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so we know we've said this a lot lately but the printing press changed [the earth floating in space with a printing press]

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the world you know we know but here's how in ancient time the invention

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of written language spread around the world it also helped people pool their

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memories and knowledge for the first time

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[family gathering by a stream] sure reading and writing were complicated time consuming skills that

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only a select few people mastered and sure knowledge was limited to the

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educated upper classes and the technology to reproduce written text was

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painfully slow but hey we take what we can get around here shmoop

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[printing press in action] then a few thousand years later the printing press came along and changed

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the way writing was published and consumed it was suddenly easy and cheap

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to make hundreds of copies of a single book and any Tom Dick and Harry could

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purchase a book and educate himself the first step on the great road leaving the [a girl flicking through books]

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paperback romance novels on Walmart shelves was called movable-type when

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there's just a fancy historical term for stamps with letters on them before [fancy letter stamps]

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moveable type people in China had already started experimenting with

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woodblock printing under the Tang Dynasty and no they weren't also

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experimenting with powder that is wildly repugnant orange flavored drink with

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[woodblock hung on a stone wall] woodblock printings they had to intricately carve a specific message

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into a piece of wood and then cover it with ink like that

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nope it wasn't quick but it did allow people to copy the same message over and

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over and over again which turned out to be useful when running a massive [chinese words stamped on paper]

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governmental bureaucracy or if somebody's dog goes missing but true

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movable-type was different from this early method of woodblock printing it

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involves metal casts of individual characters that could be rearranged into [white liquid poured into a metal cast]

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endless different messages and then reused it was kind of like those

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refrigerator magnets which are so great for leaving roommates weird

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passive-aggressive messages like dirty pan smell of retribution first formal [a man scribbling on a chalkboard]

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official system of movable-type was invented around a thousand CE

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unsurprisingly it was invented in China somewhat surprisingly it wasn't invented

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by an aristocrat or even a member of the upper class instead it was brought to us [a chinese man on a vegetable patch]

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by a commoner named Bi Sheng over the next 300 years or so different moveable types

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of things emerged in East Asia all of them were time-consuming and required

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[a man carefully arranging symbols] careful labor but that might have been because most Asian languages had several

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thousand distinct characters rather than an alphabet Still China definitely

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did its share and get the communication revolution started and Bi Sheng gets [Chinese man receives applause]

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extra points for doing it while the average joe or whatever

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the average name is in China

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