Here are just some of the ways the printing press helped pull Europe out of the Middle Ages and accelerate human progress. His greatest accomplishment was the first print run of the Bible in Latin, which took three years to print around copies, a miraculously speedy achievement in the day of hand-copied manuscripts.
Palmer, a professor of early modern European history at the University of Chicago, compares early printed books like the Gutenberg Bible to how e-books struggled to find a market before Amazon introduced the Kindle. Gutenberg died penniless, his presses impounded by his creditors. Other German printers fled for greener pastures, eventually arriving in Venice, which was the central shipping hub of the Mediterranean in the late 15th century.
The ships left Venice carrying religious texts and literature, but also breaking news from across the known world. Printers in Venice sold four-page news pamphlets to sailors, and when their ships arrived in distant ports, local printers would copy the pamphlets and hand them off to riders who would race them off to dozens of towns. Since literacy rates were still very low in the s, locals would gather at the pub to hear a paid reader recite the latest news, which was everything from bawdy scandals to war reports.
Sketch of a printing press taken from a notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci. The Italian Renaissance began nearly a century before Gutenberg invented his printing press when 14th-century political leaders in Italian city-states like Rome and Florence set out to revive the Ancient Roman educational system that had produced giants like Caesar, Cicero and Seneca. One of the chief projects of the early Renaissance was to find long-lost works by figures like Plato and Aristotle and republish them.
Wealthy patrons funded expensive expeditions across the Alps in search of isolated monasteries. Italian emissaries spent years in the Ottoman Empire learning enough Ancient Greek and Arabic to translate and copy rare texts into Latin. The operation to retrieve classic texts was in action long before the printing press, but publishing the texts had been arduously slow and prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the richest of the rich.
Palmer says that one hand-copied book in the 14th century cost as much as a house and libraries cost a small fortune. The largest European library in was the university library of Paris, which had total manuscripts.
Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg castle church. Pink Laser , photo by Parcreativo, taken from commons. DNA string , picture by qimono, taken from pixabay. Smartphone Navigatin , picture by Henry Perks, taken from unsplash. People with smartphones , picture by Rawpixel. We collect personal stories about urban landmarks and future ideas for the sustainable development of cities worldwide.
Do you want to be part of Urban Hub? Subscribe Visit us on Facebook. Some of the most exciting discoveries and inventions became launching pads for a new era of innovation in computers, electronics, manufacturing, and medicine. URBAN HUB takes a look at ten technological advances that are so revolutionary they will continue to shape our lives well into the future. VR and the future. Alison Powers talks Atlanta.
Using fewer resources for bigger change — What makes the world go around? Innovative technology. And in mobility, building, energy and manufacturing, especially green innovations are changing how people interact with and shape their environment.
Electricity Would any new advancements have been possible without the breakthrough of electricity? Harnessing the power of nature for technical advancement. The laser Discovered in , lasers were so before their time, scientists were not even certain where exactly they could be applied. Lasers transform our lives on every wavelength.
Semiconductor chips Many major technical advances became the springboard for countless other new innovations. Semiconductor chip: a technical wonder in the palm of a hand. Quantum computing The invention of the computer, and especially the personal computer, will continue to shape our lives. Nothing was more feared than a horse-drawn chariot or a mounted warrior, and societies that mastered the use of cavalry typically prevailed in battle. A criminally under-appreciated innovation, the transistor is an essential component in nearly every modern electronic gadget.
First developed in late by Bell Laboratories, these tiny semiconductor devices allow for precise control of the amount and flow of current through circuit boards. Originally used in radios, transistors have since become an elemental piece of the circuitry in countless electronic devices including televisions, cell phones and computers.
Magnifying lenses might seem like an unremarkable invention, but their use has offered mankind a glimpse of everything from distant stars and galaxies to the minute workings of living cells. Lenses first came into use in the 13th century as an aid for the weak-sighted, and the first microscopes and telescopes followed in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. These early uses were the first steps in the development of astonishing devices like the electron microscope and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Magnifying lenses have since led to new breakthroughs in an abundance of fields including astronomy, biology, archeology, optometry and surgery. Samuel Morse, inventor of the registrar electromagnetic telegraph, as well as two separate devices for sending and receiving messages. The telegraph was the first in a long line of communications breakthroughs that later included radio, telephones and email. Telegraph lines multiplied throughout the s, and by transoceanic cables encircled the globe.
The original telegraph and its wireless successors went on to be the first major advancements in worldwide communication. The ability to send messages rapidly across great distances made an indelible impact on government, trade, banking, industry, warfare and news media, and formed the bedrock of the information age.
Professor Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin in , pictured working in his lab in A giant step forward in the field of medicine, antibiotics saved millions of lives by killing and preventing the growth of harmful bacteria.
Scientists like Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister were the first to recognize and attempt to combat bacteria, but it was Alexander Fleming who made the first leap in antibiotics when he accidentally discovered the bacteria-inhibiting mold known as penicillin in Antibiotics proved to be a major improvement on antiseptics—which killed human cells along with bacteria—and their use spread rapidly throughout the 20th century.
Nowhere was their effect more apparent than on the battlefield: While nearly 20 percent of soldiers who contracted bacterial pneumonia died in World War I , with antibiotics—namely Penicillin—that number dropped to only 1 percent during World War II. Antibiotics including penicillin, vancomycin, cephalosporin and streptomycin have gone on to fight nearly every known form of infection, including influenza, malaria, meningitis, tuberculosis and most sexually transmitted diseases.
Cars, airplanes, factories, trains, spacecraft—none of these transportation methods would have been possible if not for the early breakthrough of the steam engine.
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