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The Printing Press: The Invention Built on Debt and Sin… from Business History · What's Your Problem?

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  Speaker 1: Hey, it's Jacob. As you may know, in addition to
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  Speaker 1: hosting What's Your Problem, I also host a show called
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  Speaker 1: Business History. And we recently did an episode of Business
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  Speaker 1: History about Gutenberg and the printing press. And it is
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  Speaker 1: all about people trying to make technological change and how
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  Speaker 1: that works as a business and how it changes society.
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  Speaker 1: All of which is to say, I thought it would
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  Speaker 1: be of interest to people who listen to What's Your Problem.
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  Speaker 1: So we're going to play it for you now. And
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  Speaker 1: I really hope you like it. The show is business history.
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  Speaker 1: Here it is. Crank up the siege engine because we're
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: going back to the Middle Ages. I will wear my
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  Speaker 1: leather corset. We're doing a biggie today. We are. Maybe
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  Speaker 1: the biggest one we've done yet. The printing press. The
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  Speaker 1: printing press. Love it. The printing press. Yes. It is everything,
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  Speaker 1: including a business. I'm Jacob Goldstein. I'm Robert Smith. And
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  Speaker 1: this is Business History. A show about the history. So
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  Speaker 1: why don't we go way back? Of business. Today on
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  Speaker 1: the show, the invention of the printing press, which is
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  Speaker 1: a surprisingly modern story. There is debt. There is equity.
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  Speaker 1: There is a court case, competition, international branch offices, and
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  Speaker 1: the Protestant Reformation. Our show today begins with a man
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  Speaker 1: named Johannes Gensfleisch Zur Laden. Did not see that coming.
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  Speaker 1: I'm probably saying it wrong because I don't speak German.
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  Speaker 1: Johannes Gussfleisch of the House of Laden. He was born
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  Speaker 1: around 1400 to relatively rich parents in a town called Mainz.
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  Speaker 1: It's in what's Germany today. At the time, it was
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  Speaker 1: part of the Holy Roman Empire. Which Voltaire said, of course,
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  Speaker 1: was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. When Johannes
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  Speaker 1: is around 20 years old, his father dies, and his
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  Speaker 1: mother comes into possession of a house called the Hof
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  Speaker 1: Zum Gutenberg, House of the Good Mountain. And Johannes becomes
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  Speaker 1: known as Johannes Zum Gutenberg. I guess last names work
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  Speaker 1: differently back then. Sure. There are many Johannes's, and you're like, oh,
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  Speaker 1: the Good Mountain one. He's over at the Good Mountain House.
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  Speaker 1: So what do we know about Gutenberg? There's a famous
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  Speaker 1: engraving of him. If you've seen a picture of Gutenberg,
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  Speaker 1: it is from this engraving. He's got this long white beard,
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  Speaker 1: comes down to like two points on his chest. Like
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  Speaker 1: ZZ Top? Yeah, like ZZ Top style. He's wearing a
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  Speaker 1: fur-trimmed hat. Gutenberg didn't look like this. The picture was
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  Speaker 1: made like 100 years after he died. There's no pictures
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  Speaker 1: of him as far as we know from his lifetime.
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  Speaker 1: And I love this, right? And as we'll see, there's
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  Speaker 1: all this myth, even as you get into the story,
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  Speaker 1: sort of embroidered about him. I mean, we don't know
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  Speaker 1: what he thought or felt, you know, as far as
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  Speaker 1: we know, there's no diary or trove of letters. But
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  Speaker 1: of course, he printed books, and a surprising number of
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  Speaker 1: the books still exist. And also, conveniently for our purposes,
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  Speaker 1: he wound up in court a few times. And the paperwork,
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  Speaker 1: the court records actually still exist. And so a lot
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  Speaker 1: of what we know about Gutenberg and the invention of
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  Speaker 1: the printing press and how it was used comes from
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  Speaker 1: these basically lawsuits over money. Which is great for us.
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  Speaker 1: Business history. So here's the story we can put together.
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  Speaker 1: At some point, we know Gutenberg became an affiliate of
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  Speaker 1: the master goldsmiths. Not an apprentice, but an affiliate. Exactly.
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  Speaker 1: So it's different. So- The master goldsmiths are a guild,
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  Speaker 1: which is, you know, the medieval version of a union.
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  Speaker 1: Guilds were a big deal. Maybe we should do a
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  Speaker 1: guild show someday, actually. He was not in the union. He, like,
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  Speaker 1: worked with gold is basically what that means in some way.
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  Speaker 1: So we know that. He's into metal. And we also
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  Speaker 1: know that he was an entrepreneur. And now here I am.
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  Speaker 1: This is like an anachronism, right? I'm sort of projecting
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  Speaker 1: backwards there. There were not entrepreneurs in the modern sense.
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  Speaker 1: The word didn't exist. But yet, I think you'll see
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  Speaker 1: as we go through the story, he was a hustler.
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  Speaker 1: He was a guy who started businesses. His life is
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  Speaker 1: much more that way than I would have thought for
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  Speaker 1: someone who's living in, you know, the end of the
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  Speaker 1: Middle Ages, basically. But then again, like, he is the
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  Speaker 1: guy who is going to invent the thing that's going
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  Speaker 1: to create the modern world. So maybe it makes sense.
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  Speaker 1: So the first kind of hustle, the first business that
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  Speaker 1: he starts that we know of is Mirrors. Gutenberg gets
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  Speaker 1: into the mirror game and he finds this great, you know,
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  Speaker 1: 1400s kind of niche, which is he's going to sell
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  Speaker 1: special mirrors to religious pilgrims. What made the mirrors special?
