Gutenberg Experiments with Press in Strasbourg

1439

Court records from a lawsuit in Strasbourg reveal that Johannes Gutenberg had been quietly experimenting with a secret printing technology involving a modified wine press, hand-cast metal type, and specially formulated oil-based ink. His business partners sued him for withholding the invention's technical details. The trial documents are the earliest surviving evidence of movable metal type in Europe, a full decade before the forty-two-line Bible appeared in Mainz.