William Caxton, an English merchant, learned the new art while he was traveling in Germany, and when he returned home started a press at Westminster with a partner named Wynken de Worde. This was the first English press, but others were quickly set up at Oxford and York, Canterbury, Worcester, and Norwich, and books began to appear in a steady stream.
The art of printing has seen great changes since Gutenberg’s day. The type is now made by machinery, inked by machinery, set and distributed again by machinery. The letters, when once set up, are cast in plates of entire pages, so that they can be kept for use whenever they are wanted. Stereotyping and electrotyping have made this possible. The Mergenthaler Linotype machine sets and casts type in the form of solid lines. The great presses of to-day can accomplish more in twelve hours than the presses of 1480 in as many months.
But the great press we have is the direct descendant of the little one that John Gutenberg built in the Zum Jungen at Mainz, and the letters we read on the printed page are after all only another form of those he cut out with so much patient labor on his wooden blocks in Strasburg. Printing is one of the greatest inventions the world has ever seen, but it had its beginning in the simple fact that a young German polisher of gems fell to wondering how a rude playing-card had been made.
II
PALISSY AND HIS ENAMEL
About 1510-1589
The discovery of a long-sought enamel and the successful manufacture of a new and beautiful type of pottery can scarcely be ranked among the great inventions of history, but the story of Bernard Palissy is far too interesting to need any such excuse. He was a worker in the fine arts, in a day when objects of beauty were considered of the first importance, and his success was then regarded as almost as great a thing as the building of the first McCormick reaper in another age.
This maker of a new and beautiful porcelain was a Frenchman, born about 1510 at the little village of La Chapelle Biron, which lies between the Lot and Dordogne, in Perigord. His parents were poor peasants, without the means or the opportunity to give Bernard much of a schooling, but he picked up a very fair knowledge of reading and writing, and kept his eyes so wide open that he learned much more than the average country boy. It was the age when the churches of France were being made glorious with windows of many-colored glass, and Bernard, watching the glass-workers, dared to ask if they would take him as apprentice. One of them would, and so the boy of Perigord began his career of artist, his field covering not only the manufacture of glass, but its cutting, arranging, and sometimes its painting for the rose-windows of the Gothic churches. And so skilled were those glass-workers and so deeply in love with their art that their glass has been the despair of the later centuries that have tried to copy them.
Like a true artist he was very much in earnest. With his spare time and such money as he could save he studied all subjects that seemed apt to be of help to him. He learned geometry, and drawing, painting, and modeling. In his desire for the greatest subjects for his windows and the finest treatment of them, Bernard turned to Italy, the home of the great painters, and copied their works. This led his eager mind to delve into Italian literature, and shortly the young workman was not only draughtsman and artist, but something of a man of letters as well. The little village of La Chapelle Biron found that the peasant’s son, without any education in the church schools, was already a man of many talents and quite remarkable learning.