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  Speaker 1: They're special. They're like convex mirrors that are specially made
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  Speaker 1: for the pilgrims to take on their pilgrimage. And I'll
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  Speaker 1: explain why. I'll explain why. So what's going on is
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  Speaker 1: in 1439, There's going to be a pilgrimage to this
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  Speaker 1: German town to see these relics that are displayed just
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  Speaker 1: once every seven years, like a piece of the gown
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  Speaker 1: that Mary wore the night Jesus was born, the loincloth
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  Speaker 1: that Jesus wore on the cross and is stained with blood,
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  Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Yeah, this is like woodstock for
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  Speaker 1: religious pilgrims. Yes, yes. And so... The idea with these
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  Speaker 1: mirrors is, you know, when you get your moment before
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  Speaker 1: the holy relics, looking at them, you hold up the
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  Speaker 1: mirror and the mirror can somehow capture the holy power
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  Speaker 1: that the relics have. And to be clear, he didn't
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  Speaker 1: invent this idea. This was a thing that people were doing.
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  Speaker 1: Spread by mirror merchants. Perhaps, perhaps. But he's going with it.
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  Speaker 1: He's going with it. And he actually gets a couple
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  Speaker 1: of investors who have equity in the project, essentially what
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  Speaker 1: we would call equity, starts making the mirrors as far
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  Speaker 1: as we can tell. And then when your classic pieces
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  Speaker 1: of medieval bad news arrives, the plague happens. On the
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  Speaker 1: back of a rat. On the back of a flea,
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: on the back of a rat.
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  Speaker 2: It's like panics in the stories we tell, the 1800s
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  Speaker 2: and 1900s. You know, everything's going fine, and then the
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  Speaker 2: plague happens.
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  Speaker 1: The plague is the financial panic of the 1300s and 1400s.
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  Speaker 1: Very good. Pilgrimage is delayed until 1440.
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  Speaker 2: He must have been sad looking out over a hundred
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  Speaker 2: convex mirrors all staring back at him.
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  Speaker 1: One of Gutenberg's investors dies. Oh, man. Could have been plague.
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  Speaker 1: Could have been anything. 1430s. You could die of anything
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  Speaker 1: at any time. And the investor's family, the investor's family,
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  Speaker 1: the guy who has died, his family sues Gutenberg over whatever,
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  Speaker 1: over that guy's stake in the business. Come on, act
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  Speaker 1: of God. Yeah, I don't know what the details are.
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  Speaker 1: I think Gutenberg wins. But there is this really interesting,
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  Speaker 1: just kind of enticing detail, mystery in the lawsuit. And
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  Speaker 1: it's just a few words. And what we know from
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  Speaker 1: the lawsuit paperwork is that Gutenberg is afraid that his
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  Speaker 1: trade secrets are going to get out. Of course, there's
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  Speaker 1: no intellectual property as we know it in this era.
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  Speaker 1: You try and keep your secret secret. In particular, he
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  Speaker 1: says he is worried that visitors to the dead man's
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  Speaker 1: house are going to see— and this part is a direct quote,
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  Speaker 1: or at least a direct quote translated into English— Four
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  Speaker 1: pieces lying in the press. The press. The press. The
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  Speaker 1: printing press? We don't know. We don't know. We don't know.
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  Speaker 1: But he tells somebody to take these pieces apart so
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  Speaker 1: nobody can tell what they are. Historians, of course, have
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  Speaker 1: been speculating for hundreds of years about these six words.
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  Speaker 1: Was he already working on the printing press? Unclear. We
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  Speaker 1: don't actually know what happened with the mirror business for
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  Speaker 1: that matter. Next piece of evidence. Next time we have
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  Speaker 1: a clear view of what's going on with Gutenberg is
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  Speaker 1: actually 10 years later. 1450. So Gutenberg, I will say,
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  Speaker 1: as a 15-something man, is 50-ish at this point. He's
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  Speaker 1: not a kid. Some might say he's washed up. Some
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  Speaker 1: might say he's at his peak. So it's 1450. Gutenberg
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  Speaker 1: is around 50 years old, and he makes another deal.
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  Speaker 1: He enters into another business arrangement. This time, it's with
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  Speaker 1: a guy named Johann Fust. And Fust agreed to lend
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  Speaker 1: Gutenberg 800 guilders at 6% interest. collateralized by the apparatus.
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  Speaker 1: They call it, ooh, the apparatus. We're getting excited. Ooh,
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  Speaker 1: an apparatus. I like the sound of that. It's like
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  Speaker 1: he has a code name. Das Apparatus. Sorry to all
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  Speaker 1: our German speakers. So 800 guilders is a lot of money.
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  Speaker 1: It's enough to buy 100 oxen or four houses. These figures,
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  Speaker 1: by the way, come from a book called Gutenberg, A
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  Speaker 1: Life in Books by Eric Marshall White. which is a
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  Speaker 1: good book, a really helpful book. It's relatively recent and
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  Speaker 1: it's really careful. It's a really careful biography of Gutenberg.
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  Speaker 1: So it was really helpful in kind of untangling the
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  Speaker 1: myth from what we know. So, okay, so they make
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  Speaker 1: this deal and two years later, Fust makes another investment,
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  Speaker 1: agrees to put in 300 more guilders right away, up
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  Speaker 1: to 800 more overall. And here we know from the
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  Speaker 1: kind of documentary evidence that we'll get to, that this
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  Speaker 1: is explicitly for the work of the books. This is it.
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  Speaker 1: The work of the books. It's happening. And so there is,
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  Speaker 1: if we zoom out now, like we're right in the documents,
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  Speaker 1: really in the micro, if we zoom out to the
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  Speaker 1: macro for a sec, it's interesting to think why. Why
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  Speaker 1: are they putting a lot of money into this? We
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  Speaker 1: don't have... The aha moment.
