invented: printing. Somebody in China, about 650 AD, had the idea of carving wooden blocks with a page of text, then inking it and pressing paper on the block to print a page. The oldest printed scroll we know of comes from north-west China, and it was printed about 700 AD.

This scroll was block printed - the whole page carved together - but by the 1000's AD an alchemist named Pi Sheng in China had invented the more flexible system of moveable type - carving each Chinese character separately on small clay blocks and arranging them to make words, so that the same blocks could be re-used to make many different texts.

About five hundred years later, people all across Europe and Asia began to use blocks made from metal, which worked better than the old clay type.

However, printing  is not just limited to writing. In the following video you can see how people today still use printing in different forms and using different materials.