Considering the staggering economic, social, and political consequences of gunpowder, the compass, the mechanical clock, the steam engine, the microscope, the electric dynamo, the incandescent bulb, the airplane, and nuclear power -- to mention but a few monumental inventions -- how could anyone possibly claim that the printing press and the microprocessor dwarf all others? Simple. Because while the other great inventions radically changed the way we coped with specific problems (i.e. generating mechanical power, measuring time, transporting things, incinerating enemies, etc.), the printing press and the microprocessor fundamentally altered the way we solve problems -- all problems. The printing press and the microprocessor irreversibly changed the way we collect, store, copy, and revise knowledge. And it is the steady accumulation of human knowledge -- printed on paper or recorded on magnetic media -- which makes invention possible. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but knowledge is its father.
Let's say you're a brilliant "technologist" in the days before Gutenberg. Before plunging in on a new project, how will you survey the field to learn what's already known? Technical reference works are exceedingly rare and expensive. Even if you stumble upon such a book, can you rely on it? Every book in existence is a "manuscript," its mathematical tables, diagrams, formulas, and charts hand-copied by a scribe unfamiliar with the subject matter. Footnotes, bibliographies, and indexes -- all essential to navigating within a discipline -- don't yet exist. They evolve only after book printing made them practical. Finally, even if you manage to overcome the lack of a reliable knowledge base and invent something marvelous, how will you spread the word?
For sustained scientific and technical progress to take hold, access to humankind's accumulated knowledge had to be made easy and, above all, cheap. This is where Gutenberg fits in. Though often credited with inventing printing itself, his actual contribution was in cutting its cost. For decades prior to Gutenberg, Dutch artisans had used printing presses to copy images carved into wood blocks. The Chinese had been using the wood-block technique since the 9th century. But hand carving individual letters was incredibly slow and expensive. Gutenberg smashed through the cost barrier by inventing an adjustable mold that formed molten metal into letters of the alphabet. By driving down the cost of a single piece of type -- printing's basic component -- Gutenberg released the untapped information processing power of the printing press.
Five centuries later, Intel's microprocessor repeated Gutenberg's feat by demolishing the cost of digital computing. Like pre-Gutenberg printing presses, computers had existed for decades -- since 1941 when Konrad Zuse's Z3 crunched its first numbers. But it wasn't until 1971, when the Intel team figured out how to make a CPU out of cheap transistors etched into a sliver of silicon, that the astounding power of digital computing was unleashed on society.
By turning books and computers into cheap commodities, these inventions ignited "information explosions." By the year 1500, more than 1000 presses had cranked out 10 million copies of 35,000 different titles. In 1512, Copernicus first argued -- in print -- that the earth revolves around the sun. Over the next few years, texts on agriculture, geometry, mineralogy, and anatomy laid the knowledge foundation for what later became known as the Scientific Revolution. Bacon, Galileo, and Kepler all stressed how critical printing was to the transformation of their world.
Just 21 years after its invention, can we even imagine scientific research without the microprocessor? Virtually no data is collected, stored, or sorted without the aid of database software. Few calculations are run without math programs and few papers written without word processors. Today, no respectable archaeological dig begins without a full complement of laptops and camcorders. From microbiology and genetic engineering to weather modelling, satellite imaging and research into the Big Bang, every corner of science is utterly dependent on the microprocessor. Once linked by printed scholarly journals, science is now a round-the-clock virtual community woven together by Internet and faxes. Remember, it was an unauthorized fax of a preliminary lab report that triggered the wild scientific gold rush for "cold fusion"
On the political front, Gutenberg's invention is credited with undermining the monolithic power of the Church, whose scribes controlled the lion's share of hand-copying in pre-printing days. With cheap printing came "unauthorized" ideas, and before long reformist monks, including Martin Luther, used printed pamphlets to spread their heretical notions. Similarly, in the early 1980s, the Kremlin leadership recognized the mortal threat posed by the onset of personal computer revolution. If the Soviet people were allowed to use PCs, the Party would lose its monopoly over information. On the other hand, if students weren't PC literate, their technical backwardness would doom the Soviet military.
In fact, it is not too much to say that the microprocessor turned the tide in the Cold War. Microprocessor-packed Stinger missiles in Afghanistan, Cruise missiles in Iraq, and the threat that Soviet nuclear forces could be obsoleted by a microprocessor-based Star Wars system made it clear to reformist commissars, including Gorbachev, that they were outmatched and had to change. Only a decentralization of their command-and-control economy could save their superpower status, but once launched perestroika proved impossible to stop.
With the Cold War now fading into memory and history screaming ahead in fast-forward, we are just beginning to comprehend that the stunning changes of the last two decades are but a foretaste of a worldwide economic, social, and political transformation. Just as historians view the era before Gutenberg's invention as medieval -- a time incomprehensibly different from the modern era -- our descendants will doubtlessly have a terribly hard time imagining what life must have been like in the "dark ages" before Intel's microprocessor transformed human existence. It is our privilege and burden to live through an epochal transition not experienced by humanity for 500 years.