The question—Who invented the Printing Press?—has never yet, it is believed, been thoroughly considered or satisfactorily answered. A writer in the Encyclopædia Britannica says, “It is probable that one of the difficulties which Gutenberg found insuperable at Strasburg was the construction of a machine of sufficient power to take impressions of the type or blocks then employed. Nor is it at all wonderful that even the many years during which he resided at that city should have been insufficient to produce the requisite means; for what with cutting his type, forming his screws, inventing and compounding his ink, and constructing the means for applying the ink when made, his time in the Alsatian capital must have been fully occupied.” And he goes on to argue that the Press was probably the joint production of Gutenberg, Faust and Schœffer, during the time of their association in Mentz. But for such a belief there is no real ground whatever.
Mr. Hansard, although he devotes 166 pages of his voluminous work[36] to an account of Presses and Printing machines, strangely enough heads his first chapter on the subject “Construction of the Original Printing Press by Blaew of Amsterdam.” But Blaew lived two centuries after the original invention, and was only an improver of certain of its parts. Of the original inventor he says not a word.
Mr. M‘Creery, a contemporary of Hansard, in his poem the “Press,”[37] reprinted in the Typographia, apostrophises Gutenberg and Mentz in the following terms:—
“Sire of our Art, whose genius first design’d
This great memorial of a daring mind,
And taught the lever with unceasing play,
To stop the waste of Time’s destructive sway!
* * * * *
O Mentz! proud city, long thy fame enjoy,