Johannes Gutenberg
1400 – 1468 · Germany
Known for: The printing press, the machine that democratised knowledge
“Give me twenty-six soldiers of lead and I will conquer the world.”
Biography
A goldsmith from Mainz who combined movable metal type, oil-based ink and a converted wine press into the most consequential invention of the millennium. Before Gutenberg, a book took a monk a year; after him, a workshop produced hundreds in weeks. Knowledge stopped being the property of palaces and monasteries.
He printed his masterpiece, the 42-line Bible, around 1455, went promptly bankrupt in a lawsuit, and died in obscurity. But within fifty years there were printing presses in 270 European cities, and everything that followed, the Reformation, the scientific revolution, newspapers, universities for everyone, this very page, descends from his workshop.