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Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Pariente over there. There's Chiari out there for etherial, ephemeral producer. And this is stuff you should know, which for this edition, I feel like we should be playing like harpsichord or something like that in the background when we start.

You want to do that? Should we get it up a little?

Yeah, Jerry knows what she does. She knows her way around an old harpsichord. So maybe maybe she can do that for us.

I wonder if we have a message break.

Stinger, that's harpsichord. Oh, that's a great question, because we've been getting I mean, we've gotten great ones all along, but sometimes sometimes they're just showing up. I'm like, where did this come from? I don't even recognize this one. It's great stuff. Yeah.

And to you know, for those of you that don't know, those are made by listeners. Yeah. Submitted out of the goodness of their hearts for always happen. Yep. To say here you go guys. I hope you enjoy it. You can use it all you want. It's very sweet. It is.

So we're talking about the printing press and we're talking about the invention of the printing press. And the printing press itself is basically synonymous with a man named Johann Gutenberg.

Yohannes Howard, you got right out of the gate, man.

I'm going with Johann Gutenberg or as the rest of us in the world call them, Gutenberg.

Sure. Let's call them Steve Gutenberg Gutt. But OK, OK.

So Gutenberg is traditionally credited with inventing the printing press. And for all intents and purposes, he did invent the printing press. But as our friend at Grabovski goes to great pains to point out, he did not invent it out of whole cloth, as apparently some people believe that that it was just a pile of lumber and an idea for him.

He put together like every inventor who ever invented anything, he he built on different concepts that had been worked out over centuries. The thing is, it's like that's not to detract from his accomplishment or anything like that. Like what he did literally change the world as well. Seen some amazing ways. But he he helped provide the first information age and got really kind of screwed over in the bargain. Yeah.

I mean, it's kind of a familiar story at this point, right? Sadly, yes, man.

And I'm kind of sick of that.

Which one of stealing a building on others or. Oh, no, no, I'm dying a pauper. Yeah, the second one.

No, I understand. Building on the work of others. That's the other thing, too, is I don't think Gutenberg ever said like, no, I invented all of this without any help. We don't have any indication he was like that at all. It just kind of got hung on him over the years by sixth graders.

We built on the work of Adam Curry. We did write. He's still at it. Did you know that he still podcasting?

I'm almost a million percent sure, which is really sure. And did he really have the first one? I don't know if he had the first, but he's credited with having the first.

Very interesting. He's definitely still active on social media for sure.

So for the printing press, if if we jump back in the Wayback Machine and we we breezed past Adam Curry there.

Hi, Adam. Hey, Adam. Oh, look at his hair just waving that very nice. Uh, we would go back and see people carving up these things into wood and then they would sort of like a stamp you would get for a kid these days.

Or if you you know, you go to a stamp shop and you want to get a stamp with your address or whatever for an adult.

Yeah, like we got a stamp made.

Emily got a stamp made of our house when we finally finished renovating our house. Cute.

Which we've never used our our. So you haven't used. So is it a picture of your house?

Yeah, it's like OK, looks like a little woodcut but it's not like we send people letters and stamp that or anything.

And I got to tell you, I don't have one I would like to see on a Christmas card envelope, you know.

You know, she did give me and boy, I'm going to use it one day is, you know, how they would melt wax and seal the envelope with a little stamp. Yes.

She got me one of those little kits for Christmas a couple of years ago. Nice.

And you still haven't use it now? You know what? I'm going to write you a letter on some vellum. Thank you. I'm going to stamp my house on it. I'm going to wax seal it with and then put on some red lipstick and then tinkle on the whole thing, give it a kiss and then be on it. We have a stamp, too, but it's it has our address stamped. Our friends, Laurel and Braden gave it to us.

Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. Right.

And we have used that one before. But I want to see the stamp, this whole Christmas card with tinkle on it, envelopment, wax.

I can't wait to see it. All right. It's going to happen. OK, so I would cut a long way of saying it looks sort of like one of these stamps, it's cut out out of woodblock and then you take paper or vellum or something or whatever you want to print it on, rub it down with some ink and then press it down. And they had a thing back in the day in Europe in the fourteen hundreds called block books.

Right. That were made from these woodcuts. They were, you know, ten to twenty five, thirty pages long. And they kind of look like comic books. If you look them up they have a little bit of artwork, a little bit of text. Yeah. Medieval comic books. Yeah. It's like comic books without any of the fun because they had some sort of moral message attached to it usually.

Right.

It was like a Jack Shick tract or something, but they were a big deal in Europe in the fourteen hundreds and they thought that they invented something. But of course the Chinese were like excuse me. Hmm. We've been doing this stuff for hundreds of years.

Yeah. And I think as far back as nineteen seventy one No.

868 CE which is a while ago, more than a thousand years, about eleven hundred plus the Diamond Sutra, which is a Buddhist text, was the first known printed book and they printed it like you just described, where each page was a woodcarving in negative Chuck in negative. Yeah. And so because if you made it in the positive, when you put the paper on it with the ink it would be in reverse when you looked at it on the page.

So you had to carve each page like that in negative. So it was a really difficult process, but it worked. It was useful. It was a lot easier. Once you got those blocks carved for a page, then it was to transcribe entire books and texts by hand, which is what they'd done up to that point and still continue to do for a very long time.

