The Most Amazing Thing You’ve Ever Seen

Imagine you go to a convention, and one of the booths has a larger-than-average crowd around it. You approach to see the presenter holding something up above his head. You can’t quite make out everything he’s saying but you pick up broken phrases. Some sort of new invention. He yells something about the world never being the same again.

There are several of these things on the table in front of the man and a second man approaches and similarly hoists one of the copies. Both men open the supposedly world-changing technologies. They don’t look world-changing to you. Not yet at least. It takes a minute for you to register what you’re seeing as they start turning the flaps of both objects in unison. It begins to dawn on you that the two are exactly the same. The first man picks up another one of the 50 copies he has on the table and repeats the process. Again and again they do this, until you can no longer write this off as the work of a very detailed and exacting hand.

The crowd pushes forward. The air is electric. Everyone is straining to get a closer look, because you are seeing, for the first time in human history, two separate, completely identical documents of text.

The year is 1455, and you are witnessing the birth of the printing press at the Frankfurt Trade Fair. (Historical accounts suggest that the Gutenberg Bible was indeed displayed or distributed at trade fairs like Frankfurt as early as 1455, though the exact debut is not definitively recorded.)

The books are pages from the Gutenberg Bible. This invention is about to send shockwaves through the world, the speed and magnitude of which have never before been seen.

Books existed, yes. But not like we know them now. (For historical context, see Febvre and Martin’s “The Coming of the Book” or Elizabeth Eisenstein’s “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change,” which both explore the rarity and labor involved in pre-Gutenberg manuscript culture.)

Every copy was written by hand. If you wanted to own one, you needed money, patience, and luck. If you wanted to make one, you needed silence, candlelight, a full year, and the steady hand of a trained scribe (also tons of money). Even then, no two copies were ever the same. Mistakes happened. Margins changed. Spacing wobbled.

And so people lived in a world without certainty. A world where ideas drifted, alive, but unstable.

The Bible existed, but only in Latin. And only in churches, monasteries, or the homes of the wealthy.

Most people would live and die without ever holding one.

That was the world Gutenberg was born into.

He grew up in Mainz, a city in what is now western Germany, part of a region historically known as the Rhineland. It was politically aligned with the Church and the old order. But when he left for Strasbourg (a 2-hour drive today), things changed. Strasbourg was a more modern city. It was entrepreneurial; closer to what we’d now call Silicon Valley, full of craftsmen, inventors, and forward-thinkers trying to solve real problems.

The biggest one? Information.

There were people who believed the world needed printed text. There were even other printing presses in existence but none with moveable type like the one Gutenberg would invent.

But it wasn’t just an idea. The technical hurdles were enormous.

The first things he printed were indulgences for the Church. These were paper slips people could buy to offset their sins. Not necessarily out of devotion but because he needed to gain favor and legitimacy, and hopefully funding.

At the same time, the plague returned. One of Gutenberg’s early financial backers, Johann Zum Jungen, is believed to have died during this outbreak. (See Man, John. “Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words” for reference.) But he pushed forward. Eventually, he gained the support of Johann Fust, a wealthy businessman who gave him the funds he needed. This decision would cost him later (Fust would later sue him when the press ran behind schedule and ultimately took over the operation, including all of his printing materials and the rights to the profits). But it was the deal that made the press possible.

Then came the real work.

He needed paper. Originally, he wanted to print every page on vellum, a luxury material made from calfskin. But to print one Bible would require the hides of thousands of animals. That wasn’t sustainable. Just in time, paper production which was borrowed from Chinese and Islamic technologies, had scaled up in Europe. Water-powered paper mills were springing up in places like Italy and France. (According to historical records, the first paper mill in Italy was established around 1276 in Fabriano, and by the 14th and 15th centuries, paper mills had spread across Europe, enabling the increased availability of affordable writing material.) For the first time, cheap, usable material was available in bulk.

The type was another problem. It had to be cast from metal soft enough to mold, but strong enough to endure repeated pressure. The winning combination Gutenberg used was a combination of lead, tin, and antimony.

And each character, more than 240 of them, had to be hand-punched, shaped, and aligned. A single year might go into the creation of the pieces alone.

But slowly, the pieces came together.

And when they did, the output wasn’t just functional. It was beautiful. They even hired artists to hand-decorate the copies.

This backdrop, into which the printing press smashed, like a wrecking ball was a Europe that was still recovering from the Black Death, the plague that had swept through only 50 years earlier, killing an estimated one out of every three people.

