The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

A jump to universality that played an important role in the early history of the Enlightenment was the invention of movable-type printing. Movable type consisted of individual pieces of metal, each embossed with one letter of the alphabet. Earlier forms of printing had merely streamlined writing in the same way that Roman numerals streamlined tallying: each page was engraved on a printing plate and thus all the symbols on it could be copied in a single action. But, given a supply of movable type with several instances of each letter, one does no further metalwork. One merely arranges the type into words and sentences. One does not have to know, in order to manufacture type, what the documents that it will eventually print are going to say: it is universal. Even so, movable type did not make much difference when it was invented in China in the eleventh century, perhaps because of the usual lack of interest in universality, or perhaps because the Chinese writing system used thousands of pictograms, which diminished the immediate advantages of a universal printing system. But when it was reinvented by the printer Johannes Gutenberg in Europe in the fifteenth century, using alphabetic type, it initiated an avalanche of further progress.