The Machine that Made Us (16 of 34)

The Machine that Made Us

Besides the carpenter Saspach, he'd recruited other craftsmen from the Strasbourg Guilds and set them to work at his new premises.'
'Not in the city itself, but in a hamlet downstream, far away from the prying eyes of potential competitors.'
Why the secrecy?
Why was it necessary?
There were a number of people working in this area, trying to solve this problem.
If only they could come up with a printed word for the Church, they would have their fortunes made, so he had to keep it as a secret, otherwise everybody else would be doing it.

'Whilst they worked in secret on the printing press, they needed a second revenue stream to keep the wolf from the door.'
Lo and behold, fate brought to Gutenberg a brilliant idea.
This was the creation of mirrors for pilgrims coming to the pilgrimage at Aachen.
Why was Aachen important?
Aachen was important because there was a cathedral there, and in the cathedral were relics directly descending from Christ, supposedly, and they were on display every four years, and pilgrims would come from all over Europe to see the relics and receive the rays of healing that emanated from them.
Eventually there were so many pilgrims that they couldn't all get close to the relics, so the idea came into existence that there should be some way of capturing these rays, and the rays were captured by a concave metal mirror, which would be held up so that it was some sort of a satellite dish capturing radiation.
Local makers could not keep up with the demand.
Gutenberg's idea was that if he could mix his metal right, he could use the presses that were in development to print out mirrors, which could be sold to the pilgrims at Aachen.
'It looked like a sure-fire winner, but in 15th-century Europe, there was one thing which could usually be relied on to scupper the best-laid business plans.'