Yeah. So when I saw the Diamond Sutra, just obviously the word sutra stood out to me because of the Kama Sutra.

Sure. And I really of course, and I didn't even realize I didn't even know what that word meant in this just it's a collection of observations. Basically, he said, oh, I mean, book. Well, it could be it's a collection of observations in a book or a pamphlet. And I think we really missed the diamond opportunity for our book title by not calling it, like, the stuff you should know.

Sutra. Yeah, well, hey, if this one this one goes even passingly well or sells passingly well, we'll probably have a second chance.

You can preorder that thing, by the way, the the stuff you know.

Now, Boyup, you could pre preorder that one. Right. I'm getting limbers. We speak to try and get that one done. Right. Yeah. You can preorder our book, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting stuff, sutra things.

It should have just had comma Kama Sutra.

Get it right.

Yep, I like that. So that was one and eight sixty eight. Like he said. Then in 1971, BCE, there was another one called. Did you mention that one. The Trippy TACA not. Yeah that was another Buddhist text. That was CCE.

Oh, it is, yeah, so they got wrong here. Yeah. All right, so the whole thing starts about eleven hundred years ago. OK, well, that makes more sense. Yeah, yeah. But that's the one that had, I think one hundred and thirty thousand wood black carvings.

Yeah, that's insane. That means not only that somebody carved that but somebody kept that like at their house. Yeah. Imagine living around 130000 woodblock carvings and you would be like, I need to reprint page eight, 32 and then having to go find the woodblock carving for page eight, 32. And just it just sounds like a nightmare. I'd be like, I don't I don't care about reading or literacy or moving humanity forward at this point. Maybe it was the house.

Mm hmm. You just blew my mind right out of the top of my head, so there was some more experimentation going on after this in China and Korea and some big and they were using like little wooden ceramic or metal blocks to make individual characters for the first time. And this was a big kind of push forward toward what we all know as what would eventually be the Gutenberg press as individual letters or in their case, characters, instead of just doing each page as a separate woodcut.

Yeah, what's awesome is there is a commoner in China named Bea Xiang, who is thought to have come up with moveable type wear rather than, you know, carving a woodblock for each page. You have letters, individual letters carved out and you can arrange them just so any way you want. And then once you print that page, you can arrange them in a different way to print the next page. And that is a huge innovation for sure. And again, note that this guy came up with this in about 10 41 CE, so a good 400 years before Gutenberg was working.

Why does it keep saying BCE? I don't know.

I think he really likes the sound of it. All right. Fair enough. It's definitely C either. No, I'm not doubting that. I'm just, uh.

I was thinking, too. I was like, gosh, what if he was right? What if all this had started a good thousand years earlier? Like, how much further along would we be right now as well as Yati if this had happened three thousand years ago rather than 1000 years ago?

Yeah, because here's the little spoiler. Printing books is a big deal. Yeah. Like some say that religion in democracy and I mean just sort of the advancement of humanity was was it was key to advancing all the things. You know who says that. US people who are right. Yeah, I definitely am on board with that.

Yeah. The best way you can put it, it was the first information age that got launched by Gutenberg, by Gutbucket.

So that's I keep saying that because Steve Gutenberg's handle on Twitter. Oh, is it really OK. You've got. But is it really.

He is the nicest guy to default. I have it. Yeah. I haven't, I haven't checked in on his feed for a very long time, but years back he used to be like all up in our feed and he was just so nice. Happy Friday everybody. Kind of stuff like every Friday. Just a super nice guy. So I'm assuming nothing's gone horribly wrong with him and that he's still just as nice as he was a few years ago.

Well, I highly recommend you know, I've always promoted the great Great Stars TV show Party down one of my favorite shows of all time. Oh, yeah. And Jutes has a great, great, great episode. And it seems like that's who he is. And he's a super nice guy in that episode because he you know, it's about a catering company. There are a bunch of like writers and actors and stuff doing catering work, and he hires them to come over to his house for his birthday.

They're there at the house when he pulls in and he's like, oh, man, we ended up having a surprise party for me and forgot. So he's just like, why don't you guys just come in and we'll be the party? Right. But you could really get the idea that that's who good says as a person, you know, it's great, as you've definitely definitely told that story before on the podcast, which means like we've gotten to this point where we're amassing like we're building a stand alone universe.

We're like when Steve Coogan appears, this story pops up as well around him. You know what I'm saying? Like, Oh, I knew I told it. I couldn't remember when though. What when would he have come up?

I don't remember. But I'm sure we talked also about what a great guy he is on Twitter and all sorts of stuff.

Like like we have a character like a similar markram of ah simulacra of Steve Guttenberg that lives in our podcast universe.

Very less multifaceted than I'm sure he is in real life, but in our universe is nice guy on Twitter. Had a great episode of Party Down. That's all you need to know about Steve Greenberg. I know we haven't even gotten into police. Do we do a show on police academy? So that probably would have made sense. I don't think we have.

If we have, I must have been blacked out or something. All right.

