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The Printing Press and the Spread of Ideas
history of technologyWhen Johannes Gutenberg began printing with movable metal type in the mid-fifteenth century, books in Europe were expensive objects copied by hand. Within fifty years, printers were working in more than two hundred towns, and a book could be bought for a of its former price.
Cheaper books did not create mass literacy, however. For most of the following century, reading remained a skill to clergy, merchants and wealthy families. What printing did change was the way knowledge spread. Scholars in different cities could now work from identical copies of a text, made it far easier to compare results and correct errors. Printed pamphlets also allowed new religious and political ideas to large audiences quickly, which is one reason rulers in several countries tried to control the presses.
Historians still debate how the printing press was in bringing about these changes, but few doubt that it made new ideas much harder to suppress.