Johannes Gutenberg

Gutenberg was the goldsmith who turned a wine press into a revolution, creating the movable type that would eventually shatter the monopoly of the elite over the written word. He spent his life in a desperate struggle against debt and lawsuits, yet he managed to produce a Bible so beautiful it proved that the machine could rival the hand of the monk. Before him, a book was a treasure for a king; after him, it was a seed for a commoner’s mind. He is the father of the modern individual, the man who unleashed the Reformation and the Renaissance through the simple, repetitive clatter of lead letters hitting paper.