So printing press is advancing forward. Go to Korea in twelve, thirty four and you're going to find a man named Cho Yanyi who was commissioned to do some more Buddhist texts. A lot of this was Buddhist texts. Well, yeah. If you'll notice, religious texts helped push this whole thing forward from different religions even.

Yeah.

Like that Bible the Gutenberg would make Stotz sorry. So this one was really, really long and he was using this movable print that had already been around. But this time he was making these letters for metal, kind of using what the technique they did for Coin Menteng, which had been going on for a while, set him in a frame, lined them all up, coated them with ink and press them. And if you think, hey, that sounds like a printing press, you would be exactly right.

You're right, fella, for sure. That's that's. Basically, what Guttenberg came up with, he had a couple of extra innovations for sure that are definitely credited to him directly, but that general idea had been around for a couple of hundred years, at least before he started printing his own stuff, using this machine of his invention. Now, again, this is not detract at all from Gutenberg. He put together a lot of disparate ideas and there's also a lot of debate whether he would have known about the Korean or Chinese advancements in printing.

If so, maybe it was the Mongols that spread it West, but they're not entirely certain. There's no smoking gun. So it's possible. He also thought of it himself just by being involved in it and thinking about it. Or maybe he heard about some other stuff and refined it into his own thing. Regardless, he came up with the printing press and the Chinese and the Koreans are not credited with that for actually a couple of reasons. And the upshot of all of it is, is that it didn't ever really take off in China or Korea, even though it was invented there.

It didn't become widespread or widely used, and it certainly didn't create an information age revolution.

Well, how's this for a cliffhanger? We'll take a little break and we'll tell you a couple more reasons why it never took off in Asia right after this.

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All right, Chuck, I can't take this any longer. Tell us tell us why it never took off in Asia. Well, some some reasons that just make a lot of sense.

They are they have very complex characters with their language and they have, you know, up to tens of thousands of characters with different pronunciations, different phonemes, different syllables.

And you can't you just can't do it. You can't have that many little tiny blocks, much less multiples of those if you want to print a page. Right. You know, because it's not like you can move them around. And then keeping up with all these was literally one of the big problems. Like they made these big I think there was a man named Wayne Wang Zein who use these revolving tables to access these big racks of letters. But it was kind of like what you were talking about with the house made of woodblocks.

One hundred and thirty thousand woodcuts. Right. It's like you just can't keep up with that many. So it wasn't practical.

And then Gutenberg comes along, he's like, we only have twenty six letters. Yeah. So this is pretty is pretty dumb down as the language goes. Yeah.

Because I mean even if you do, you know capitals and lowercase that's still just what 52. Yeah. Throw in some punctuation. Yeah. Some punctuation makes some doubles because you know you're going to use E a lot more times than one per page, so you need to make some backup copies of them. How many did you made. About three hundred in the end, right. That's what I saw. Yeah.

300 different character spaces, punctuation, uppercase, lowercase and that that's all he needed. So the 300 versus tens of thousands. No one is easier to make. But number two, it's easier to keep up with two. So Gutenberg just happened to be working and just the right language for movable type printing press to really make sense to. We talk about this guy.

Yeah. Because I like him. He's he's he had a bit of a hustle too.

And I know and he's also one of history's kind of hard luck guys, in a way, even though I mean, you know, his name is legendary, so you can't put a price on that. I'm sure he would have liked to have put a price on that.

So I just want to say, from what I saw, it is very much up for debate whether he actually was financially ruined. In the end, he was doing fine, because one thing we got to tell everybody, Chuck, out of the gate is Gutenberg was born at a time where his father was a patrician. He was an aristocrat in in Germany. Means is it means minus minus Germany. So he was, you know, notable. But this was in a time where people of that class, you know, he wasn't like a king or anything like that.

So there was not a lot of documentation of his birth. We're not entirely certain when he was born. His early life has kind of lost to history, too, because he was just kind of a nobody until he invented the printing press. But the thing is, when he invented the printing press, it was so revolutionary and so obvious how revolutionary it was out of the gate that within a decade or two of his death, historians were studying and documenting life.

So there is a surprising amount of stuff that was documented about him that's preserved still. But the stuff that we do have is almost entirely his work and then court records when he was dragged into court by creditors and investors.

Yeah. So you said he had a little bit of a hustle. I think Ed says they referred to him charitably as having entrepreneurial flair. It's another word of saying he had a bit of a hustle to him and he would get in. He was always trying to make a buck. I always had some sort of scheme in the works. Yeah. And which means he had investors a lot of times and a lot of times he might not come through.

So as a result, he was taken to court a lot, like you said.

And it's kind of funny to build this guy's life out of court records, but we are able to construct a little bit of it because of him being hauled in there and being sued time and time again.

And most notably were able to kind of piece together the printing press that he invented, what he invented, what he knew when from these court records, because all of these these lawsuits basically were over his work. They were between investors in his work and him. And the thing is, is like I don't have the impression that he was a hustler in the sense that he was a con man or shark or anything like that. He he had very high aspirations.

He also had the smarts to figure out how to achieve these aspirations. He just didn't have the money to achieve these aspirations. So he needed outside help. His big problem, as far as investors go, from what I can tell, is that he was a perfectionist. So rather than just figure out how to invent the movable type printing press, which he did, he also tried to figure out one they could also print in red on a different set or using copper engraving to create different.