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  Speaker 2: The big surprise story where he was, I don't know,
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  Speaker 2: he left some type somewhere and his wife sat on
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  Speaker 2: it and she gets up and he sees the impression.
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  Speaker 1: Yes, right. Or he falls in some ink and there
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  Speaker 1: happens to be a little coin on top of the
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  Speaker 1: ink and it gets on his shirt and he thinks, ah,
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  Speaker 1: we do know this. We do know this. Demand for
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  Speaker 1: books was really high in Europe at this point for
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  Speaker 1: some interesting reasons and kind of varied reasons. Social and
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  Speaker 1: economic reasons. And political, actually. So you have governments are
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  Speaker 1: becoming more of a thing, right? It's not just kings
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  Speaker 1: occasionally going to war. You're having kind of bureaucrats, sort
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  Speaker 1: of modern governmental functions emerging. And for that, you need
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  Speaker 1: people who are literate, who have gone to school and
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  Speaker 1: read books to learn how to read. So there is
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  Speaker 1: demand for books. You have the Renaissance getting going in
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  Speaker 1: Italy by this point. And all the rich guys in
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  Speaker 1: Italy want to build their libraries of books from classical antiquity.
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  Speaker 1: There's actually this little story that I love of a
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  Speaker 1: businessman in Florence, a guy named Vespasiano di Bisticci. One
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  Speaker 1: more time. I love it. Vespasiano di Bisticci. That's the name.
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  Speaker 1: Da Bisticci. I believe he started out as a paper merchant,
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  Speaker 1: but he winds up creating kind of like what to
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  Speaker 1: me seems like a book factory in the 1440s. What factory?
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  Speaker 1: Without a printing press. So what happens is Cosimo de' Medici,
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  Speaker 1: you know, of the Florentine Medici, decides he needs his library,
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  Speaker 1: his personal library, and he goes to the Bisticci. And
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  Speaker 1: Bisticci has like 55 scribes writing for him, like, you know,
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  Speaker 1: copying out manuscripts for Cosimo. And these 55 guys create
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  Speaker 1: something like 200 books in two years. So that's basically like,
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  Speaker 1: if you round it to 50, you know, it takes
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  Speaker 1: a guy six months to write a manuscript. And of course,
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  Speaker 1: these are beautiful, whatever. But like, that's a lot of labor.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: And that's a lot of money for each book. And
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  Speaker 1: a lot of money for each book. Now, there is
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  Speaker 1: something making books cheaper. And that is paper. Paper. I
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  Speaker 1: presume Cosimo's books would have been on parchment, which is what,
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  Speaker 1: you know, they had been using in Europe for a
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  Speaker 1: long time. It was still the high class thing. And
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  Speaker 1: paper is profoundly cheaper than parchment. Parchment, of course, made
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  Speaker 1: from animal skins, costs a lot to grow an animal
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  Speaker 1: to make the parchment. And paper has been around in
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  Speaker 1: Asia for quite a long time by this point. But
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  Speaker 1: it has recently come to Europe and has become sort
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  Speaker 1: of industrialized, right? And the availability of paper is profound
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  Speaker 1: for the book business because when a scribe is writing
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  Speaker 1: a book on parchment, the parchment is a huge chunk
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  Speaker 1: of the cost, maybe most of the cost. But once
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  Speaker 1: you have paper, almost all of the cost of making
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  Speaker 1: the book is the cost of the labor, the cost
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  Speaker 1: of the scribe's time. This is a classic business situation, right?
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  Speaker 1: You have a high demand for a product and the
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: demand is going up. The thing that you use to
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  Speaker 1: make the products, the input, the expensive input is getting
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  Speaker 1: cheaper with paper. And so what you are left with
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  Speaker 1: is a bottleneck, a low productivity part of the process,
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  Speaker 1: and that is the scribes. And so we could talk about, oh,
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  Speaker 1: was it an insight? Did Gutenberg see something that no
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  Speaker 1: one else saw? Really, there were economic pressures. Somebody was
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  Speaker 1: going to do this because it's obvious when you have
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  Speaker 1: a bottleneck, a very expensive bottleneck in the process, you
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  Speaker 1: should try to automate that. And there was printing in
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  Speaker 1: the world. Woodblock printing had been used for hundreds of
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  Speaker 1: years in Asia. And it was in use in Europe somewhat.
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  Speaker 1: You know, obviously you carve sort of a single page's
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  Speaker 1: worth of typically an image, sometimes some words into a woodblock.
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  Speaker 1: But of course, it's static, right? You got your block,
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  Speaker 1: you can print one page, but that's it. We've all
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  Speaker 1: done this with potatoes when we were kids. Yes, it's that.
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  Speaker 1: Movable type. as we know what he's going to invent,
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  Speaker 1: is way more dynamic, way better. And by this time,
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  Speaker 1: by the mid-1400s, movable type had been invented also in Asia.
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  Speaker 1: In Korea, they had even used metal types. But both
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  Speaker 1: in China and Korea at the time, they used pictograms.
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  Speaker 1: Each word was its own character. So you'd need thousands
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  Speaker 1: of these little things in order to have a book.
