Before the 1450s, every book in Europe was copied by hand. Monks would sit in cold rooms with quills and ink, copying letter by letter for months. A single fancy Bible could take over a year to make and cost about as much as a small farm. Books were so rare and expensive that almost nobody owned one.
Then a goldsmith from Germany named Johannes Gutenberg figured out how to cast small reusable metal letters and press them onto paper using a wooden screw press. Suddenly a single workshop could print hundreds of copies of a book in the time it used to take to copy one by hand. Books got dramatically cheaper - by some estimates, around a thousand times cheaper.
The printing press changed everything. Knowledge that had been locked in monasteries spread to ordinary towns. Scientists could share new ideas across countries. Reformers could distribute pamphlets. The world got noisier, smarter and faster - and modern science, modern news and modern democracy all trace back to those clattering wooden presses.