Types of of type, some stuff that like details that were like kind of unnecessary, but made this transformed this thing from, you know, an amazing piece of work to a masterpiece. And the time it took to be that much of a perfectionist made him run into creditors and investors that were not that patient. Yeah.

And his first sort of tinkering with pressing anything, it seems, because of, again, a lawsuit was in Strasbourg when he lived there in around fourteen thirty eight days at sea.

And he would he had this plan to produce these trinkets for people going on religious pilgrimage. Yeah. Is right. More than one. Yeah.

So he had these tools that he could stamp out these trinkets and press these things. And so he, he sort of had an idea at least of how this kind of technology worked as far as cutting something, stamping and pressing it.

And there's some indication, Chuck, that he was already figuring out the rough contours, if not more detail than that of his printing press in Strasbourg, because that first court case was by the family of some creditors who who took him to court because they wanted in on some secret work he was keeping from them and being investors in him, they were saying, well, you know, if you're doing work on the side, we should have a piece of that, too.

And that's where some historians are like this. Actually, what they're describing here is part of the printing press.

Yeah, because the debate still well, I mean, it was 10 years later that was in around fourteen, thirty eight. And by the time he got back to mines in fourteen forty eight, he borrowed some money from his cousin to do like a real printing business. So it's I mean I think he could be right. It's very likely those people knew that he was in the back room with his plan to print books and they wanted some of that action.

Right.

But he's like, no, do you want to trade on the ground floor or the trinket business? This is a whole different world changing business.

You're going to have to cough up some more dough. And they said night. Yeah, they did say nine.

And he said, all right, well, I'm going to invent this thing or I'm going to cobble together a bunch of other people's work in a way that makes sense that you can, you know, make massive amounts of books that look good and that you can sell and make money on. And the Bible was a pretty obvious choice for the first big, big project. But he was like the Bible is a lot to undertake. And if you've ever seen a Gutenberg Bible, they're they're huge.

They're not. There's two volume. Yeah. There's not like these little handheld Bibles. They're very large. And I didn't get an exact measurement. But you can see when someone holds it, it's a big, big book. It's like a big fat coffee table book sale.

Eleven by eighteen. Mm. They seem a little wider than that but thirty six point ninety nine. That's as high as I'm going.

So he said one dollar. He said that I'm going to I'm going to not start with the Bible.

Too much to bite off. Yeah. It's a little dull. So I'm going to start out with some other stuff. I'm going to print some some pamphlets. I'm going to see if I can sell these things. I'm going to see how good they look. And he did. He printed a grammar book was one of the first things. This is from another lawsuit by a Roman writer. And it was a popular book which was, again, it's a smart thing that he did, is is basically taking like what would be a best seller at the time and seeing if he could mass produce it instead of black book as a regular printed book.

Right.

So he was also doing Brodsky's for sure, kind of like early newspapers, which they had a pretty we should do it on newspapers because the early leptons papers were these broadsheets and sailors would buy them, read them and then take them into town at the next port and they would be sold to those people who who most people weren't literate at the time. So they would hire somebody who could read in town to read the news out at like the local tavern or something.

And we both have experience with newspapers. Sure. Man, I would like to do newspapers one day. Let's do it.

I would totally. That sounds like a two parter to me. OK, so he basically the upshot of all this, I think, is the second time I said that, I never say that. I always want to like, deliberately make everything much slower than that. The upshot of something like you say summarizes it.

Do you? Why?

Yeah, just like you say it, as much as we talk about Gutenberg and Partyism, you know, it's sad. I'm an unreliable narrator in my own life. Oh, man, what a great quote.

So the the overall general point of what we've been saying at this moment is that he kind of broke his teeth on some slightly easier projects to kind of figure out the ins and outs of everything. And then when he was finally ready to do the Bible, he apparently was well aware. That this was going to be a masterpiece. He had figured it out and he was ready to bite it off and he started work on the Gutenberg Bible, also known as the Gutenberg Bible and also known as the 42 line Bible, because that's how many lines really he had per page.

And even at 42 lines per page, which was more lines because he lowered the space in between lines to fit more lines per page. It was still something like twelve hundred and eighty six pages. Yeah, over two volumes. That's a lot. But they kind of bear that in mind. What we're talking about when we talk about this project eventually is that he was creating 186 page Bibles, OK. Yeah.

One at a time.

Yeah, one page at a time that is so which will figure in here in a second. So he starts to work. He knows that. I mean, before he starts, he knows that he's going to be able to charge a lot for these things and he knows he's going to need to crank them out as quickly as he can. So he's going to need more space. He's going to need more presses. He's going to need a lot of ink and other little doodads and spon divots that it takes to make one of these.

And he's going to need people, you know, he's going to need some assistance. He can't do it all by himself because here's where that comes back. You can only it's not like he would print out a Bible and he's like, I got one. Go sell this thing and we can continue to fund our little project here. You got to print out one page at a time over and over and over and over, and then print out page two over and over and over or two and whatever the reverse side is.

And eventually you're going to be able to start putting them together in bound form. And only then can you start actually making money.

