The invention of the printing press and moveable type set in motion events that changed the world.  The printing book became a means of political revolution -- necessary technology for the spread of non-Latin texts and for the democratic revolutions of the 18^th century.  Key dates:

1456:  The first type-printed book, the Gutenberg Bible, is printed by Johann Gutenberg.  Books no longer have to be written by hand.
	1475:  Pope Sixtus IV opens the Vatican Library to house the new flow of books.
By 1500:  Printing presses appear throughout Europe.  More than 10 million copies of 25,000 books exist.
	About 1500:  As demand grows, a book trade flourishes and related industries, such as papermaking, thrive.  Learning and literacy take off.  Printing becomes the cheapest of universities, open to all, and is a powerful stimulus for great numbers of people to learn to read.
1509:  Erasumus, who calls printing the greatest of all discoveries, publishes The Praise of Folly, which satirizes all institutions, including the church.  A way to print music is invented, making it available at a reasonable cost.
	1517:  Martin Luther posts his Ninety-Five Theses and in 1534 publishes his translation of the Bible.  Printing has ended the Church’s monopoly on learning, and the Protestant Reformation is in motion.  Luther’s message:  People who can read the Bible don’t need a priest.  Thinking independently from the church about faith leads to independent thinking about politics, science and art.
	By 1700:  Ideas can be immediately communicated to large numbers through pamphleteering.  Serial newspapers, born in the 1620s, proliferate around the early 1650s.  News sheets abound in England, Germany and Holland.
1700s:  The sharing of Humanism leads to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, spurring the American and French revolutions and the rise of democracy and nationalism.  Printing Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) and The Federalist Papers (1787 - 88) foment revolts against the old order.
	1800s:  Mass-produced books and novels are widely available to the growing middle class.  The novel, a major art form of modern Europe, evolves from the printing press.
1900s:  The printing process, the first uniformly repeatable commodity, is the archetype and prototype for Henry Ford’s moving assembly line in 1913.  This allows large-scale manufacturing of the Model T.