{"id":1771,"date":"2026-10-12T18:32:33","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T18:32:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tiwaripedia.com\/index.php\/2026\/10\/12\/history-of-printing-press\/"},"modified":"2026-10-12T18:32:33","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T18:32:33","slug":"history-of-printing-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tiwaripedia.com\/index.php\/2026\/10\/12\/history-of-printing-press\/","title":{"rendered":"The Printing Press: The Invention That Spread Knowledge Everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Infographic:<\/figure>\n

Before printing, every book had to be copied by hand, which took months and made books rare and expensive. The printing press changed that, and with it, the world.<\/p>\n

Early printing in Asia<\/h2>

Printing began in East Asia. The Chinese used carved wooden blocks to print text centuries earlier, and the oldest surviving dated printed book, the Diamond Sutra<\/em>, dates from 868 CE. Movable type made of clay and later metal was also developed in China and Korea.<\/p>\n

Gutenberg’s breakthrough<\/h2>

Around 1440<\/strong>, Johannes Gutenberg<\/strong> in Germany developed a printing press using movable metal type<\/strong>, oil-based ink and a press adapted from wine presses. Individual letters could be arranged into pages, inked, printed and then reused. His famous Gutenberg Bible<\/strong> was printed in the 1450s.<\/p>\n

A knowledge revolution<\/h2>
  • Books became cheaper and more widely available.<\/li>
  • Literacy spread beyond priests and nobles.<\/li>
  • Scientific ideas could be shared accurately and quickly.<\/li>
  • It helped drive the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution.<\/li><\/ul>\n

    Printing comes to India<\/h2>

    Portuguese Jesuit missionaries brought the first printing press to Goa in 1556<\/strong>. In the following centuries, printing spread to Tamil Nadu, Bengal and elsewhere. The Serampore Mission Press in Bengal printed books in many Indian languages in the early 1800s.<\/p>\n

    India’s first newspaper<\/h2>

    James Augustus Hicky started Hicky’s Bengal Gazette<\/strong> in Calcutta on 29 January 1780<\/strong>, India’s first newspaper. Indian-language newspapers soon followed, and the press later became a powerful voice of the freedom movement, through papers founded or edited by leaders such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi.<\/p>\n

    From press to pixels<\/h2>

    Printing evolved through steam-powered presses, rotary presses and offset printing to today’s digital printing and e-books. Yet the idea Gutenberg spread, of making knowledge available to everyone, lives on in the internet.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Gutenberg’s printing press made books cheap and transformed the world. Learn how printing works, how it reached India, and the story of India’s first newspaper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1770,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[337],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tiwaripedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tiwaripedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tiwaripedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tiwaripedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tiwaripedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tiwaripedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tiwaripedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tiwaripedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tiwaripedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tiwaripedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}