A History Of Power From The Gutenberg Revolution To The Computer Revolution

A History Of Power From The Gutenberg Revolution To The Computer Revolution


This piece is a result of conversations with a number of knowledgeable people
who do not seem to be as aware of the history of power as I expected, with an
emphasis on the kind of power used in The Industrial Revolution through today
which I am hopefully labeling as The Neo-Industrial Revolution.

The kinds of power under discussion will range from ancient waterwheels to an
electronic age that most of us don't understand yet even though we are living
right in the middle of the Internet Age and computers are ubiquitous and this
will also include several kinds of social, political and economic power.


How did humanity raise itself up from an illiterate agrarian population?

Why is it that you can read what I am writing?


The answer to both questions starts with Johannes Gutenberg's invention known
to us as The Gutenberg Press.

This was the first example of "mass production" in the world.

It was also the first example of metallurgy being used for purposes more than
agriculture or arms and armor.

In addition, it was the first example of "interchangeable parts," something a
whole world would not figure out for 400 more years, and the starting pointer
to the Industrial Revolution that would not officially start by the standards
of modern day historians for another 300 years.

This is an introduction to less than half the ways The Gutenberg Press led to
The Industrial Revolution.

However, the real reason I am writing this for you is to tell you about a new
Industrial Revolution that is taking place around us at this very moment, but
that the current powers-that-be would prefer you remained ignorant of just as
the same thing was preferred in Gutenberg's day, which luckily for us, failed
so miserably that most of us don't know of it.

But it also succeeded more than most of us know. . .read on to find out.


Today few of us can deny the power of the Internet, as Dan Rather, one of the
most powerful persons in the world was in the middle of efforts to bring down
an even more powerful person, The President of the United States, when no one
in particular, a person with a name that will not go down in history, pointed
out in Internet discussions, specifically in World Wide Web discussions, that
Mr. Rather's sources were somewhat suspect in some too modern form of content
that were never actually challenged, yet another triumph of form over content
that I have recorded over the years.

This kind of power, the power of a nobody to put an end to the career of such
a person as Dan Rather, Head of CBS News and to successfully retain George W.
Bush as President of the United States is the one kind of power Martin Luther
used when he brought down the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, again through,
as fate would have it, an unnamed person or person who republished his words,
via The Gutenberg Press, the Internet of Luther's day.

The world had hardly been aware of The Gutenberg Press for the half a century
since Gutenberg's invention changed the face of publishing forever, and today
the world has hardly been aware of The Computer Revolution for 50 years.  Yet
these two events, some half a millennium apart, both changed the world in the
same manner, bringing information to the public that had heretofore been only
the province of the elites of education and wealth and power, though they did
not always reside together in the same person, family, or company.

The Gutenberg Press was run by human muscle power and even though limitations
of human power were great, the ability of only a few people to turn out books
that should have taken the monks and scribes of that era lifetimes to produce
on their own was an astonishing event, even from the perspective of 500 years
later and beyond.

The fact that anyone, much less an unknown such as Martin Luther, challenging
the Roman Catholic Church, could have even the remotest chance of success was
heretical at least, and revolutionary at best.

Yet most of us, even half a millennium later, have heard of Martin Luther and
The Protestant Movement of which he was the father.

What we don't often hear is that we only know of him because his friends took
his words to the local Kinko's du jour and made copies, copies they then sent
to influential people around Europe, and the rest, as they say, is history.

From these small beginnings as far as print shops go, huge beginnings, as far
as the effects of those print shops goes, comes the entire publishing history
that is one of the major subjects we are considering.

Another kind of power is the kind that powered The Gutenberg Presses as those
evolved into more and more advanced forms of publication such as steam and/or
electrically powered printing presses.  Interestingly enough, I haven't found
any references to water powered printing presses.  Interestingly enough water
power had already been harnessed for the making of paper in wider portions of
the world long before Gutenberg.  Perhaps any of my readers who can find such
a reference to water powered printing presses would advise me.

