A FaustianPact

Around 1400, much of the world was just recovering from its greatest ever disaster. The Black Death, a pandemic of bubonic plague, had wiped out somewhere between a third and three-fifths of the entire population of Europe and Western Asia. More than 100 million people are estimated to have died, out of a population of perhaps 450 million.

Those who survived were left to wonder why such a catastrophe had befallen them. This was an age with no concept of germ theory, and no understanding of such vectors of disease as fleas and rats. When things went wrong, people were likely to see the wrath of God as the primary agency of their misfortune. And the wrath of God could be actuated by nothing but their own wickedness.

Once it became apparent that the pestilence had begun to clear, hundreds of thousands of survivors made it their mission to supplicate the angry creator in the best way available to them. They would go on a pilgrimage, a journey to visit and pay homage to the great holy shrines of Christendom. There they could grovel, apologize, praise, beg, and beseech God, Mary, Jesus, and the saints, in the hope that no more cataclysms would be visited upon them, and that their place in heaven would be assured.

It took effort, pain, sacrifice, danger, and a great deal of time. God, it was understood, was always pleased by demonstrations of suffering of this kind.

For those who could pay, there was a way to skip the suffering and go straight to a state of grace. It was called an indulgence. Kindly monks in their scriptoria wrote these out on parchment, and they were sold, through the grace of His Holiness the Pope in Rome, to anyone who could afford them.

An indulgence was essentially a moral blank check, forgiving sins for the living, or shortening the periods of purgatory for the souls of the dead. It was a kind of sin-offset voucher, guaranteeing the rich full absolution up to and including the value of their voucher, until the expiry date marked on the document. The longer the period of grace, the more expensive the paper. Some indulgences were issued with expiry dates of 20,000 years, and in a few recorded cases 45,000, leaving the lucky owner with a whole world of sin still to indulge in.

This trade provided a fine income stream for the Church. And the terrifying power of God and his plague could only be interpreted by priests, who were, after all, just about the only people, aside from lawyers, their clerks, and some of the aristocracy, who could read. Unambiguous interpretations thundered from the pulpits. Mankind had fallen short of God's requirements, and must pay, in money and in penance, to the Church.

So popular were these routes that by the time a tired pilgrim finally arrived at his shrine, there was almost no chance of getting to see so much as a sliver of the holy bones. Every reliquary on the pilgrimage roads was overcrowded with the desperate. Once a day, the bishop would stand at the crossing before the altar and present the relic. Only the lucky few who pressed forward, or who had paid to get to the front, would have their souls replenished by a sight of the wonder. For everyone at the back, the journey ended in a blocked view. It was, you might say, a problem waiting for an entrepreneur.

Even in hierarchical and mostly immobile Europe, there was space for bold entrepreneurs. One such was a silver and goldsmith from the Rhineland town of Mainz, an inventor and serial entrepreneur named Johannes Gensfleisch, which means gooseflesh. He was born, Fry tells us, the same year that Chaucer died: 1400.

Aged thirty or so, Gensfleisch had an idea. With some friends, he would make charming and magical mirrors and sell them to pilgrims. They were, he promised, a technological marvel. And they answered the very problem we left at the back of that overcrowded church.

His plan was to corner the market in pilgrims heading for Aachen, famed for its relics, undercutting the competition by using his metallurgical skills to press out the convex mirrors on the same kind of machines that were springing up to make lenses. And then, fortunately, the enterprise failed. Another round of plague hit Aachen. His investors left him. The business collapsed.

Fry calls it a fortunate failure, because it pushed Gensfleisch on to a second invention, one that would also, in the end, fail to make him rich, but would make his name for all time. Sensing that his next project deserved a more dignified label than gooseflesh (and, perhaps, that creditors were on his trail), he dropped Gensfleisch and took the name of his family's house in Mainz. From now on, he was Johannes Gutenberg.

Faust advanced Gutenberg 800 guilders. By the reckoning of one currency historian Fry consults, that is just about 100,000 euros in today's money. It was the seed round for the most consequential startup in history. Now the technology itself had to be invented, almost from nothing.