Literacy was maybe 5% of the population (Estimates vary, but historians generally agree that literacy in 15th-century Europe hovered between 5–10%, depending on region and class. See R.A. Houston, “Literacy in Early Modern Europe”.). If you were a peasant, your entire world was oral: sermons, rumors, stories handed down, names remembered by voice.

Now imagine a pandemic is coming, like COVID 19, but you have no idea.

There’s no Twitter or news station to get updates.

The plague likely began in Central Asia, spread through Silk Road routes, and reached Europe via merchant ships from the Black Sea into Italy around 1347. (See Benedictow, Ole J. “The Black Death 1346–1353: The Complete History” for an in-depth analysis of its origins and transmission.)

But if you lived in a small village in the Rhineland (as did Gutenberg), it could be months before you even heard a whisper of it.

Maybe a traveler passed through town and said there was death in Venice. Or a merchant mentioned the streets of Florence were quiet.

The news comes in bits and pieces,

But then it’s here. And there’s no understanding why, or how, or what to do.

That was the mental bandwidth of the world Gutenberg inherited.

Not just fear, but informational darkness.

It wasn’t just that people lacked books.

It was that they lacked a way to know what was true, and how fast the world could change.

Now imagine, almost overnight you throw something like the printing press into that world. No surprise that not everyone celebrated it.

The same invention that made the Bible accessible also made dissent harder to control.

Within decades of Gutenberg’s Bible, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, igniting the Protestant reformation. The printing press made sure it didn’t stay local. His ideas were copied, translated, and spread across Europe in weeks.

The result? Religious wars. Schisms. Upheaval.

The Catholic Church lost its monopoly on doctrine.

Some warned that too much reading would corrupt people’s minds. Others feared that false texts would circulate. Many saw the end of truth, the loss of control, the death of tradition.

Sound familiar?

Today, we hear the same warnings about AI. That it will end jobs. That it will flood the world with misinformation. That it will break what little trust remains in society.

In both cases, the underlying fear is the same: what happens when power over knowledge is no longer centralized?

Was the world better or worse after the press?

More violent, yes, for a time. More chaotic. But also more human, more connected, more free.

Today, the global literacy rate is over 85% globally. Up from the previously mentioned estimate of 5% in Gutenberg’s day. That type of increase represents centuries of compounding generational transformation.

Obviously it didn’t happen overnight.

After the release of the press you could probably live through the 1450s, 60s, 70s just fine without learning to read. But your children would feel differently about the world than you did. That was a novel phenomenon. Prior to the printing press most people’s lives probably very closely resembled the lives of their ancestors. Poor, powerless, uneducated farmers (sprinkled with war and disease) as far up the family tree as one cared to look.

We might be tempted to draw too similar a parallel to the disruption AI is already bringing. The difference now is we don’t have decades.

With AI, the adoption curve is near vertical. You don’t get to say, “I’ll let my kids learn it.”

You have to learn it, now, to understand what kind of world we’ll all be living in six months from now.

You can’t go back to school for four years to get a job that may not exist by the time you graduate (Or you can, and you’ll just have to accept an ever-unfolding list of modifications to the standard curriculum)

Continuous reinvention is the new survival skill.

But despite all the fear, I for one am excited to be alive and hopeful that humans will find a place in this new world (as we always have).

Now to (hopefully) end on a hopeful note: A few nights ago, I was reading with my five-year-old son.

Normally, we read picture books. But this time I pulled out an old favorite of mine, Thunder Cave by Roland Smith, a teen novel I loved reading growing up.

As I read, he kept asking me to describe what the characters looked like. He was building the world in his head.

At one point, he asked, “Is there a movie of this?”

I told him no. But I wished there was.

Then it hit me, someday soon there will be.

With new tools like Google Veo, we’re approaching a world where readers might be able to turn their favorite books into full movies… in an evening, bringing the pictures in their imagination to life.

Of course, I realize the copyright headaches that could create. But there’s hope in that too.

Every new technology brings new problems, as fast as it brings new possibilities.

And that means there will be a constant need for new thinkers, builders, and small businesses (probably run by continuously smaller and smaller groups of people as time ticks on) solving increasingly nuanced problems at speed.

The tools are here now. The speed is real. The only question is how well we’ll adapt.

The printing press once changed the world slowly.

This time, it’s happening fast.

And we won’t have the luxury of preparing our kids for a future we don’t understand.

We have to understand it ourselves.

Because now, the only way to stay ready is to stay in motion.