Bi Sheng invents movable-type printing

1040

A Chinese commoner in Song dynasty Bianjing carved individual characters in fired clay and arranged them in iron frames sealed with warm resin. He could compose and print texts at a fraction of the labor of woodblock carving. Four centuries before Gutenberg, the printing press was born in Asia. The vast number of Chinese characters, however, limited the technique's practicality compared to alphabetic systems.