Most historians pretty much ignore the effects of The Gutenberg Revolution in
any other aspect than directly related to publishing, concentrating on merely
if the word "merely" can be used on something so important, on the facts that
millions of books, perhaps as many as about 25 million, according to some for
whom this is a topic of scholarly expertise, were published using the presses
following the model of The Gutenberg Press by the end of the 1400's.  Some in
their scholar wisdom even give Gutenberg credit for starting what became that
historical period known as The Scientific Revolution.

But none of them seem to give Gutenberg credit for what eventually became The
Industrial Revolution, even though he obviously invented the first example of
what later became known as "mass production."

In Gutenberg's shop, two experienced printers could turn out work that should
have been over a decade's work by an experienced scribe and do it in one day,
with each page identical to every other page.  It should be noted here that a
scribe didn't always try to keep the same words on the same pages, nor did it
seem reasonable to expect that every word would be spelled exactly the same.

250 pages an hour, at least 10 hours a day, thousands of pages per day. . . .

Mass production.

By the end of the 1400's there were as many print shops in Europe as the page
count from a day's labor by those two man print teams.

2500 printing presses, 2500 pages per day, 6,250,000 pages per day, presuming
only a 10 hour workday, short for the time, and no press improvements.

Truly mass production, and more books were printed with these Gutenberg press
print shops that had been printed in all previous history.  30,000 titles.

.

However, let's not presume that there were no reactionary politickings on the
subject of this publishing revolution.

The Stationers Guild, the secular scribes on the order of Bob Cratchit of the
Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" fame, though Mr. Cratchit also did arithmetic on
his pages, was not pleased to see their previously permanent monopoly lost to
this single invention that turned the entire idea of "bookness" upside down.

Indeed those who had bought libraries of books before The Gutenberg Press had
some aversion to the addition of these new kinds of books to their libraries,
as they might devalue the enormous cost of the previous collection.

For these people it was obviously not the content of the book that was of the
greatest concern for determining its value, but some other factor[s].  Today,
in my own efforts to bring electronic books to the world I often see much see
much the same sort of thing.

After all, why would anyone want a one pound library containing as many books
at home, and easily searchable, as the average public library down the road?

Obviously such paradigm shifts take much longer for those heavily invested in
the previously existent paradigm, as has been exemplified in so many ways.

As always, these paradigm shifts seem to come faster and faster as time goes,
and eventually some come to the point of "Future Shock."

It took 250 years for The Stationers Guild, later renamed Stationers Company,
to finally regain their monopolistic control over the publishing industry, at
least in Great Britain, as the number of titles available for UK readers fell
from 6,000 to 600 overnight, thus beginning the trade in illegal books from a
perspective of both censorship and scholarship.

Going back to The Gutenberg Revolution, it doesn't take much research to find
examples of books being taken out of publication by The Catholic Church via a
process of burning the publisher at the stake.

The powers and forces at work here, both secular and religious, are powerful,
amazing in that they have gone largely unreported throughout history, and are
still engaged in the same kind of behavior today.

Perhaps the reason that they are so largely unreported is that the very ones
we would rely on to convey them must go through the very publishing industry
that would censor what they have to say.

Here are a few example in light of the kinds of power discussed here:

The first publishing revolution was obviously that of Johannes Gutenberg and
the Reactionary politicking of The Stationers managed to stifle or take over
all of the presses in Great Britain via "The Statute of Anne" in 1709-1710:
the first successful copyright law as we know it today.

I say "first successful copyright law" because The Stationers attempted with 
even harsher copyrights at least back to 1557, and probably even earlier.

These earlier copyright laws, even when they became law, were so stringent a
restriction on all rights to all writings for all previous history, giving a
total monopoly to The Stationers on everything ever written, that no one saw
them as being worthy of obedience or enforcement.

However, it should be noted that the origin of copyright law dates back from
before The Statute of Anne, and that The Statute of Anne was only a good law
by comparison to these previous attempts.

