The Machine that Made Us (18 of 34)

The Machine that Made Us

This table is, believe it or not, a complete foundry.
'I've asked Stan to help me make a piece of type, a single letter E, which I can use in our grand printing experiment.
'For the sake of authenticity, I want my letter to match the dimensions of the original font used in the Gutenberg Bible.
'First, we have to make a punch, a master copy of the letter we want to reproduce.'
'After we've transferred its outline onto the tip of this steel bar, it has to be carved by hand using a file - a very sharp file.'
You'd do maybe a punch a day, two punches a day.

So, in order to do the full set of type that Gutenberg needed for his bible, how much work was that?
At least 270 characters, perhaps more.
So, given that a lot of holidays, I would imagine close to the better part of a year.
A year.
So if you were one of those people who'd invested in this new technology, you'd be getting rather impatient.
You'd be saying, "Mr Gutenberg, do you really need eight different Es?"
And the reason he needed different ones was obviously because it was a very elegant and harmonious look he was after, he wanted absolutely top quality, so he wanted some which were slightly wider, some that were slightly narrower, so that he could always have justified lines...
Correct...
Without trailing white space and ugly, bad compositing things.
'This is a smoke proof, a way of checking that our punch is an accurate copy of the letter we want to replicate.
'It looks spot on. How clever is that?!'
So here we have it, it's hand-carved and grooved and shaved and emeried, rasped and shaped and hardened and tempered.
And now that is the key that unlocks the technology that changes the world.