# Printing Press The **printing press** with movable metal type, developed by [[Johannes Gutenberg]] in Mainz around 1440–1450, turned the copying of texts from a scribal craft into an industry. Movable type itself was older: Bi Sheng made clay type in Song China in the 1040s, and Korean printers used metal type by 1377. What Gutenberg added was a complete system of cast metal type, oil-based ink, and an adapted screw press, arriving in a Europe with a small alphabet, a commercial economy, and rival states that could not suppress print everywhere at once. Within about seventy years the press carried Martin Luther's Reformation pamphlets across German-speaking Europe, the first mass-media campaign. It is the opening entry of the [[Media Timeline]] and the medium [[Marshall McLuhan]] and [[Harold Innis]] treated as the root of the modern "typographic" mind. See [[Medium Theory]]. > [!note] Stub > Minimum-viable page created to support the [[Media Timeline]]. Expand with the technology's development, its owners, and its political uses. ## See also - [[Media Timeline]] - [[Johannes Gutenberg]] - [[Medium Theory]] - [[Public Sphere]]