Right? Right. So he was also that was another thing that he doesn't get credited for enough, I think, is that he figured out, like how to do a rough, primitive version of an assembly line, basically. Sure was. He was mass producing these books out of the gate. That was the point. Your mass producing. You're not doing it one page at a time like you were saying, like the old black books used to be.

Right. So he gets four presses going at a time, later went up to, I think, six. And because of all this upfront money that he needs to keep this going until he can sell them and turn a profit, was he needed like always he needed some dough. He wasn't just he didn't have his pockets lined with money, so he had to go to a guy. And that's this guy's name was Yohann first. Mm hmm.

And he because he calculated he would need about two years and because before he could start selling. Yeah. The project he figured out was going to be about two years. This print run of Bibles is going to take him two years to do so. He need to be able to pay. Everybody needed money for all the supplies, all the materials he needed to be able to survive for two years because he would not be able to sell one single Bible until all of them were done.

None of them were going to be done until all of them were done. That's just the way the process worked out.

Right. So first, I think saw the writing on the wall, knew it was going to be expensive, but knew that he was going to probably be able to make a lot of money. And who knows? I don't know this first guy from Adam, but maybe in the back of his head, he also thought, you know what, I might also be able to just sue this guy at some point and take control of these printing presses because this guy didn't have a pot to urinate in and he's not going to have any money.

So and that's exactly what happened. He ended up having no assets other than these presses. And when he got sued and lost and I don't even know what he got sued for. Was it for taking too long? Yes. Really?

Yes. That makes the whole thing that much worse, that he was sued, basically, like I was saying, for being a perfectionist. Wow.

And technically, Gutenberg could have gotten the Bible out before Fewster sued him, but dumbed down version he was.

Yeah, just a slightly less masterful version that would have just knocked everyone or had just the same amount of an impact on the world. I don't think the world would have been changed really any had he had he gotten them out in a time when first was was willing to not sue him. But he he wasn't prepared to do that. He was he was an artist. He was an artist. He had the soul of an artist. So he just kept going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole to try to make this thing more and more perfect and elaborate.

And Foose said enough. And the court actually sided with first. So first Lynam 800 Gilden or Golden, which at the time was about the the price of a lot of money.

Eight houses. Yeah. That's what we're going with. We'll see in a second. It'll make sense. But let's say eight average cost houses, that's how much he lent them. Then he did it again. He lent them another 800 golden. And so he was into him for six hundred golden. Could have easily been able to pay that back when it first first sued him. The court said not only do you owe him six hundred gold in your home and interest, we're going to say to get this about 2020, golden is what he ended up having to pay for.

Now, did he sue him because he was that far over schedule?

The only time it would take two years. Did it take like six or something? I saw that from the court records. They believe that he was done by 14, 55, and I believe he started in 14, 53. So he was probably right on schedule. I have the impression that first was a bit of an impatient gesture quite well.

And also get the feeling that that Gutenberg probably didn't dot the I's and cross as Ts contractually.

Maybe not. Maybe not.

I could see that too, because you've got to bake in a little bit of over over time there, you know for sure.

But I think I think he may have been roughly on schedule because because by 14, 52 he had created the Bible. And here's the other thing. Here's the other reason why Foose suing him was a bit of a screw job or a huge screw job. And by screw job, I mean like the act of a screwdriver screwing a screw into a slab of wood that the screw doesn't want to go into that wood. It wants to stay free. Exactly the kind of kids.

So the the reason why why why it really stunk that first sued him is because he got the Bible's done the Bible. The Bible run was completed and flew, still sued him and still won.

If I had been first in the investor, I would be like, OK, fine, you finished, maybe pay me more or something like that. But that was not the case. Yeah, and who knows what's going on back then.

He could have bribed a judge who got a piece of the action, you know. Right, exactly. I mean, not speculation, but I'm just saying it's not like today when our court system is just so perfect in every way. All right. Well, let's run exclusively by artificial intelligence. So Ed was kind enough to cobble together a few just sort of fun facts about that Bible run he printed. A hundred and eighty of these things initially sold all of them.

Of course, today there are 49 of them still around, which Ed points out, and I agree is a really great survival percentage for something that old. Yeah. Forty nine out of one hundred and eighty. And that just sort of pinpoints or just puts a point in the fact that puts a pin in. What am I trying to say really drives home the fact that these things were very cherished and taken care of from the beginning. I went to see how much he could buy one of these for.

Oh yeah. What did you find? Well, 87 was the last one I saw at auction. There may be one since then, but in 1987 it went for five point four million.

So that was one one volume. A complete set hasn't been auctioned since 1978, really for two point two million in nineteen seventy eight dollars. Wow.

From what I saw, if you have a Bible, you get the Old Testament only or some if you're lucky. But if the complete copy they think would be 35 million today and then it went to auction. That makes sense. That's about right.

But so so he made two he made two versions. He made one like a regular version on paper and it over 20 golden and he made a vellum one on calfskin for fifty goaltend, 45 of those. So allow me to figure these calculations real quick. OK, boy, here we go. So remember Malcolm with George. I'm going to get this right. Right. So there is this historian named Andrew Pedigree who says that a house in means mines would have cost up to 100 goals in a house.

