Gutenberg, Johannes (circa. 1400-1468)

German printer who was born and died in Mainz. His real name being Johannes Gensfleisch – Gutenberg being the name of a house owned by his family (Zu guten Bergen, ‘at the good mountain’) –, this engineer is considered in the West as the inventor of printing, which was developed by his hand in 1450 in the town of his birth. What seems certain is that he invented the printing press (1434), metal letters in the place of wooden ones and good quality ink allowing the printing of two sides of a sheet of paper. If the paternity of his revolutionary discovery has been contested, it is because the well-known inventions in the history of humanity in general result less through the genius of a single individual than from a series of techniques being perfected which, step by step, have ultimately enabled the ‘invention’ in the strict sense of the word to be produced.