Coventina's History Thread: Start the Presses!!

When a German named Johannes Gutenberg developed the moveable type printing press in the mid-1400s, the world of paper making changed forever. Books that were once hand copied were now available in a mass-produced format. As the appetite for new books grew, so did the need for paper.

The New World was introduced to paper making in the late 1600s, when the first paper mill was built in Mexico. A German immigrant named William Rittenhouse started the first paper plant in the British colonies in Philadelphia in 1690. In less than a century, 20 mills were producing paper in the colonies.

(The Chinese invented moveable type long before the Europeans, but the technology was abandoned due to the complexity of Chinese characters. Also, the Dutch fervently insist that moveable type was invented by their guy Laurens Janszoon Coster.)