So the total that he could have made selling this is these Bibles is one hundred and eighty print run of Bibles is forty nine hundred and fifty gold.

And it's a lot of houses.

It is, let's say at one hundred gold in a piece that's forty nine and a half houses. Don't ask about the half of a house, but let's say in today's dollars that we're saying that a house is two hundred thousand dollars per house. OK. Yeah. So thousand dollars times forty nine and a half houses means that he made off of these 180 Bibles. Almost ten million dollars.

Can't wait for the correction. It's right, dude. I am definitely right. And so here's the other thing too. So when first Suzume and gets that 20, I like to get that judgment of 2000 gold against them. A lot of people say, well, that ruined Gutenberg and he died a pauper. If that Bible run sold out, he still would have had more than half of it, nearly 10 million dollars left over after paying futzed. So it's very much unclear that that he was a pauper, not the the.

The overall point of what I've been saying up to this moment is this the upshot is that that was the word you could have used earlier to when you were looking for a word about would it work? Yeah, you're right. I wasn't going to encourage the use of that, though. But the the the the upshot of is that first got his hands on Gutenberg's printing press. Right. Right after that that run of Bibles was made or his sixth printing presses, rather.

Yeah.

And his and his printing assistant who was actually first son in law. He got the whole the whole shebang, all his plates, everything.

You know, my favorite thing about your math stuff is what I know.

The second that you start that there are thousands of people, math, math, buskers, if you will, that just immediately get out their pencil and pad and just to see if they can prove you wrong.

That is fantastic. It's like I'm fine with that. Yeah, it is a game and I always win.

All right. So we're going to take another break. OK, we're going to tally up your math wins and losses. All right. And we're going to talk about how this thing actually works right after this.

On this season of unobscured with experts to guide us, we will go back to the streets of Victorian White Chapel to follow the trail of Jack the Ripper for almost 100 years. The police files from that investigation were sealed behind closed doors. Plenty of time for the legend to grow will join the police in their attempts to solve a series of brazen and brutal murders. We'll see through the eyes of London's East Enders as they try to make sense of the violence taking place right in their midst.

And we'll explore the alleys, yards and homes where a series of monstrous murders became the most infamous true crime story of modern history. Unobscured Season three premieres on Wednesday, October 7th. Subscribe today on Apple podcasts, I heart radio or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Hi, this is Hillary Clinton, host of the new podcast, You and Me both, there's a lot to be anxious and worried about right now, and it's made so much worse by the fact that we can't be together. So I find myself on the phone a lot, talking with friends, experts, really anyone who can help make some sense of these challenging times. These conversations have been a lifeline for me.

And now I hope they will be for you to please listen to you and me both on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So I think we came up, Chuck, with the, um, the that I've won every math contest, I've I've initiated everyone. Okay.

All right. So shall we talk about the Gutenberg press?

Yes. Well, you got your individual letters. OK, all right. So if you're going to we said he ended up making three hundred of these things. So you're going to need all these little individual letters carved there carved into steel using these little files. And these are the master letters. And then they punch those into soft metal, most likely copper. And then the impression in the copper is formed into a mold and then you're going to pour molten metal.

And what I saw was that one thing that Gutenberg definitely invented with the right hand casting instrument where they actually where you would actually pour this with this molten metal, I think he use lead tin and antimony, whatever that is.

That was an alloy that he invented. Even like add that to his list. Yeah. So he invented some stuff, but this is how you would actually make the individual letters was by this early process. Right.

So the one thing that's still up for debate supposedly is whether he invented or used that punch matrix thing where you punch the letter into a softer metal. It's they're not entirely certain. But yes, he definitely was casting letters with alloy of his own making. And apparently it cooled like the moment like you just poured it in, closed the mold and opened it. And it would be cool enough to dump it on the table and start filing down, because that was the other thing, too.

You had to file down every letter to make sure that they were uniform. Yeah. And he even went this is an example of how how how detailed he got. He even was like, oh, well, this this f has a lot of space between, you know, on either side of it. So we file down the sides of all the FS after testing it a few times to make basically kerning. He was he was he figured out kerning right out of the gate.

The first time anyone had ever really created the printing press. There was also kerning, which is the spacing between letters like if you've ever seen a bunch of letters strung far apart, it looks really weird. Yeah, kerning. Not a fan of that. That's that's a high kerning value, low kerning values where they're tighter together, which is what you want.

Yeah. So the the long and short of his the of these little blocks though is that you only needed to carve each one one time you had to pour a bunch of molds if you wanted a bunch of E's or A's or other vowels and stuff. That was nothing but yeah that was nothing. You only had to do that carving once, filed these things down until they're all uniform and then it moves on to someone known as the compositor. Yes.

The compositor or not to be confused with the eradicate or write from kids in the hall. The compositor was the person who sat there with like the manuscript, write and read each line. And as they were reading each line, they were gathering the letters they needed and putting putting the letters together and like a like a hand-held little rack to basically make each line and they would slide each line into a frame called the form. And you would do that just line by line until the whole form, the whole frame is filled up with the lines that you're going to print a page with.

Yeah, basically what they did in Korea two hundred years earlier, except with far fewer characters. Yeah.

