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Originally Posted by johndallman
James Burke is a journalist, not an engineer. Pure-ish lead is a bad type metal: it shrinks too fast as it cools to take a sharp impression, and wears and spreads too fast in use. Guttenberg developed a lead-tin-antimony alloy, after a lot of effort. I'd question the Romans' ability to develop that technology without knowing it was possible in advance. |
Good point. They could use wood type as the Chinese did. Wouldn't be as durable as metal type but it would be better then pure lead.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DanHoward
If Gutenberg travelled back in time, retaining all of his knowledge, he probably could have developed his printing press using Roman technology. The Romans could not make the same advance for a whole host of technological and sociological reasons including the lack of precursor skills and technologies and the availability of cheap slave labour.
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Lest Darkness Falls is a novel about a 20th century man being sent back to 535 CE and he redevelops the printing press with very basic knowledge on how it worked.
Technologically the Roman could have developed the printing press. The precursor skills were there but the incentive to put them together wasn't
Slaves that were able to read and write were rare though exactly how much of the Roman population free and slave was literate is debated (I have seen it as low as 5% and as high as 30%). Also Mechanization (of a sort) existing in Roman times with water power being the go to. Thanks to the cam water power could pound objects faster and harder then any human being.
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Originally Posted by mlangsdorf
Were the Romans incapable of reproducing the lead-tin-antinomy alloy used to make Gutenberg's type? They clearly had access to all three metals in some form, but apparently not metallic antimony. But Gutenberg didn't have access to metallic antimony, either, so I'm not sure why that's a limitation.
Gutenberg also had to re-engineer the hand press to apply pressure more consistently across the entire press. I'm not sure if that modification was beyond Roman engineering or just something they hadn't need to do because it's an unnecessary frill when you're pressing olives.
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Of course we are debating what is possible without magic.
With magic (especially common magic) the TL goes pear shaped real fast. Take the lowly Copy spell, anybody literate who knows Dye can learn it.
One of the things medieval monasteries did was copy what survived the Western Roman empire going down the tubes. In fantasy terms we are talking about normal to high sanctuary with many monks having Blessed or even better Power Investiture making the Copy spell a very common spell.