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  Speaker 1: To have a book, right. Much less practical than when
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  Speaker 1: you have an alphabet and you can do whatever, your
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: uppercase and your lowercase and dozens. The order of magnitude
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  Speaker 1: is dozens and you can print anything. And so there
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  Speaker 1: is this question, was Gutenberg copying an Asian press or
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  Speaker 1: It doesn't seem like it. There's no evidence that he
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  Speaker 1: knew that people in Europe knew, you know, in any
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: kind of real way about these presses in Asia. It
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: seems like when Gutenberg is doing this work around 1450,
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: he's working from first principles. And we know, you know,
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: he had done some kind of work related to goldsmithing.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: His dad was affiliated with the mint. So maybe he
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: knew something about the way coins were made. We know
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: he's like a hustler. You know, he's entrepreneurial. And it
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: seems like Gutenberg, on his own, invented or invented for
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  Speaker 1: Europe the movable type printing press. arguably the most important
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: invention ever to come out of Europe, up there. You
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: mean what, the croissant? The croissant, the steam engine. Oh,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: the steam engine, of course, yes. Internal combustion. Yeah, huge, yeah.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: So there were a few other biggies, but one of
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: the biggies, fondue, but certainly one of the biggies. The
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: earliest image we have of a press is not of
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: Gutenberg's press in particular, but it's not that long after.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: It's from about 50 years later. It's this form of
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: picture of That was popular at the time called a
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: dance macabre. You have pictures of people in everyday life,
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: and then you have death kind of dancing through, I guess,
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: to remind you that everybody's going to die. Maybe they're
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: taking away these people. Memento mori. Yeah, memento mori. And
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: so in this image, you can see like a Gutenberg-ish press.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: Are you looking at it? Yeah, they're these kind of
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: skeleton-looking dudes. Yeah, that's death. Those are death. Yeah, I
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: got that.
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  Speaker 2: And one of them has his hand on the person
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  Speaker 2: who's picking out the type, who's putting the type together.
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  Speaker 1: Right, they call that guy the compositor, right? So for
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: each page, he arranges the letters, and the letters are backwards, right?
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: You arrange it all backwards.
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: And there's a guy who's doing the actual press, which
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: looks like one of those things where you pull the
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: lever and it goes down. Like maybe you'd use to
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: squeeze olive oil or something. Yes, they had used presses
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: like this in Europe for a long time.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's another skeleton dude like touching that man.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: That's amazing. And that's basically it, right? The press is
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: actually simple in its way, right? He's putting together these
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: different things, but it's not that complicated. Yeah. And that
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: raises this question in my mind, right, which is we've
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: talked before about simultaneous invention. It seems like. All the
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: big inventions that we've talked about, it is really not
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: ultimately like one guy figuring it out. You know, well, Edison.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: We talked about it early on in the Edison and
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: the movies story. Lots of people were trying to figure
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: out movies. Photography was out there. It was clear somebody
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: was going to figure out movies. The telephone? Famously. Like
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: literally people racing to the patent office to get the
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: first patent. I mean, even calculus. Calculus, right? Leibniz and Newton.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: And the reason, of course, for simultaneous invention is what
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: we talked about a little bit earlier. There is the need,
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: you know, technology has come up to a certain point
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: and people are using that as a launching pad for
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: something else. And so it is natural when people are
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: trying to solve the same problem, they know about the
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: same information out there in the world.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: They're going to come up with a new solution. And
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: yet that doesn't happen in this case, right? Like there
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: is demand for books. There is paper. And nobody else
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: in Europe does this. Like that seems pretty clear. And
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: so I was thinking, why is this? Too much plague.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Always a good answer for this era. I have an idea.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: And my idea is, you know, if you think about
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: these other periods we've talked about, the 1800s, certainly the 1900s,
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: even the 1700s, right? everybody's reading what everybody else is doing.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: There are journals and books. And, you know, in the 1800s,
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: there's a magazine printing all the new patents that Thomas
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: Edison is reading to keep up on things. What you
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: need for these things is a printing press. You need
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: a printing press to know what everybody else is working on.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: And so the reason, maybe, I'm making this up, that
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: Gutenberg is the only one to invent it is it
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: hasn't been invented yet. So not everybody knows everything all
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: the time the way we do once you have a
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: printing I.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: Think that's a great idea because what would it take
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: to spread this? You'd have to write letters to people.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: But even then, not everybody knew how to write.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: Letters do become a thing, right? And science letters are
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: a big deal. But the journal, you know, the printed
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: journal is a much more powerful tool than letters. It's
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: a thought. In any case, in any case, Gutenberg now
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: has his press. What does he print first? The Bible.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: Not the Bible. Okay. Too expensive, maybe, right? It's long.
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: The Bible is long. It has to start there, right?
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: You don't start with the Word of God. Cash flow
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: nightmare also, you know? Yes, and also high stakes. You
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: want to get it right. Yeah. So he starts with
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: things that are simpler, cheaper, shorter, a German poem, a
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: grammar textbook for Latin. And then, this is my favorite
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: sort of pre-Bible printing technique. work that Gutenberg does comes
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: around 1453, so not that long into this project, when
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: there is actually this world historical event that's going to
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: be good news for Gutenberg's printing business. And that is
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: the Sultan Mehmed II captures Constantinople. Big news. Big news
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: in the religious world. The Byzantine emperor is decapitated. Oh.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: And now the Catholic Church needs money to fight the sultan.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: How does the church raise money in 1453? Indulgences. Indulgences.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: They sell indulgences. And, you know, you know this from whatever,
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: from school, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you give money
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: to the church, they will remove the punishment that you
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: owe for your sins. They would also allow you to
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: get your relatives out of purgatory if they had died. Uh-huh.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: That makes sense. That's the punishment, I guess. Maybe a
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: little extra. Cost a little extra, but sure. What I
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: didn't realize until I was working on this show is
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: indulgences were physical things. There was an indulgence, which was
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: basically like a nice receipt. A nice receipt, often written
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: out on vellum, a fancy, like a very high-grade parchment
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: made from calfskin. And this fact, the receipt part of
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: the indulgence thing, becomes important when the sultan captures Constantinople
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: because the church suddenly needs to sell lots of indulgences,
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: but they have a labor problem. It's the problem we
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: were talking about before, right? There's just not enough scribes
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: to write out all the indulgences that you need to
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: sell right now. Plus so much sin. The demand was huge.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: The demand is huge. Who among us? And now here
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: comes Johannes Gutenberg with a solution to your problem. You know,
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: your grace, how many do you need? I'll just crank
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: them out for you.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: This was also a solution to Gutenberg's problem because he
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: had just enlisted the richest customer on planet Earth, or
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: one of them at least.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: Yes, yes. The Catholic Church. Definitely a good customer to have.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: And you know, on indulgence, I believe it's a single page, right?
