Johannes Gutenberg: The Steve Jobs of His Time
The inventor of printing with movable type had one remarkable breakthrough, but his synthesis of other people’s ideas was the key. Then his lead investor kicked him out.
He had an idea. No one is quite sure where it came from. But its simplicity masked the enormous complexity required to bring it to life. He wanted to change the way people interacted with visual media, expanding access to more people while reducing the cost to make it. He quickly grew the consumer audience by thousandfolds.
Most of his ideas weren’t quite original. Many technical experts assisted him, though they remain largely unsung. He built a first-of-its-kind, all-in-one manufacturing facility that was remarkably productive. In the end, with his company on the brink of its greatest success, a key investor kicked him out.
This wasn’t Steve Jobs, but Johannes Gutenberg.
The Tipping Point
It’s hard to understand from a remove of nearly six centuries how revolutionary the set of innovations that Gutenberg linked together were. He moved European society from a state in which books and scrolls were entirely written by hand and largely unaffordable except by the wealthy to one…