And you get the idea that if you were a compositor working for for Gutenberg the Perfectionist, it was probably a pretty nervy job because you're reading that manuscript. Any misspelling, any any misuse of punctuation that would have I'm sure there would have been heck to pay from here. Gutenberg. So I imagine that job was just sort of high tension.

And Gutenberg very famously was super passive aggressive in his managerial policy. He was just kind of wander around the shop with his coffee and say, oh, are you going to treat it that way? Huh? I'm going to need you to work Sunday as well. Yeah. Yeah. And it was it was like you try to avoid him or whatever, but he had this sixth sense to like, pop up exactly right. As you were trying to leave for the day.

Right. And you would and he would ask about your stapler and he would say, this is my this is my red stapler. That well, that was that was one of the press, the pressmen. Right. I just kind of kept in the basement. It was a weird time for printing.

It was another weird time is going to be right now when I ask you if you understand this gobbledygook about folios.

Yeah. So what is it a little confusing to me. Right. So it's way easier to print. Yes.

A logistical nightmare is another way to put it. Yeah. But if you take, you know, one large page, that's actually two pages of a book. Wide and Foldit, you have a Foleo, sure, supposedly Gutenberg printed these things in folios of five so that each each little, I guess, thing that they did was was was like 20 pages. They would do 20 pages at a time for, remember, something like 186 pages. They were doing this total per Bible.

And I mean, that was that the key was this. I know. To answer your question, no, I didn't fully understand the folios. I think there was a lot made of folios when there didn't necessarily need to be a lot made of folios. The point was that when you printed this stuff, this is very, very tricky.

You had to dampen the paper. OK, because if you didn't, did you like that? We could read them by that. Yeah. When when you print paper using the kind of ink that he created, another thing you created, which we'll talk about, the paper can stick very easily unless you dampen the paper. The problem is, is you got a print on the back side too, but you can't dampen the paper again, my friend, or else you're going to smear the ink on the other side or it's going to run or whatever.

So they would print, they would dampen the paper, print one side and then have to print the other side, like after the ink on the one side was dry before the paper had dried fully. Right. Which is that's got to be tricky. You talk about nerviness and high stress. I mean, especially when you're on like a if it's a hundred and eighty Bibles in a ten million dollar project, I mean, each page is rather expensive and valuable.

So you don't want to screw up any of them, you know. So if you want to look at a press again, I would go to YouTube and see the video of it actually being done. But the press has two sections. You've got this frame that allows the plates and the paper to align themselves, the carriage and then the actual press part of the press and the you set these plates onto the carriage and they're facing up and then you apply ink using these.

And when you see it on the video, it kind of looks like kind of looks like these big giant Gord's there. They have a handle and then this big round sort of drumhead looking body. Right. And you and you stamp you know, you roll this thing all around the ink and then roll them around on each other to make sure that all the ink is really, really even if it's actually gluskin, these pads are. And then you you just go around and stamp these four plates.

And, you know, from the looks the way this guy did it, it took about. Maybe a minute and a half to fully thank them for a good page, and these things were kind of heavy. You know, he's he's kind of he didn't roll them because if you roll them, you end up smearing. So he's just sort of pounding them on their. Hmm. And it's a lot of work in and all of this looks like a lot of work.

Even the pressing part is takes like, you know, a lot of manual strength.

Well, yeah. I mean, again, two years to just print one hundred and eighty Bibles.

Yeah. So, I mean, it's a physical workout. Right. He uses this ank you mentioned it's an oil based varnish previously for many, many hundreds of years. They use water based which is just no good water based. Ink is not what you want to do when you're printing a book. No.

And that was actually another reason why it didn't catch on printing didn't catch on in China. And Korea, too, is they were using water based inks exclusively. And it runs. It smears, it doesn't stay in place. It's just a bad jam. And that was another innovation of Gutenberg's, which was to to use oil based think. There is somebody I can't remember we've talked about in a podcast before, but they were they were talking about how some inventor just knocked something out of the park his first time out.

And they said that it was akin to invent like it had the Wright brothers invented their airplane, complete with airline miles and food trays that that came down off the back of a scene five years like this complete thing. And that's kind of what Gutenberg did with the printing press. He he solved all the problems all at once in his his initial invention, like he figured it all out. And as we'll see, it stayed the same for hundreds of years as a result.

Yeah. So to hold the paper in place because, you know, this frame is upright and then you end up folding it down, it's held in by these pens, these little looked like little nail heads sticking are not in our heads, but now pointy parts. Yeah, the opposite of the head out. And that way when you flip it over, because you're gonna have to print that other side, it's exactly in the same spot that it was before.

Another nice little, very rudimentary way of making something perfect. Right. And then you mentioned earlier he made certain parts read this lubrication and I'm not sure what they did for the Gutenberg Bible. But in the King James version, if I'm not mistaken, Jesus's words are all in red.

Oh, yeah, that makes sense if I think I remember that being the case. But I think he just use it here for certain parts and maybe flourishes of art. And there was some drawn art and stuff like that as well.

Well yeah, they went to hand drawn because they, they, he had so much trouble with the red light going back and printing after the black was printed printing on the same page with just the red text. It's pretty advanced back then. You're right. But they said, yeah, I'll just go do the hand lettering like traditionally is done. Nobody will be Manitas for it.