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: So you said it once. Yes. And, you know, the
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: printing business, you want to make as many copies and
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: sell as many copies of each thing as you can.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: So it's generic. They don't have the different ones for
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: the different sins. I guess over time, there are different ones.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: But the basic thing is that there's a blank for
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: the name of the buyer. There's a blank for the
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: name of the buyer. And so. He cranks out all
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: these indulgences. White, the guy who wrote that book that
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: I mentioned, says they go out by the wagon load.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: The money, I guess, was supposed to go to defend Cyprus,
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: the island of Cyprus. But apparently none of it or
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: almost none of it ever got to Cyprus, got siphoned
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: off along the way. But whatever. That's not Gutenberg's problem.
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: Surely he got paid. Let's do the biggie. Let's do
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: the Bible. We'll do it after the break. Okay. Robert,
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: we're back from the break and it is October of 1454.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: We're in Frankfurt.
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: Frankfurt.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: At a diet.
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: A religious meeting of some sort. A meeting of the
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: Catholic Church. Not a conclave, but a diet, yeah.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: It's not as big as a conclave, I guess. And
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: we're with an Italian bishop named Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. Piccolomini
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: sees something that blows his mind. He sees some preliminary
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: pages from a printed Bible. From what's going to be
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: the Gutenberg Bible. And we know this because he wrote
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: a letter to a cardinal about it. He describes a
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: miraculous man who he encountered, who I hope was Gutenberg,
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: but it could have been somebody who worked with Gutenberg.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: We don't know. And he describes for the cardinal what
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: the pages of this Bible were like. Give it to us.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: He said they were exceedingly clean and correct in their
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: script and without error, which your grace could read effortlessly
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: even without glasses. That means something. I know. I appreciate that.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: Large print.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: I learned from numerous witnesses that 158 copies had been completed,
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: although some others say the number is 180. I shall
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: try if possible to buy a copy on your behalf
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: and have it brought here. But I fear it will
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: not be possible, both because of the distance and because
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: they say that ready buyers had all been found even
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: before the volumes had been finished.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: It's a hit. It's a hit. That seems promising, right?
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: It is wild to think of a guy seeing what's
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: going to be the Gutenberg Bible. Do I remember that
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: you went to see to see one at the New
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: York Public Library?
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, for Planet Money, I went to it was on
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: display in in they have a special display case for
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: these kind of things. There's also one at the Morgan Library,
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: I should say. JP Morgan bought one. No big surprise.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: And I recall it was much larger than. than I
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: thought it was going to be. It was probably the
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: largest Bible I'd ever seen. It looked like one of
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: those giant dictionaries that you have to put on a stand.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: And the other thing I remember about it is that
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: the margins were very wide. It was just, it was
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: these columns, these two columns, and the print was that old-fashioned.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: Sort of Gothic print. Yeah, Germany, very German-looking, yeah. It
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: was very... orderly, I will say, with these large margins,
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: these very straight columns, and this very dense writing. Was
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: there color in the part that you looked at?
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there were some color that clearly someone had filled
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: in or painted, right? Yeah, they actually left blank where
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: there would be a big colored first letter at the
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: start of a chapter or a paragraph or something. They
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: actually didn't print that on the press. They left it
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: to be hand inscribed. I wonder if the scribes were
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: afraid of the printing press and then saw that, in fact,
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: they could do their favorite part.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: You know, it's no fun to print every.
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: Little letter, but to make the giant G with the
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: flowers and the colors, they must have loved that.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: And now they could do 180 of them. Maybe. Maybe
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: Gutenberg was like, no, no, I'm not going to automate
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: your work out of existence. I'm just going to take
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: away the drudgery and leave you to do the creative
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: fun part. It's a compliment. Familiar. Yeah. So you've described
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: the book very well. It's 21 complete copies still in existence,
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: which is a very large percentage given how long ago
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: it was and how it just happened in Europe since then.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: It shows you how valuable they were. How valuable they
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: were and how special they must have seemed even then, right?
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: One fun business detail about the printing of the book itself,
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: it's referred to typically as the 42-line Gutenberg Bible because
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: there are 42 lines per page. And as you say,
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: it seems quite spacious and like not crammed in. The
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: first few pages, they were actually doing 40 lines a page.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: And so presumably they must have figured out like, oh,
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: we could do two more lines per page. And that
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: means less paper, less parchment.
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: That's just profit right there. By the time you get
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: to Revelations, it's tiny, tiny, tiny writing.
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: No, it isn't. So he's cranking them out. Gutenberg is
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: making the Gutenberg Bible. And There's this great detail. So
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: some of the Bibles were printed on parchment, some on paper.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: And there is a belief, a kind of a theory based,
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: I believe, on the different watermarks on the different pieces
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: of paper, which I love, like scholarly work like this.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: A belief that at some point Gutenberg might have had
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: six different presses going, just kind of a factory, right?
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: He's becoming a publisher, a printer. And then it feels
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: sudden looking back, but we don't know. Something goes wrong.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: There's a big problem that's going to happen right now.
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: And that is this. Johann Fust, the guy who put
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: up the money to get the project going. The investor.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: Decides he wants his money back. Hmm. We don't know why.