Even so, for the first 14 years of publication all rights belonged to member
publishers of The Stationers Company, and the only rights for the author was
a possible 14 year renewal that could only be made by a living author and of
no value if the book was already out of print or if The Stationers decided a
book should go out of print when the author renewed the copyright.

This is what happens when you allow the previous status quo to be retained a
longer period through legislation.

Yet the examples go far and wide.

Most of us have studied steam power to some extent, from the fold tales of a
Mr. John Henry competing head to head with a steam powered drill to Fulton's
steamboat, to the steam locomotive and even the Stanley Steamer that held an
assortment of speed records for many more decades that one might thing.  The
nuclear navy is all steam powered, when it comes down to it.

The history of steam power is quite amazing, even down to the steam power of
harvesters and threshers that used to travel the United States as crops came
in and for a relatively small fee would bring in the crops in much less time
and with much less worry about the weather.

Yes, the history of steam power is most fascinating, and worth a good look.

But most of us have never heard of steam power printing presses.

Why not?


Here is the story.


The United States became an independent country and started its copyright in
1790 with only a relatively small number of copyright issued to start with.

Nevertheless, when these first 28 year copyright periods began to expire for
those relatively few books still in print and making a profit, a new patent,
for the first high speed steam printing press, was issued in 1830, just time
enough to start republishing the first expiring copyrighted U.S. materials.

Once again a new publishing technology was stifled by copyright law with the
U.S. Copyright Act of 1831, which extended previous copyrights 14 more years
and thus stopped the owners of the new high speed steam presses cold.


The same thing is true of electricity.

Just as steam power was the up and coming thing two centuries, complete with
new high speed printing presses.

However, for the record, it should be noted that they very first of electric
printing press patent was issued in the same decade as that high speed steam
press mentioned above, but steam was the more prevalent form of power for an
awfully long time, so electric presses didn't get much publicity, and should
be noted as not being viable at all where there was no electric power.

However, by one century ago, electricity was the rage, and steam power could
be relied upon to transport materials quickly and inexpensively to vast wide
populations in areas that used to be considered quite remote.

The combination of wide railroad service with new higher speed printing left
an opening that Sears and Roebuck couldn't resist and they published catalog
books of 768 pages, complete with lavish illustration, and mailed them via a
new Rural Federal Delivery system, to millions and millions of households at
no cost to the recipient.

For millions of people this was the first book they ever owned.


Once again, this sort of thing was too much for the old publishing industry,
as new publishers sprang up at remote railroad crossings, installed printing
presses that could fill a boxcar overnight, and shipped books far and wide--
at prices that gave heart attacks to the olde boye networke publishers.

The result, a third copyright law, again expressly designed to stifle yet an
entirely new technology of publication.

The evidence of this is still available at your local used book store.

Just go in and ask for books about 100 years old.

You'll find a number of reprint houses dating back before 1909, when the new
copyright law went into effect, but only a few of them remained much after.

Before 1909, well over 90% of all books at least 30 years old were reprints,
simply because their copyrights had not been renewed in their 28th year.

The original publishers didn't find it profitable to keep them in print.

However, with the new technologies of printing and distribution, publishers
of the new variety were able to make a profit where the olde boye networkes
had been too lackadaisical to invest.

Instead they invested in the Jack Abramoff lobbyists of their day, just the
same way as in the day of the steam powered printing presses, and just that
exact same way as The Stationers had invested in the first copyright laws.

Thus we now see THREE Information Ages stifled by this kind of legislation,
each time paid for by the olde boye networke of publishers.


The FOURTH such Information Age was that of The Xerox Machine, and its very
similar demise at the hands of the U.S. Copyright act of 1976.

The FIFTH such Information Age is the one we currently occupy, and its very
similar efforts by the olde boye networke of publishers via U.S. copyright,
as set forth in the "Sonny Bono Copyright Act" or "Mickey Mouse Copyright,"
as the U.S. Copyright Act of 1998 is often called.


