Word: gutenberg
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even more central to this globalization were the electronic technologies that revolutionized the distribution of information, ideas and entertainment. Five centuries ago, Gutenberg's advances in printing helped lead to the Reformation (by permitting people to own their own Bibles and religious tracts), the Renaissance (by permitting ideas to travel from village to village) and the rise of individual liberty (by allowing ordinary folks direct access to information). Likewise, the 20th century was transformed by a string of inventions that, building on the telegraph and telephone of the 19th century, led to a new information...
...protocol devised by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 created the World Wide Web, which simplified and popularized navigation on the Net. The idea that anyone in the world can publish information and have it instantly available to anyone else in the world created a revolution that will rank with Gutenberg...
...Prague slipped into tourist hotels to watch CNN reports on the upheavals in Berlin. A decade later, dissidents in China set up e-mail chains, and Web-surfing students evaded clueless censors to break the government's monopoly on information. Just as the flow of ideas wrought by Gutenberg led to the rise of individual rights, so too did the unfetterable flow of ideas wrought by telephones, faxes, television and the Internet serve as the surest foe of totalitarianism in this century...
...Johann Gutenberg was born of well-to-do parents in the Archbishopric of Mainz, Germany. Details of his life, early as well as late, are sketchy, but he apparently trained as a goldsmith and/or gem cutter and then became a partner in a printing shop in Strasbourg...
...When Gutenberg entered it, printing was a slow and laborious business. Each new page required the creation of a new printing form, usually an incised block of wood. He began looking for ways to make metal casts of the individual letters of the alphabet. The advantages of such a method were obvious, or must have been to Gutenberg. Equipped with a sufficient supply of metal letters, a printer could use and reuse them in any order required, running off not just handbills and brief documents but a theoretically infinite number of individual pages. There were technical obstacles to overcome, including...