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: There was a fight, maybe. Maybe Fust needs the money
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: for something else. But we know that they wound up
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: in court on Thursday, November 6th, 1455. I love court documents.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: As a reporter, I've always loved them. I covered cops
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: in courts in Bozeman, Montana. Yeah. 20 many years ago
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: when I started out.
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: It's amazing because we wouldn't know anything about this, really.
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And there is this one document that describes this
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: whole thing in detail, written by one Ulrich Helmesperger, cleric
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: of the Diocese of Bamberg, notary public and lay judge
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: of the Holy Seat at Mainz by imperial authority, who
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: wrote out this beautiful detailed document that explains a lot
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: about the first printing press in Europe. The document is
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: called the Helmesberger Notarial Instrument. Notarial instrument is one beautiful
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: log word in German. And it lays this out kind
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: of as a story. And it starts with Fust's version.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: It's like a he said, he said. So Fust tells
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: a story like this. He says, I loaned Gutenberg 800
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: guilders at 6% interest. And by the way, I borrowed
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: that money from somebody else at interest. Oh, good job, Fust. Fust, right?
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: He's like a private credit, right? He's like, I don't know,
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: Apollo or something in the market today. And then, Fust says,
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: Gutenberg came back to me later and said, actually, I
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: need another 800 guilders. So I loaned him 800 more. Which, remember,
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: is a lot of money at the time. Yes, exactly. Yes.
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: And now Fust is saying, I want repayment of that
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: $ 1, 600 plus interest, which comes to over 2,000 guilders. And
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: as you pointed out, like 800 guilders was four houses.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: So 2,000 is a lot of houses. We don't know
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: why he's demanding the repayment, but it's happening. Gutenberg doesn't
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: show up at the hearing, weirdly. Don't know why, but
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: he wasn't there. But he sends a statement, which somebody
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: reads on his behalf. And Gutenberg disputes a lot of
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: what Futh says, unsurprisingly. It's why they're in court, I guess.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: He says, OK, yes, that first 800 guilders, that was
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: a loan. But even though the contract might say in
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: the fine print that it's 6% interest, we actually agreed
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: that I wasn't going to pay interest on that. Not
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: his strongest argument, not his strongest argument. Get it in writing, Gutenberg.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: Come on. The second part is more interesting. He says
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: the part of the money Fuss put up after that,
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: the other 800, that wasn't a loan. That was investment
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: as a partner to share in the profit or loss
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: of the business. In other words, Gutenberg is saying in
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: our language today, he wouldn't have said it this way,
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: that first 800 was debt, but the second 800 was equity.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: That's the, he said, he said. Then, kind of third
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: beat of the document, there is a sworn affidavit from Fust.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: Remember who was there in the room. In this part,
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: Fust actually seems to back off his original claim a little.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: You know, we don't know what was said in the room,
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: but it seems like in the course of the hearing,
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: maybe he reduced his claim. Because in this affidavit, he
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: basically says, okay, Gutenberg should go back through his accounts,
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: figure out how much of the money that I gave
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: him actually went into this printing business. And he should
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: pay me back with interest for whatever part of the
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: money did not go into the printing business. If he
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: took my money and spent it on something else, come on,
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: he's got to pay me back with interest for that. So, Robert, actually,
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: we have it in Foose words translated into English. Give
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: it to us. Oh, nice. On the borrowed money, which he, Gutenberg,
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: received and did not use for our common undertaking, I
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: demand from him the interest due under the terms of
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: the verdict. And the court basically seems to agree with this,
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: which I have to say seems reasonable, right? It does
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: seem like a very common sense thing. And the court
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: sends Gutenberg back to produce evidence on what he actually
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: spent on the project. I guess they're saying, like, show
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: us your books. And if, in fact, you took his money.
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: Books existed, yeah. The ledgers. Yes. Books existed. The Codex
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: is the book. And it is a useful technology, but
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: it's been around for a long time at this point. Otherwise,
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: you've got to use a scroll. Much less convenient. Let
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: me tell you from experience. It's a little bar mitzvah joke.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: I see. So the court says, Gutenberg, go back, look
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: at your records, pay him with interest for whatever you
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: didn't put into the project. And that's the end of
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: what we know from this document. It ends there. Which
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: is interesting given the myth that has arisen around this
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: part of the story. The myth is basically the evil
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: financier Fust drove the noble and brilliant inventor Gutenberg into bankruptcy.
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: Everybody will say they made him go bankrupt. Yeah, just
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: like people talk about private equity and private credit today. Yeah, fair, fair.
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: And yeah, maybe for similar reasons, right? Like it's a
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: classic villain. Financiers are classic villains. Now- There is no
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: evidence that Gutenberg went bankrupt. And in fact, he kept
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: printing things after this. My favorite is he printed a
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: wall calendar for doctors. Why do doctors need a wall calendar?
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you, in the 14-whatever, I think it was
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: 60s or so, mid-1400s, It tells you, based on astrology,
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: when is the best time to do your bloodletting for
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: the year. There were bad days and good days. There
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: were bad days and good days to drain the blood
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: of your patients to help them. I'm doing it to
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: help them. Of course, he prints some more. indulgences, always
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: a good business. He may have printed this giant Latin dictionary.
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: He definitely didn't print anything, as far as we know,
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: as beautiful as the Bible. Maybe because he didn't have
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: access to capital anymore. But he was still in the game.
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: But it is a little sad, right?