The world had long known a way of reproducing writing: carve a page of text and illustration into a block of wood, cutting away everything that was not text, so that what remained stood proud, like a potato print. Ink it, press it to paper, repeat. Fine, as far as it went. But to carve the entire Bible, in perfect mirror-writing, one block of wood for every page, was no use at all. Gutenberg would die of old age before he reached the middle of the Old Testament. What was needed was something else.

Movable type was not, in fact, new. Porcelain movable type had been developed in China in the eleventh century, and a technology using movable metal type appeared in Korea in the mid-fourteenth. Whether news of these superior Far Eastern methods actually reached European ears, carried by traders and missionaries, is, Fry is careful to say, likely, probable even, but of course unprovable.

What no one had yet done was make movable type pay, at scale, for the alphabet of a European language, with a metal hard enough to survive thousands of impressions and a system precise enough to set a page that could rival the monks. That was the problem Gutenberg now bent his goldsmith's mind to. It would take him the rest of his working life.

Gutenberg's first great innovation was to use his expertise as a metalworker to make accurate, durable, almost infinitely reproducible characters. He would carve a master letter, an E, say, in hard steel. This punch he pressed into a softer metal to leave a clean impression, a female mold, or matrix. Molten metal was poured into the mold, where it cooled and hardened, a process known as casting. A whole family of one design, cast in his foundry, and typecasting was born.

The individual letters were known as sorts, which is why, when you ran low on a character, you were said to be out of sorts. Capitals lived in the upper cases, minuscule in the lower, and the names stuck. Historians reckon Gutenberg needed some 290 separate boxes for his battery of capitals and minuscule, his vowels and consonants, his commas, ligatures, and accents. The compositor then set each line back to front, right to left, working from a handwritten master and justifying both margins with tiny spaces, so that no unsightly rivers of white ran down the page. Master compositors, Fry says, soon learned to read backwards faster than the right way round. The finished block, locked tight, was called a forme.

He hired a carpenter, Conrad Saspach, to build a press to his specifications. Picture a fine wooden structure as tall as a person, a central threaded spindle with a flat board, the platen, at its lower end, and a lever, the bar, attached to turn it. Printers, who love a nickname, called that bar the Devil's Tail. Walk it one way and the platen descends. Walk it back and it rises.

The forme of type, locked in its frame, was set into a stone bed called the coffin. Water-based ink would run and blot, so Gutenberg developed his own oil-based ink, a kind of black varnish that held its shine and its sharp definition: another crucial step in his cascade of innovations. The ink was dabbed on with a leather ball of dog skin stuffed with wool, dog skin being preferred because dogs do not sweat, and their hides are therefore impermeable. The damp paper, which takes a cleaner bite of the ink, was clipped into a frame called the frisket and covered with a stretched cloth, the tympan. Then the carriage was wound in under the platen on a windlass, and the printer walked the Devil's Tail round to press.

Precision was all. Apply the ink unevenly and the page came out blotchy. Lay the paper a fraction askew and the human eye caught the lines running off true. The slightest error was fatal, and the expense was real: paper was made slowly by hand, and vellum, the treated skin of calves, was costlier still.

Fry has felt the thrill himself. He took part in building a working replica of Gutenberg's first press, and made a film about it. To lift a perfectly printed page, on paper he had helped to make in a mill in Basel, carrying on one of its lines an E that he had carved and cast with his own hands, gave him, he says, goose pimples, goosebumps, gooseflesh. When the platen first came down squarely on the face of the forme, Gutenberg had fulfilled a promise made some seventeen centuries earlier. The man who leaped from his bath crying Eureka, who built the screw pump that the spindle echoed, and who first grasped the terrifying power of exponential numbers, would have danced a jig at the sight of that first page, and at the explosion of copies it promised.

So, after much trial and error, it all came together. Thanks to movable type and the casting of thousands of letters, thanks to his oil-based ink, thanks to a carefully orchestrated series of calibrated maneuvers, Gutenberg could print a hundred page ones, a hundred page twos, and so on, until he had a hundred identical copies of a book. He had a workflow, a rhythm. The aim, all along, was to produce a Bible, the great proof of concept. But the major proof needed minor ones first.

