Chapter 1 · July 2026
The printing press: when ideas escaped scarcity (c. 1450)
Before the press
Around 1450 in Mainz, a craftsman named Johannes Gutenberg changed what ideas cost. A hand-copied manuscript took months of skilled labor and could cost a year's wages, so books were luxuries and most people knew only what their priest and neighbors told them.
The insight
Gutenberg's breakthrough was movable metal type: cast individual letters, arrange them into any page, print many identical copies, then reuse the letters for the next.
A single operator could now produce more copies in a week than a team of scribes managed in a year, and by 1456 he had printed dozens of identical Bibles.The hinge
Within fifty years printing spread across Europe, and by 1500 more books had been printed than had existed in all prior history.
The Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and the Renaissance all depended on it — Luther's 95 Theses spread in printed copies within weeks, and scholars in different countries could finally read and build on the same work. Information had moved from scarcity to abundance, and authority never held the same absolute grip again.