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: I mean, right away, the man who invents the most
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: amazing invention in Europe at the time is reduced to
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: you know, basically running a Kikos in Harrisburg, right? He's
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: doing calendars, he's doing flyers, this sort of thing. You
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: buy one, get one free. It doesn't seem as miraculous.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: It just seems like a little business he has. Yeah,
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: in a way, as a story, you want him to
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: either have wild success or crushing failure. Not personally, not
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: as a human being, but just for narrative purposes, the
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: middle is unsatisfying. One thing that is true is is Fust,
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: the lender, I'm not going to call him a banker,
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: but the lender, the financier, seems to have surpassed Gutenberg
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: in the printing business.
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: Well, he's gotten some of the money back and he's
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: going to invest it in something else.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: And furthermore, and we know this again from like really
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: careful scholarship, I guess, we know that he got some
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: of the types, some of the metal letters that had
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: been in Gutenberg's shop. Because I guess, you know, you
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: can match the books that he printed with what Gutenberg
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: had printed before.
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: And some of the letters... are Gutenberg's letters. Because they
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: were sort of unique at the time. Yes, because they
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: were sort of unique at the time.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: That's right. And, you know, maybe, remember that loan was,
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: the original loan was collateralized by the apparatus, right? So
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: maybe these letters are him collecting on the debt. We
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: don't know. But that seems totally plausible to me. He
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: also hires a guy from a Gutenberg shop, this really
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: talented guy. I guess no non-competes then, which is good.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: It's good for The proliferation of technology. I suspect the
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: employee walked out with a few letters in his pocket. Right, right.
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: Is that an exclamation mark in your pocket? Are you
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: a tiny bit happy to see me? I don't know
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: if they had the exclamation mark then, actually. Go with
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: the joke. It's a good joke. So this worker's name
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: was Peter Schaefer, I believe it was pronounced. And Fust
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: and Schaefer did great. And maybe Fust was a better
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: businessman than Gutenberg. No idea. Don't know. They started out
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: with this beautiful Psalter, a book of Psalms, you know,
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: and they actually printed it in multiple colors, which must
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: have required, you know, you got to put the same
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: page through multiple times and get the alignment right, like
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: elegant technical work. And as a business move, they do
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: a really clever thing that Gutenberg didn't do. They put
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: their names in the book. just like publishers do today,
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: although at greater length. Robert, read to us what they
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: put in that book. The present book of the Psalms
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: has been fashioned by the artful invention of printing by
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: means of letter forms made without the driving of the pen.
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: And in praise of God, it has been brought faithfully
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: and industriously to completion by Johann Fust, citizen of Mainz,
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: and Peter Schaeffer of Gernsheim. In the year of the Lord, 1457.
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: It's early branding. They put their name on it. They
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: put their name on it. People are like, you know
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: what I need? I need a foost. We got to
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: get foost to do our next book. These guys do great.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: This book does great. Their business does great. They expand
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: to Paris, which is home of a big university, big
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: book town. They're printing broadsheets. Of course, they're printing indulgences.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: And they print Bibles. And their Bibles are clearly modeled
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: on the Gutenberg Bible. because the words are the same.
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: And you might say, of course, the words are the same.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: But in the era of the manuscript, right, something as
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: long as a Bible, manuscript meaning people are literally writing
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: out every book by hand, something as long as a Bible,
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: there's always going to be a few little errors, omissions.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: You leave out one word, whatever, change an and to
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: a but. And print changes that, right? Print, once you
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: set the press, every book that comes out of that
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: edition is the same. And that is actually a new
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: thing in the world. I mean, it becomes more like
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: the unerring word of God. Even though I know Gutenberg
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: put it together, it has that feel that this is
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: more than the work of man. This is something eternal.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: I like that. I believe that. So Fust and Schaeffer
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: are growing and printing itself is growing. People who worked
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: with Gutenberg and with Fuss and Schaeffer go to other towns,
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: set up their shops, and you just see this rapid
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: spread across Europe of printing presses. In other German cities,
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: but also in Rome and Venice and Paris and Basel
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: and small towns. It's just happening fast. So there is
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: the end of the Gutenberg story, of Gutenberg the man.
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: We know that in 1465, when he's around 65 years old,
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: the Archbishop of Mainz, gives him this, basically this high
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: status lifetime pension. And we have the formal announcement that
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: proclaimed it. Read us a little of that. From the Archbishop.
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: We will clothe him every year, always like our noble men,
• 38:04
  Speaker 2: and give him our court dress. Also, we grant him
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: 20 bushels of grain and two large barrels of wine
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: for the use of his house, free of duty upon
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: its arrival in mines, every year as long as he lives,
• 38:16
  Speaker 2: on condition that he will not sell it or give
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: it away, as has been promised in good faith by
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: Johann Gutenberg himself.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: Tax-free wine. Tax-free wine. That is the happy ending, I guess,
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: that we were looking for in a way, right?
• 38:31
  Speaker 2: Well, that and, you know, schoolchildren don't learn about the
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: Fust printing press. Gutenberg's name, even if he didn't put
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: it on the book itself, is famous. He is one
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: of the greatest inventors of all time.
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: We've got one last idea I want to talk about
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: before the end of the show, which is really I
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: think the first moment when you see the printing press
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: transform society. We'll talk about that in just a minute. Robert,
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: this last idea, we're doing this kind of epilogue to
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: the show. It's about indulgences. Indulgences, of course, were one
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: of the first things Gutenberg printed, one of the first
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: things Fust and Schaeffer printed. And it's really remarkable when
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: you look at the spread of printing across Europe, you
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: see this boom in the indulgence business. Because, like, remember,
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: the church was constrained before by the actual labor of
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: the scribes to write out each receipt for each indulgence.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: But by 1500— You see a bishop in Sicily paying
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: a publisher to print 130,000 indulgences.
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: Do we know if sin went up? Did people like
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: cheat on their spouses more because there were just like
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: piles of indulgences?
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: I like that. Or if the price went down, right?
