The "Did You Ever Hear Of A Gentleman Named Johannes Gutenberg?" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Recently found a notebook that I had used for years while teaching Industrial Arts at Manheim Township High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvnia.  One of the very first lessons that I taught to my Graphic Arts classes was about the invention of movable type which was used to set individual letters which in turn could be placed in a press to be printed, first by hand and later by a printing press.  Easy teaching a lesson such as this since it shows the students that the end result of this lesson is a page of printed type they could eventually read.  And...this all began in 1445 when a gentleman by the name of Johannes Gutenberg invented wooden movable type which were individual letters that could be moved around in a printing press to change what words were transferred to a piece of hand-made paper.  Empowered by this revolutionary technology, Mr. Gutenberg printed the very first book ever published... the Bible!  Before the printing press, monks painstakingly hand-copied every edition of the Bible, often taking years or more to complete the task.  Now, Gutenberg could produce 180 copies of the Bible in the same amount of time.  And, if that wasn't impressive, after Arabic movable type was produced, the first print edition of the Quran rolled off the presses in Venice, Italy, and was exported to the Ottoman Empire in 1538.  By the early 1800s, Hindu scripts were likewise being mass-produced.  As religions the world over embraced Gutenberg's invention, sacred books became more available, and less expensive, than ever before.  For centuries, religious texts were often the only books in a household.   Children learned to read by tracing their fingers down the pages, and in the evenings families would convene to hear stories of faith, love and devotion.  Collected here from a variety of religious texts are words of deep wisdom from cultures around the world, made ubiquitously available online through technology that Gutenberg never could have dreamed possible.  But, without the knowledge and intuition of Mr. Gutenberg, what you are now reading on this page right now might never had been invented.  Might be hard to believe, but who knows?  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.