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Around 1455 in Mainz, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg's workshop finished printing a Latin Bible with movable metal type: single letters cast in metal that could be arranged into pages, printed and reused. It was Europe's first major printed book, and within 50 years presses were at work across the continent.

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Printing of the Bible began around 1452. It was a huge undertaking: each copy ran to nearly 1,300 pages, usually bound in two large volumes, and between 160 and 185 copies were printed. At least some sold for 30 florins, about three years' wages for a clerk. Gutenberg had borrowed 1,600 guilders for his press and the Bible from Johann Fust, a wealthy Mainz financier. In 1455 Fust took him to court to recover the money; the ruling apparently went Fust's way, and he took over the Bible workshop, leaving Gutenberg in heavy debt. Fust and his partner Peter Schöffer carried on printing, and their Mainz Psalter of 1457 was the first book to give its printers' names and a printed date. It did not mention Gutenberg. No complete Gutenberg Bible has been sold since 1978, when one fetched 2.2 million dollars.

Türkçe oku
Johannes Gutenberg'in Almanya'nın Mainz kentindeki atölyesi, 1455 dolaylarında Latince bir Kutsal Kitap basmayı tamamladı. Harfler metalden tek tek dökülmüştü; dizilip sayfa yapılıyor, basıldıktan sonra sökülüp yeniden kullanılıyordu. Avrupa'da basılan ilk büyük kitap buydu ve elli yıl içinde matbaalar bütün kıtaya yayıldı.

Bugün Gutenberg İncili diye bilinen bu Kutsal Kitap'ın baskısına 1452 dolaylarında başlandı. Büyük bir işti: Her nüsha 1.300'e yakın sayfa tutuyor, genellikle iki büyük cilt hâlinde bağlanıyordu; toplam 160 ile 185 arasında nüsha basıldı. Bazı nüshaların 30 florine, yani bir kâtibin üç yıllık kazancına satıldığı biliniyor. Gutenberg, matbaası ve bu kitap için Mainzlı zengin sarraf Johann Fust'tan 1.600 gulden borç almıştı. Fust 1455'te parasını geri almak için mahkemeye başvurdu. Karar anlaşılan Fust'un lehine çıktı; Kutsal Kitap atölyesini o devraldı, Gutenberg ise ağır bir borcun altında kaldı. Fust ile ortağı Peter Schöffer baskıyı sürdürdü. 1457'de bastıkları Mainz Mezmurlar Kitabı, basımcılarının adını ve basılı bir tarihi taşıyan ilk kitap oldu; Gutenberg'in adı ise kitapta geçmiyordu. Eksiksiz bir Gutenberg İncili en son 1978'de 2,2 milyon dolara satıldı.

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WonderHistory

When Neil Armstrong radioed “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” on 20 July 1969, his words reached Earth about 1.3 seconds later. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, and the Moon is about 384,000 km (239,000 miles) away.

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The Apollo Guidance Computer that steered astronauts to the Moon had about 4 kilobytes of rewritable memory and 72 kilobytes of permanent memory. Its programs were woven by hand into “rope memory”: a wire threaded through a tiny magnetic ring stored a 1, and a wire passing it by stored a 0.

Designed at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and built by Raytheon, the computer was one of the first to use silicon chips (integrated circuits) and fitted into about 28 litres. Its memory was counted in “words” of 16 bits, or binary digits: 2,048 rewritable and 36,864 permanent. During Apollo 11's descent on 20 July 1969 it flashed 1202 and 1201 alarms: a radar left on in case the landing had to be abandoned was stealing processing time and overloading it. Its operating system, designed by J. Halcombe Laning, dropped less urgent jobs and restarted in a moment while the landing programs kept running, so Mission Control told the crew to carry on. The flight software was written by a team led by Margaret Hamilton, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. Its power was similar to that of the first home computers of the late 1970s.

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The Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek geared device probably made in the 2nd century BC, had a spiral dial covering 223 lunar months for predicting eclipses. Symbols on the dial marked the months when an eclipse of the Sun or Moon was expected, and inscriptions gave details such as the hour.

Sponge divers found the mechanism in 1901, a corroded lump among treasures from a Roman-era ship that sank off the Greek island of Antikythera around 70 to 60 BC. Its hand-turned bronze gears modelled the movements of the Sun and Moon, and it is called the oldest known analogue computer, a machine that calculates with moving parts rather than digits. The eclipse dial follows the Saros cycle: after 223 lunar months (new moon to new moon), about 18 years and 11 days, the Sun, Earth and Moon return to almost the same positions, so eclipses repeat in a similar pattern. Symbols in 51 of the dial's cells mark 38 lunar and 27 solar eclipses. Much of this was read only in the 2000s, when researchers including Mike Edmunds and Tony Freeth used X-ray scans to see inside the fragments. The front, which probably showed the planets, is largely lost.

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The idea had roots in the Tang dynasty (618–907): by 804, merchants were using “flying cash”, paper certificates that let them move money across China without carrying coins. In Sichuan, where iron coins were too heavy for large payments, private firms in the regional capital, Chengdu, began issuing jiaozi notes. When some issuers went bankrupt, the state set up its own office in 1023 and printed the first government notes the following year. Paper money rested on trust: a note was worth only what its issuer promised. That trust could be abused, and when the Song printed far more notes than they could back with coins, prices soared. Europeans learnt of paper money from travellers such as Marco Polo, who described the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan's notes in the 13th century. Europe's first banknotes came from Stockholms Banco in 1661; the bank failed six years later.

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