The inventor of printing lost his press in court.

1450 · 1455 · apart: 5 years

In 1455 Gutenberg's creditor Johann Fust won his workshop and his share in the Bible, and the profits went to Fust.

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The event

• Gutenberg's printing pressc. 1450 · Mainz. In Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg developed printing with movable metal type on a press. His Bible appeared around 1455; printing made books cheap and accelerated the spread of knowledge, the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution.

15th century

More amazing facts

• 1450 · 1564 Ivan Fyodorov's Apostol (1564), the first precisely dated Russian printed book, came out more than a century after Gutenberg's press.
• 1450 Machu Picchu and Gutenberg's press are the same age: around 1450 the Incas were building their mountain estate while Mainz printed its first books.
• 1450 · 1453 When Constantinople fell in 1453, Gutenberg was already printing in Mainz: the last Roman Empire vanished in the first years of the printed book.
• 1450 · 1911 The Spanish never found Machu Picchu.
• 1450 · 1729 The first Ottoman Turkish book printed in Arabic script appeared almost 280 years after Gutenberg: a dictionary published by Ibrahim Müteferrika in Istanbul in 1729.
• 1450 · 1671 The legend of Kaldi the goatherd, whose goats perked up after eating coffee berries, was first written down only in 1671.

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