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: I don't know. You know, in a competitive market, the
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: price went down, but there was a monopoly. Around the
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: same time you see near Barcelona, a monastery commissions more
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: than 200,000 indulgences. The line is around the block. I
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: actually don't know if there was a monopoly. Maybe different
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: like local, you know, archbishops were competing. Good question. Don't know.
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: So the printing press itself is enabling this explosion in indulgences.
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: But a backlash is building. A backlash of people who
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: want reform. Who want to protest. In 1517... Martin Luther. Yes,
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: Martin Luther. That Martin Luther. Professor, priest in the German
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: town of Wittenberg. I guess it's Wittenberg in German. He
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: decides that the indulgence thing has gone too far. Like
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: it is. He sees it everywhere. It's all over the place. Yeah.
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: It's too much. And he writes this kind of academic
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: argument in Latin. Basically against indulgences, you know, famously his
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: 95 theses, which get posted on the church door. And
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: just post it. He hammered them to the church door. Well,
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: that's the myth. Again, that's the myth. Yes. I was
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: actually reading about that. I guess like the church door
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: was like the bulletin board and everybody posted everything there,
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: but whatever. It just sounds better. It does. So his
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: 95 theses, 95 propositions are largely an argument against indulgences.
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: And so I've grabbed a few here for you to read.
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: Give me a couple. All right.
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: We'll skip over some and go to number 32. Those
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: who believe that they can be certain of their salvation
• 41:40
  Speaker 2: because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned. together
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: with their teachers.
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: Serious? Okay, let's go to 36. Any truly repentant Christian
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt,
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: even without indulgence letters. Save your money, bro. He's coming
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: right at them. Yeah. So yeah, so this, of course, famously, right,
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: is the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. And it's happening,
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: like you could argue, it has been argued, it is
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: happening partly because the invention of the printing press led
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: to this proliferation of indulgences. And if you didn't know
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: what was going to happen next, you might think this
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: would be bad for business for the printers. But no,
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: because first of all, the 95 theses are suddenly reprinted everywhere.
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: Everybody loves a list. This is a very interesting idea.
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: It's very much of the moment. Number 36 will shock you.
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: And really interestingly, in the next few years after this,
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: Luther starts writing a lot, not just in Latin for
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: this kind of academic and and a religious audience or
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: priestly audience. But he's writing also in German for a
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: much more popular audience. And in fact, the public goes
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: wild for his work. And it becomes almost like news.
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: Like he writes these short sermons that are just a
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: few pages long and he'll take them to the printer
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: and they'll be out on the streets in a few days.
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: Like it's very dynamic and it's enabled by the printing press.
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: When he's getting going, there's just one printer in Wittenberg.
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: It's a small town. And it's amazing the way Luther
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: keeps complaining about the printer to his friends. At one
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: point he writes, you would not believe how I regret
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: and how I am disgusted by his work. Writers love
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: complaining about their publishers. It's too sloppy. He's not promoting
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: my stuff. It's too sloppy. It's too sloppy. He wasn't complaining.
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: Nobody's complained about the marketing department yet. So he actually
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: invites another printer to come and set up shop in town.
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: And soon, because Luther is this kind of proto bestselling author,
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: there is this little industry of print shops in this
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: small town so they can just get Luther's stuff out fast.
• 43:50
  Speaker 2: This is like the invention of the media. There's a
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: whole ecosystem developing. People want the newest stuff now. You know,
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: it's a clear line from here all the way to TikTok.
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: So there is now this print industry, this media industry,
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: you could say, if you want to be a little anachronistic,
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: in Wittenberg. And over the course of Luther's lifetime, it
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: just proliferates. Like he translates the Bible into German, which is,
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: of course, a big deal historically. In his lifetime, these
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: local printers print over 100,000 copies of this German translation
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: of the Bible. And in his lifetime, you know, more
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: broadly in the German-speaking world, printing is proliferating. And something
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: like six or seven million evangelical pamphlets are printed in
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: German throughout the region. It's amazing because it's not just German.
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: a product. Gutenberg didn't invent something that just fulfilled one need.
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: It created a million needs. The moment the printing press
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: is there, you don't just want to print one thing,
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: the Bible. You want to print arguments about the Bible
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: and arguments back and competing views of this. And it
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: changes the dynamics of like, well, now you can have
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: more indulgences. Now one random priest can have an audience
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: of millions in a way that is almost unimaginable without
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: the printing press. And if you didn't know how to read.
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: you would have incentive to learn how to read in
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: order to read these things, which creates more demand.
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: Yes. So maybe one idea to land on is like
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: a new technology is a new tool. And what nobody
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: ever knows is how are people going to use that tool?
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: These guys, Gutenberg thought they were just making a cheaper,
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: more efficient way to make Bibles. They didn't know what
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: else you could print beyond this. And then it goes
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: beyond religion. It changes politics, war, philosophy, science, everything. I
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: want to say, as we roll into the credits today,
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: I want to say thank you to the listener who
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: wrote to us to say that whenever he tells his
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: friends about our show, they say, that doesn't sound like you.
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: But it is a nice thought to tell your friends
• 45:57
  Speaker 2: about the show. And we encourage all of our listeners
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: to at least bring someone along.
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: Truly, I'm very grateful to anyone involved. who recommends the
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: show to a friend. If you write to us and
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: tell us that you told a friend, I will personally
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: write back to you and thank you for whatever that's worth.
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: We're at businesshistoryatpushkin.fm. Our show today was produced by Gabriel
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: Hunter Chang, was engineered by Sarah Bruguier. Our video editor
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: is Matt Nielsen. Our showrunner and editor is Ryan Dilley.
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein. And I'm Robert Smith. This is Business History.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.