Thus we see that THE FIVE MAJOR STEPS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION have the
same response from the olde boye networke of the day:

Let's pass a law to make our competition illegal.


.


These parallels between publishing and Industrial Revolutions have not been
mere accidents of history, as might be thought due to the fact that history
as taught and written by historians, has hardly mentioned them at all.

Nevertheless, a popular media, even though they are still part of the "olde
boye networke of publishers," or at least wannabees, have had little effort
required in deciding that The Gutenberg Press was the greatest invention of
the last millennium, and that Johannes Gutenberg was the greatest person.

Yet, with all the goings on surrounding such proclamations, in publications
going to millions or even billions, no mention of the cataclysmic powers by
which The Gutenberg Press was stifled in Great Britain to the point that of
30,000 titles in print in Europe in 1500, and who knows how many added from
1500 to 1700, only 600 titles remained in print by The Stationers and those
were all in London so it doesn't take much imagination to envision what the
process must have been like for someone from the more remote areas.  If you
have trouble with such a vision, just read a little Jane Austen to envision
what the London scene was as compared to the rest of the country.  

These books are available free of charge at http://www.gutenberg.org, along
with nearly 20,000 others, and a total of over 50,000 from the various site
locations of other Project Gutenberg efforts around the world.

.


Now a similar look at other aspects of Industrial Revolutions.


Since so many people tell me they can't see the cause and effect between a
Gutenberg Press and The Industrial Revolution, a moment to lay out some of
the more obvious connections.

1.  
Metallurgy

2.
Mechanical Leverage

3.
Social Leverage

4.
Political Leverage

5.
Interchangeable Parts

6.
Mass Production



1.  
Metallurgy

Before Gutenberg metallurgy wasn't that far removed from alchemy, and that
metallurgy was mostly concentrated on weaponry and jewelry, not industrial
applications, and just barely agricultural applications.

Before Gutenberg, high tech weaponry was knights in armor and their lances
and the various gear for footsoldiers, archers, stirrups, and just barely,
gunpowder and firearms.  

The tools of science were rudimentary at best and would be refined greatly
by the advances of The Industrial Revolution.

Johannes Gutenberg was the first major user of metallurgy for utilitarian,
industrial purposes of mass production.

Does anyone really think The Industrial Revolution would have happened via
a thought process that did NOT include "Mass Production."

This point alone should be sufficient to make even the most ardent of such
detractors rethink their position that The Gutenberg Press was not a real,
if not THE real, precursor to The Industrial Revolution.

[More later on mass production, it has its own section below.]


2.
Mechanical Leverage

For those who really want to think about The Industrial Revolution, ideals 
about leverage or "mechanical advantage" as they called it, are necessary.

The Gutenberg Press employed several kinds of mechanical leverage, most of
it taken outright from presses used to extract juices and oils from a wide
variety of crops.

However, this time the leverage was used for something other than replaced
previous methods of doing the same thing.

We can talk about leverage going back to the caveman's club, and up to the
point, the literal point, of the knight's lance, arrow tips, and even that
dual leverage of the sword edge that makes it so effective, but the major,
repeat MAJOR, difference is that this leverage was for industrial purposes
that had never been considered before.

Does anyone really think The Industrial Revolution would have happened via
a thought process that did NOT include "industrial leverage."


3.
Social Leverage

Here we change value systems from technology to society.

Technological inventions are one thing, sociological inventions another.

Before Gutenberg all inventions were of the "trickle down" variety.

The invention started with the rich and trickled down to the poor.

The Gutenberg Press was an invention that brought books to everyone, right
from the first generation anyone noticed it was there.

It was NOT something first monopolized by the rich, then "trickled down."

A basic effect of The Gutenberg Press was general sociological advantage.

Does anyone really think The Industrial Revolution would have happened via
a thought process that did NOT include "sociological advantage."

i.e.  If you couldn't SELL your product to the general public, then it was
NOT to your personal advantage to engage in "mass production."

