It’s illustrative to take your constraint theory and apply it to the press itself. Pi Cheng’s press used porcelain type, which required skilled labor to manufacture and wore out quickly. Gutenberg’s innovation was to replace porcelain (or wood, which had been used in prototype printing presses in Europe) with lead. Building on this, Gutenberg invented an ingenious system of molds that allowed a single metalsmith to cast a large number of type blocks at once.
Gutenberg’s innovations (replacing porcelain with lead and his invention of a system to mass-produce type blocks) relaxed another constraint on the printing press: the availability of letters. These innovations were so successful, printing continued to use variations of lead type all the way into the early ’80s, when cast lead was finally replaced with electronic systems.
That’s true, but it’s not really the limiting factor. If you have lead type, you can make yourself a set of Chinese characters almost as easily as you can make yourself a set of Latin characters. The limiting factor is the fact that porcelain type was a lot less durable in a press and needed more time and skilled labor to make, whereas lead type can be made en-masse by metalsmiths.
Composing Chinese with moveable type is still slower, because you need at least a thousand, maybe several thousand, different characters. Just physically selecting them is time-consuming. Back in the days of mechanical typewriters, attempts were made to design typewriters for Chinese and Japanese, but using them was no faster than writing by hand. A skilled typist on an alphabetic typewriter can go much faster.
Composing is slower, true, but composing a page for a printing press isn’t really comparable to typing on a typewriter. The cost of composition on a press is amortized across hundreds or thousands of pages printed, which isn’t the case for typing. In fact, we know that composition was worth the cost because the Chinese and the Japanese eventually did adopt the Gutenberg-style printing press in the mid-to-late 1800s as they industrialized and opened up to Western technologies.
It’s illustrative to take your constraint theory and apply it to the press itself. Pi Cheng’s press used porcelain type, which required skilled labor to manufacture and wore out quickly. Gutenberg’s innovation was to replace porcelain (or wood, which had been used in prototype printing presses in Europe) with lead. Building on this, Gutenberg invented an ingenious system of molds that allowed a single metalsmith to cast a large number of type blocks at once.
Gutenberg’s innovations (replacing porcelain with lead and his invention of a system to mass-produce type blocks) relaxed another constraint on the printing press: the availability of letters. These innovations were so successful, printing continued to use variations of lead type all the way into the early ’80s, when cast lead was finally replaced with electronic systems.
It’s also worth noting that if you want to print a book in Chinese with a printing press, you’ll need a lot more than 26 typing blocks.
That’s true, but it’s not really the limiting factor. If you have lead type, you can make yourself a set of Chinese characters almost as easily as you can make yourself a set of Latin characters. The limiting factor is the fact that porcelain type was a lot less durable in a press and needed more time and skilled labor to make, whereas lead type can be made en-masse by metalsmiths.
Composing Chinese with moveable type is still slower, because you need at least a thousand, maybe several thousand, different characters. Just physically selecting them is time-consuming. Back in the days of mechanical typewriters, attempts were made to design typewriters for Chinese and Japanese, but using them was no faster than writing by hand. A skilled typist on an alphabetic typewriter can go much faster.
Composing is slower, true, but composing a page for a printing press isn’t really comparable to typing on a typewriter. The cost of composition on a press is amortized across hundreds or thousands of pages printed, which isn’t the case for typing. In fact, we know that composition was worth the cost because the Chinese and the Japanese eventually did adopt the Gutenberg-style printing press in the mid-to-late 1800s as they industrialized and opened up to Western technologies.