The first pages to come hot off the Gutenberg press were not the leaves of a book at all. They were indulgences. And the Church could not believe its luck. What had taken a scriptorium full of monks and novices months to produce could now be knocked off in an afternoon. It was, Fry says, the first license to print money.

The pleasure this gave the Church bought Gutenberg permission to print his Bible, a thing never heard of before. The Old Testament had first been written in Hebrew and Aramaic, the New Testament in Greek. A thousand years earlier, Saint Jerome had translated both into Latin, a version known as the Vulgate, and it was this that Gutenberg and Faust settled on. But the longer he took to perfect every step, from casting to binding, the harder it became to service his debts. He pleaded for extensions. He brought in new partners who put up cash for slices of his future profits. You know how it works.

Having brought the technology to a workable, consistent pitch, Gutenberg lost all rights to the profits it would ever make. Faust, and the Mephistophelian Schöffer, who had sided with him, now owned the whole shebang. Gutenberg worked for them. And yet, lit by the internal fire that burns in many a passionate inventor, granting creativity but little sense for business, he had a nose for his real gold. After the indulgence run came clean copies of his two-column, 42-line Bible. Somewhere between 160 and 180 were issued, mostly on paper, some on sumptuous vellum. By the mid-1450s, a churchman who would soon become Pope Pius II had seen enough to write a letter of wonder to one of his cardinals.

Here is the irony at the heart of the story. The Church embraced the press because it saw a machine for tightening its grip: money from indulgences, and authorized, error-free copies of the Vulgate sent out across Christendom to strengthen its stranglehold on the Word. When did it first cross His Holiness's mind that others might use this technology too? That in a world without effective patents, printing would spread and spread?

From just 180 printed books in the world in 1456, there would be millions by 1500. And as soon as 1517, a monk named Martin Luther would protest precisely against the sale of indulgences and other corruptions, and found his Protestant religion. The very technology meant to tighten the grip of the Mother Church fatally loosened it.

It is tempting, but too simple, to draw a straight bright line from printing to the Renaissance to science to the Enlightenment to democracy. The Church soon regrouped and launched its Counter-Reformation using the very same presses. The Vulgate became the sole authorized Bible, and those who tried to print other versions, especially in their own languages, were exiled, executed, or tortured, from the press to the rack. All kinds of bad actors saw the opportunity, and the results could be burnings, massacres, and wars.

For the technology itself is neutral. It has no moral valency, no inner directive to act for good or ill. An indulgence could be printed, and so could a broadside attacking the corruption of indulgences. The Declaration of Independence, or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The sonnets of Shakespeare, or the thoughts of Chairman Mao. Recipes for cake, or recipes for bombs. All of it familiar to us, who have watched the utopian promises of the internet curdle in just the same way. The letters in their boxes could seem, Fry says, like the evil spirits that flew out of Pandora's box.

This, in the end, is the work of the whole series: to come to terms with the inevitability of change. Not to bemoan it, nor to over-praise it, but to know as much as we can about the transformative nature of our leaps, and to understand them. For the changes now coming, Fry warns, will dwarf the information revolutions we already know. It has never been more important to be armed with knowledge of our past, in order to face our future with anything like confidence.

Look at the development of printing, and you can recognize the movers and shakers of our own digital age. Steve Jobs went almost ludicrously out of his way to put real typography into the first Mac, insisting on proportional fonts when screens were black and letters glowed in crude neon. His obsession with design pushed up prices and, in time, cost him control of his own company, just like Gutenberg before him. And like Gutenberg, he had hardly invented a single thing from scratch.

Gutenberg is a hero to Fry. Not his financier, Faust, for who ever remembers a financier, nor the treacherous collaborators who took over and profited from his perfectionism. Gutenberg could not have guessed how education, science, knowledge, creativity, and politics, all of human life, would be changed utterly by his conjoining of oil-based ink, lead-tin-and-antimony letters, and the turning of a lever on a repurposed wine press. But his statues stand, his squares are named for him, and his fame endures. He remains, Fry says, one of the greatest heroes human history has brought forth.