[More later on mass production, it has its own section below.]


4.
Political Leverage

I only write this at this location to remind you that political leverages
were only used AGAINST bringing so much to the masses at such low prices.

Governments, at least those governing The Stationers Company, ostensibly,
in the true sense of the word, were to create the general welfare of that
whole country, and not just the royalty, as of The Magna Carta.

Does anyone think The Gutenberg Press, the steam press, or electric press
or the more modern technologies of The Xerox Machine and the Internet all
would have had much greater impact if not for the various copyright laws,
passed solely to stifle their progress.

Whether you agree that those laws were passed solely to stifle progresses
of these particular inventions or not, you'll probably still have to step
back and admit that they would each have had a much greater effect if the
copyright laws hadn't happened just at the right time to stop them.

Does anyone really thing The Gutenberg Press and those various successors
would not have had an even greater impact on civilization if not for some
very powerful reactionary "Political Leverage."

5.
Interchangeable Parts

Obviously interchangeable parts are one of the staples of modern aspects,
perhaps over the past 150 years, of industrialization.

But few acknowledge that the first interchangeable parts were the letters
created by Johannes Gutenberg for his printing press.

Does anyone really think we could have had the last 150 years of bringing
more and more industrialization about without "interchangeable parts."


6.
Mass Production

The entire concept of Industrial Revolutions is based on Mass Production.

The entire concept of Mass Production is based on The Gutenberg Press.

After all, there WAS no Mass Production before The Gutenberg Press.

Does anyone really think The Industrial Revolution would have happened via
a thought process that did NOT include "Mass Production."


7.

Synergy

The concepts listed above, powerful as they are, have much greater effects
when used together than when used separately.

While Gutenberg is sometimes credited with starting Scientific Revolutions
due to increasing the entire literacy and education level, there seems for
the present to be very little understanding of how his printing processes,
and their underlying technologies, created even greater changes through an
Industrial Revolution that was a combination of new science and technology 
that combined these fundamental advances and also combined them with great
scientific and technological advances yet to come.

Much as Thomas Edison is credited with inventing "research and development
laboratories" as a result of his Menlo Park operations, we should all give
equal credit to Gutenberg for creating the "interdisciplinary" products as
well a for creating the first "mass production" workshop, and the earliest
uses of metallurgy for industrial mass production.

Add to these the concept of "interchangeable parts" and you have perhaps a
greater contribution to the modern world than previous conceived.

These are a wide range of concepts that are very fundamental to the ideals
of The Industrial Revolution, no matter how far back you go, or do not go,
in your definition of The Industrial Revolution.

I challenge those who would deny the connection from The Gutenberg Presses
of half a millennium ago to The Industrial Revolution to come up with some
other example, ANY other example, that provides even a reasonable fraction
of the impact of these fundamental concepts for The Industrial Revolution.

I barely even mentioned the requirements for the more literate or educated
members of society needed to create such new sciences or new technologies,
and that is no small feature of the basis for The Industrial Revolution or
for The Neo-Industrial Revolution I am predicting will sweep the planet as
a result of The Computer Revolution, the Internet, and the World Wide Web.

The truth is that none of you would ever have heard of me if not for these
aspects of The Neo-Industrial Revolution that allow me, someone without an
even ordinary set of credentials, to try worldtipping on the scale of some
of the people I have mentioned above.

I am the first to admit that my contribution was small, just the snowball,
the one that started the avalanche of eBooks you see around you today, and
I have, as Isaac Newton said, "Stood On The Shoulders Of Giants" to create
that little snowball, and have been helped by 40,000 volunteers and others
who have created the entire eBook industry.

Yet, my purpose here is to say that this contribution will appear smaller,
vastly smaller, compared to The Neo-Industrial Revolution I am predicting.

It is the first day of my 60th Spring, and, as always, my vision is set on
the future, a future I hope will make all the efforts I have described via
the words above pale by comparison.

