The “Man of the Millennium” is dead

Johannes Gutenberg dies in Mainz

Born in Mainz around 1400, Johannes Gutenberg founded a printing workshop in his hometown in 1450, where he pioneered the use of movable metal type letter printing. This method involved assembling individual characters or letters to form a text, which was then covered with ink and applied to a piece of paper in a press to produce a notice, flyer, book or other form of publication.

Producing texts much faster than individual scribes could hand-copy them, Gutenberg’s invention constituted a media revolution. Information and opinions could now be disseminated far more quickly and easily than ever before. The effects were far-reaching and neither the Reformation nor the Renaissance would have been conceivable without it. Indeed, Gutenberg can be credited with having contributed to the dawn of modernity.
At the end of the 1990s, the US media named letterpress printing the most important invention of the second millennium and Gutenberg – whose date of death is often given as 3 February 1468 (although this is doubtful) – as the “Man of the Millennium”.