I don’t find it mysterious at all why wheels took “so long”. I’d expect the wheel to be conceptually discovered much earlier then it’s first usage, because to be actually useful in the real world a wheel requires roads or vast flat plains to outperform using a backpack, let alone simply loading the animal with sacks in case your civilization figured out animal husbandry of at least one animal useful for transporting.
Regarding printing
I was always a lot more surprised by how long the Gutenberg-type printing press (i.e. movable type press) took to invent and take off. According to wikipedia the earliest ones were invented around 1000-1200 B.C. in Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
Compared to other feats of engineering of the time you’d think arranging single letters on a slab and printing a few hundred pages rather than having monks do all the painstaking handwriting must have been an utterly obvious invention (though there may be a prestige factor in play here, since obviously handmade writing with illustrations is much more beautiful and would be preferred by people who could read, which were to a large extent also the people who’d be able to afford it in the first place).
However, upon looking into it, the invention of the “hand mould” and its manufacturing precision seemed to be of much importance for the technology to take off. Precise manufacturing of type seems to be of huge importance, because if some of your letters are just a tiny bit shorter or longer than the others it won’t work at all and you’ll get missing letters or otherwise low-quality print (e.g. if the letters are not at the same height). Since printing quality before Gutenberg was bad, people who could actually read presumably wouldn’t have wanted to waste their time with this low-status quality nonsense anyway. Unfortunately there is no wiki article in English, but check out these pictures to get an idea how the first hand moulds actually looked like: https://www.buch-kunst-papier.de/drucken/raritaeten/handgieinstrument.php
Basically people molded the type pieces directly in their hand inside a small device that could be separated into two halves. The type letter itself was stenciled into blocks of metal that would then fit inside the handheld mould device perfectly, achieving the needed standardized precision. Check out the pictures in this slider to get the idea: http://www.druckkunst-museum.de/de/schriftgiesserei.html
So it’s not that no one has conceived of it or tried it before, it’s just that the quality was too bad and no one figured out how to make perfectly standardized metal typesets. So Gutenbergs achievement wasn’t really so much the obvious basic idea of movable type, his real achievement was actually the invention of the hand mould, which is the much less obvious part of making the printing press actually work with enough efficiency to be worth the trouble.
Thus, they speculated that “the decisive factor for the birth of typography”, the use of reusable moulds for casting type, was a more progressive process than was previously thought.[32] They suggested that the additional step of using the punch to create a mould that could be reused many times was not taken until twenty years later, in the 1470s. Others have not accepted some or all of their suggestions, and have interpreted the evidence in other ways, and the truth of the matter remains uncertain.[33]
Gutenberg didn’t get rich through his Bible printing business. He didn’t make enough money with his printing business to pay his creditors and lost his business as a result.
For the printing press to be more economical than hand written books you actually have to sell many copies of your book. Books used to be written on parchment and that’s really expensive and would likely have been to expensive for making the printing press work.
Paper that’s much cheaper than parchment was likely a necessity for the printing press to have commercial success. According to Wikipedia the first paper mill in Germany was build in Mainz in 1320. By random Mainz happens to be the city in which Gutenberg was born.
Gutenberg burrowed money to employ 20 people over two years to print 180 copies of his bible. If you are used to books being very expensive the prospect of it being responable to print 180 copies of a single book might seem far fetched and as a result few people would start such a project.
The fact that he actually could borrow money to run a business with 20 people is notable because that means that certain economics have to be in place that weren’t at many times in history.
Update: I did some further research and it’s possible that the paper mill in Mainz didn’t exist and the first German paper mill was created in 1390 in Nürnberg. If that’s true that disturbs the narrative of the story a bit, but it doesn’t change the fact that paper availability was essential for Gutenberg.
Books used to be written on parchment and that’s really expensive
I bet people don’t quite realize HOW expensive it is. Even today, a single piece of parchment the size of a piece of notebook paper is going to run you about 50 dollars. Now make a book of them.
Regarding the wheel
I don’t find it mysterious at all why wheels took “so long”. I’d expect the wheel to be conceptually discovered much earlier then it’s first usage, because to be actually useful in the real world a wheel requires roads or vast flat plains to outperform using a backpack, let alone simply loading the animal with sacks in case your civilization figured out animal husbandry of at least one animal useful for transporting.
Regarding printing
I was always a lot more surprised by how long the Gutenberg-type printing press (i.e. movable type press) took to invent and take off. According to wikipedia the earliest ones were invented around 1000-1200 B.C. in Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
Compared to other feats of engineering of the time you’d think arranging single letters on a slab and printing a few hundred pages rather than having monks do all the painstaking handwriting must have been an utterly obvious invention (though there may be a prestige factor in play here, since obviously handmade writing with illustrations is much more beautiful and would be preferred by people who could read, which were to a large extent also the people who’d be able to afford it in the first place).
However, upon looking into it, the invention of the “hand mould” and its manufacturing precision seemed to be of much importance for the technology to take off. Precise manufacturing of type seems to be of huge importance, because if some of your letters are just a tiny bit shorter or longer than the others it won’t work at all and you’ll get missing letters or otherwise low-quality print (e.g. if the letters are not at the same height). Since printing quality before Gutenberg was bad, people who could actually read presumably wouldn’t have wanted to waste their time with this low-status quality nonsense anyway. Unfortunately there is no wiki article in English, but check out these pictures to get an idea how the first hand moulds actually looked like: https://www.buch-kunst-papier.de/drucken/raritaeten/handgieinstrument.php
Basically people molded the type pieces directly in their hand inside a small device that could be separated into two halves. The type letter itself was stenciled into blocks of metal that would then fit inside the handheld mould device perfectly, achieving the needed standardized precision. Check out the pictures in this slider to get the idea: http://www.druckkunst-museum.de/de/schriftgiesserei.html
So it’s not that no one has conceived of it or tried it before, it’s just that the quality was too bad and no one figured out how to make perfectly standardized metal typesets. So Gutenbergs achievement wasn’t really so much the obvious basic idea of movable type, his real achievement was actually the invention of the hand mould, which is the much less obvious part of making the printing press actually work with enough efficiency to be worth the trouble.
Also, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg#Printing_method_with_moveable_type
Gutenberg didn’t get rich through his Bible printing business. He didn’t make enough money with his printing business to pay his creditors and lost his business as a result.
For the printing press to be more economical than hand written books you actually have to sell many copies of your book. Books used to be written on parchment and that’s really expensive and would likely have been to expensive for making the printing press work.
Paper that’s much cheaper than parchment was likely a necessity for the printing press to have commercial success. According to Wikipedia the first paper mill in Germany was build in Mainz in 1320. By random Mainz happens to be the city in which Gutenberg was born.
Gutenberg burrowed money to employ 20 people over two years to print 180 copies of his bible. If you are used to books being very expensive the prospect of it being responable to print 180 copies of a single book might seem far fetched and as a result few people would start such a project.
The fact that he actually could borrow money to run a business with 20 people is notable because that means that certain economics have to be in place that weren’t at many times in history.
Update: I did some further research and it’s possible that the paper mill in Mainz didn’t exist and the first German paper mill was created in 1390 in Nürnberg. If that’s true that disturbs the narrative of the story a bit, but it doesn’t change the fact that paper availability was essential for Gutenberg.
I bet people don’t quite realize HOW expensive it is. Even today, a single piece of parchment the size of a piece of notebook paper is going to run you about 50 dollars. Now make a book of them.