My hope is that Project Gutenberg and eBooks in general should provide the
foundation for a Neo-Industrial Revolution that will make the previous few
industrial revolutions also pale by comparison.

Anything that can be digitized can travel across the Internet at speeds we
define as instantaneous if we are on good connections, somewhat slower for
those at the end of slow wires.  For my own purposes, I am lucky in so far
as the eBooks I have made a career of promoting travel very well over such
wires and thus are even more instantaneous than other materials.

However, not only will the Internet continue to get faster, but more of an
assortment of developments such as MIT's FABrication LABoratories[FABLABs]
become more and more widely available, but the specifications for stuff to
make with them will become more and more widely available, until you would
be able to make thousands, if not millions, of things at FABLABs, all over
the world, in every country, just as we do with eBooks today.

Don't believe me?

Well, you should have heard all the comments for the first 17 years of the
time I spent talking about eBooks!

Not even my best friends who helped me the most believed eBooks were going
to ever get off the ground, must less fly like the Wright Brothers or like
modern day airplanes.

eBooks are so commonplace today that when I do Google searches I find that
I am reading a book when I don't even know it. . .it just so happened that
today while I was researching The Industrial Revolution, printing presses,
and the like, I ended up with my searches taking me to eBooks, without any
warning whatsoever. . .until I realized there were little Google clues for
the fact they were eBooks, but I realised it only after the fact.

Someday, nearer in the future than the first step toward eLibraries was in
the past, someone will search for parts and those part will be made by MIT
FABLABs or the like, and the person won't know it any more than I realized
after the fact that I my hit from the Google search was an eBook.

Such parts will be "printed" or "manufactured" via the capabilities of the
new 3-D printers, FABLABS, and other methods of creating material objects,
objects whose origin lies in computer files of miles away.

For those who want to start the clock counting, that's about the beginning
of 2040, but my own feeling is that it will happen even sooner, so much so
that it might have already happened.  I've  heard of people making parts a
person needed for a washing machine in a FABLAB in Africa{?) so all it may
take to make my prediction already have come true as that the person given
the part didn't know how it got there.  

To someone in remote Africa is UPS all that different from a FABLAB?

The point is that more and more solid three dimensional objects are going,
or should I say coming, to be available via "printers," machine shops, and
other devices that can make three dimensional objects from a file.

More and more of our low tech industries, not just high tech, are making a
move to automated manufacturing of this nature.

Desktop 3-D printers cost less now than an IBM-AT computer did in 1984 and
you don't even have to factor inflation into the equation.  If you did you
would perhaps get two of the 3-D printers for the cost of one IBM-AT.

The price of a FABLAB is reported to be only twice that of the IBM-AT with
no inflation, or perhaps the same price without inflation.  $20,000 or now
perhaps $25,000, as a Google search just informed me.  Cheap at the price!


Conclusion

Today we take using such Google searches for granted, something that quite
recently didn't even exist, now it's just a minute of searching to find an
exact quote on the price of something as new and complex as a FABLAB.

In the same respect, I am proud to say that the best selling book of a few
years now, The da Vinci Code, was researched extensively using eBooks from
Project Gutenberg, as you can see is in quite good company listed there on
the acknowledgements page with The Louvre and Bibliotheque National, and a
few other prime resources.

Those who don't think things will change in the future just are not paying
much attention to how things are changing right now.

The average car today has hundreds of functions carried out by computer we
rarely ever consider.  Our analog radios and televisions are full of stuff
that comes from digital sources, though it will probably all be digitized,
sooner rather than later, just so they can make a trillion literal dollars
selling new devices and another trillion dollars selling you the rights to
tape the shows you tape for free today.

What?

They didn't mention that part!

Hmmm.

I wonder why not?

If you understood the little history of publishing and copyright above it
should have been obvious.

The more the publishing media CAN deliver to the masses, the more it will
be that laws are passed to STOP that same media from reaching the masses.

So it has been since The Gutenberg Press, and so it shall be until/unless
something even more revolutionary happens.