Right. Like what do you call it when the first letter is big drop cap. Yeah. Dropcam. They did those in red for sure.

Yeah. And then you've got your screw the screw press he used he kind of ghankay from wine and grape presses and you know, once you have this think inked up you move it over to the press and it's just a big, big armed lever. It's not like something that moves in a circle. Right. You just kind of pull it really tough kind of one or maybe two times. And then, boom, you've got your printed page.

You do an ad points out something that I think is overlooked. But, you know, and one of the other problems with Chinese and Korean printing or any kind of printing using like woodblocks or something like that is you're going to get uneven pressure. So you're going to get an uneven transfer. Yeah. One of the genius things about the press, about it using basically a winepress for printing is that it applies even slow pressure at, you know, increasing pressure and then decreasing pressure as you unscrew the screw.

So the editor at the same rate, like over the whole plate. Right.

So there was a nice even amount of pressure that was increasingly introduced in decreasingly reduced that that really kind of made this this beautiful outcome for the on the printed page. Yeah.

You get when this guy in this video holds up the little printed page at the end there, you know, there's a little moment of going on in that room, like a little trickle of blood comes out of his ear, is just gazing into the camera.

Man, I was worried about that guy for me. I got to go see that.

Yeah, you should check him out. So that's I mean, that's the printing press. We we we should say after Gutenberg printed those Bibles, Fusco's hands on those presses almost immediately and in very short order, I think, like less than two years released Psalter, which is also considered a masterpiece, but first put his name on it. Even though Gutenberg had basically created the whole thing, he also made a business for himself, creating these Bibles, using Gutenberg's old plates because he got his hands on all those who the.

But again, Gutenberg was certainly not lost to history. Everybody knew what he did and very quickly revered him as a hero extraordinaire.

But we were talking about what the the Gutenberg press did for the world. And it's really tough to overstate the impact that it had on things.

Yeah, I mean, just think about, like you said, the first information age, getting out information on on government and politics and democracy. And I mean, just little things like how tos and, you know, how how to there might have been a how to on how to make those nails that we talked about in the blacksmithing episode. Right. Although I think a lot of that is passed down, but all of a sudden you can get this out en masse.

And and that's the whole thing. It's like all of a sudden hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of people could read information.

Right. And they could learn to read, too, because books were now way more affordable than they had been before. And actually, ironically enough, I ran across the history dotcom article called Seven Ways. The Printing Press Changed the World by our own Dave Ruse.

And he went to he he points out this, that I thought this is really important with the printing press. It made it way easier to make way more copies of something than ever before, which also made it harder to stamp out new ideas. Whereas before, if you had some heretic who had this new idea about, you know, the the earth revolving around the sun rather than the other way around. Yeah, all you do is kill that person, burn them at the stake and then burn their copies of their notes along with them.

An idea gone, right? Yeah. Now that person could make a bunch of copies and disseminate them. And so this idea would be out there. You could kill that person, but their idea was going to survive because there were too many copies for you to get your hands on and stamp out. And that led to things like the Enlightenment, like the revolution in America and in France and the birth of democracy in the West. Like like all of this stuff came from that ability to disseminate things like never before in the legal system and allowed judges to throw the book at people.

Yeah, because it was just one book. Yeah. They wouldn't throw that one thing. No, you might not get it back.

That's right. So wow, that's a good one. I think on that one we should end this episode on the Gutenberg printing press, don't you. Yes. Well since I said don't you everybody, it's time for Listener Mail.

All right. I'm going to call this sweepstakes winner. This is from Devin Johns. Hey, guys, just listen to the sweepstakes podcast. I want to share one of my wins as a sweeper in 2016. I saw Sweepstakes four from Interstate Battery and Firestone. They were giving away two trucks and a bunch of gift cards. I had to do is get a free battery check at any Firestone and enter with your invoice.

I thought I need an oil change, so I might as well get that battery checked and enter. Less than three months later, I was contacted by a third party company who facilitates the sweepstakes. Almost didn't answer. They told me I didn't win. And he won a gift card. No, he won a truck. He won one of those two trucks. Twenty seventeen Chevy Silverado. He said, I loved having a truck, but as you guys said, you got to pay taxes on winnings, which counts as income.

So I ended up selling it, buy a nice used car and paying off debt. I've won a bunch of stuff and have learned how to spot real and fake giveaways, but they do exist. So keep entering.

And that is Devin Jones and he included a picture of himself with his car. It's great. Looks good still. Yeah. Thanks, Devin. Congratulations. And it's a fantastic story. That's a perfect listener. Mail response to the sweepstakes episode, if you ask me. Yeah.

In a smart, responsible thing you did by getting a cheaper thing and then paying off debt. Good for you. Yeah, well, if you want us to give you a pat on the head for something you did email to us. You can send it off to Stuff podcast today.

Heart radio, dotcom. Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, my radio, is it the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows? He was a man, he was a senior, maybe they would have called him a teenager at my church, if you know what I mean. Oh, I see. I thought you meant like a like go nearby football or something.

No, he was he was a senior.

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