It may perhaps be said, that so apparently simple a matter could surely not have taken so long a time to contrive, nor have cost so much as has been implied, in the way of preliminary experiments. But the printing press, in its origin, was an entirely novel invention. The whole contrivance,—although the idea, as we learn from Arnold de Bergel, (1541), was first suggested to Gutenberg’s mind by the wine-press,[46]—had to be thought out by its inventor, step by step, unhelped by any adventitious aid. Gutenberg, versatile genius as he was, may not have been an expert mechanic; he was certainly unable to avail himself of the many appliances which modern inventors find ready to their hand at every turn, for they were non-existent, and he had therefore to realize his designs the best way he could, without revealing their object to those whom he employed to carry them into execution. His partners indeed might know that a new kind of block or book printing was intended, but yet be ignorant of the real purpose for which the costly and still unfinished machines were meant; for it is evident, judging from the depositions of Anthonie Heilmann, concerning the formen, (‘frames or models’), and of others who speak of presses (pressen) in the plural, that more than one had been planned. Unless such knowledge had been imparted to them, and was further supported by specimens of block Alphabets, school Grammars, and Vocabularies, it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand how their faith in the ultimate success of “the wonderful art,” could have been so long sustained. Now, bearing in mind that three hundred and seventy years later, it cost a practical printer and engineer, aided by other men’s ideas, and by every facility which science could give for the quick and accurate production of whatever his ingenuity designed,—no less than seven years of labour, and an outlay on the part of his employers of £16,000, before he achieved success in the first cylindrical printing machine;[47] a machine which was merely required to print off sheets more rapidly than could be done by the hand-press;—the marvel is, not that Gutenberg’s invention cost him the time and labour and money it did; but that in realizing his ideas, he perfected them so thoroughly, that the principles of his hand-press have not to this day been improved. Different adaptations of leverage power may have been tried to produce the same effects, and different materials made use of in the manufacture of the machinery, but the hand-press of to-day is essentially the same as that with which the first Typographer printed his first book. The greater therefore is the honor due to its inventor.
The annexed sketch represents a press in its completed form, with tympans attached to the end of the carriage, and with the frisket above the tympans. The tympans, inner and outer, are thin iron frames, one fitting into the other, on each of which is stretched a skin of parchment or a breadth of fine cloth. A woollen blanket or two with a few sheets of paper are placed between these, the whole thus forming a thin elastic pad, on which the sheet to be printed is laid. The frisket is a slender frame-work, covered with coarse paper, on which an impression is first taken; the whole of the printed part is then cut out, leaving apertures exactly corresponding with the pages of type on the carriage of the press. The frisket when folded on to the tympans, and both turned down over the forme of types and run in under the platten, preserves the sheet from contact with any thing but the inked surface of the types, when the pull, which brings down the screw and forces the platten to produce the impression, is made by the pressman who works the lever,—to whom is facetiously given the title of “the practitioner at the bar.”
One of the consequences that ensued on the termination of the lawsuit with the Dritzehens, was a stoppage of the progress of the invention. Very probably Gutenberg, an impoverished if not a disappointed man, felt compelled to lay his projects aside, and to devote himself, for a time at least, to other and more remunerative pursuits. Nothing more at any rate is heard of the partnership, or of types or presses, until after his return to Mentz. And as printing was not practised at Strasburg until after Mentelin set up a press there, this silence is pretty conclusive as to the correctness of the surmise, that neither Dritzehen nor Heilmann nor Riffe had been entrusted with the secret of the separable types.
The inference which writers adverse to the claims of Gutenberg draw from the silence in the evidence in regard to types or letters, is, that he had not then invented them. But if the press was not designed, and made, for taking impressions from types, for what else could it have been invented? Gutenberg must have had types in his possession, before he commenced experiments in connection with the press. Now these experiments commenced some time before 1436; how long cannot be ascertained; but it is clear that the original making of the types must necessarily have preceded the first attempt at making a press. But when once a small stock of metal letters had been engraved, (in itself a work of years for a single individual,) and it was found that they could not be availed of by what was then the ordinary method of producing prints, further progress with them would be stopped, until the press, which was to make them profitable, had been made.[48] The mere making of the types, however tedious and time-eating a work, was, as has already been shewn, by no means so wonderfully ingenious as some have stated it to be.
A period of ten years now passed by. Gutenberg, true to his convictions, resumed his typographic labours, and perfected “the mightiest engine of human intellect—the great leveller of power—the Demiurgus of the moral world—The Press.”[49]
The statement made by Wimpheling,[50] in his Epitome Rerum Germanicarum, written in 1502, that in the year 1440 the art of printing was invented by John Gutenberg in Strasburg, though afterwards brought to perfection in Mentz, affords ground for believing that between the year 1439 and the date of his leaving Strasburg, Gutenberg actually printed a work or works in that city. It also gives colour to the conjecture of M. Bernard[51] that a “Donatus, printed in characters very closely resembling those of the Bible afterwards printed by Gutenberg at Mayence, may possibly have been printed by him at Strasburg.” If M. Bernard be right in his conjecture, Mr. Humphreys is of opinion, (p. 74,) “that it would tend to prove that the characters used were of lead, as in the ‘Donatus’ in question the types show such symptoms of spreading and blurring, as would be sufficient to deter a man of Gutenberg’s taste and ambition from undertaking the printing of a more important work.”
Other works may also have been printed, of which no trace remains, as in the case of the Tracts of Peter of Spain, alleged by Junius to be one of the two works first printed at Mentz in the year 1442. Of the other, the Doctrinal of Alexander Gallus, there is a supposed fragment preserved in the public Library at Treves, part of which is figured by Wetter, in Tab. XII. of the fac-similes accompanying his work;[52] but it is plainly the production of the printers of the Speculum Humanæ Salvationis, whoever they were, and of whom more will be said hereafter. The lines are irregular, the letters appearing to be of wood, strung together with a thread, a practice known to have been adopted by the first printers, and to which allusion is made by Theodor Bibliander (1548), Heinrich Spiegel (1549–1612), and other writers.