No Printing Press

I'm not sure if this should go in this or in the ASB tab but I'm sure a mod could move it should they feel the need. I only place it in this due to it not being that hard to imagine such a timeline.

So my question is what would the world look like if the Printing Press never existed and we still had to do it by hand?
 
If the printing press never existed there'd be no industrial revolution. But is it delayed permanently or just by a century or two?
 
If the printing press never existed there'd be no industrial revolution. But is it delayed permanently or just by a century or two?

I just have to ask how would the fact that the printing press doesn't exist in this timeline stop the industrial revolution from happening?

Sure it allowed for ideas to move around faster but at most, the ideas that allowed it to happen in OTL are just slower to come about. So please explain that line of reasoning to me.
 
I just have to ask how would the fact that the printing press doesn't exist in this timeline stop the industrial revolution from happening?

Sure it allowed for ideas to move around faster but at most, the ideas that allowed it to happen in OTL are just slower to come about. So please explain that line of reasoning to me.
In order to never invent the printing press, even centuries after Gutenberg, people would have to be doing a lot less experimentation with machinery.

The manufacturing of paper, development of ink, woodblock printing, distribution of eyeglasses and use of wine presses already occurred. So for no one to put the pieces together after 500-600 years would imply a lack of economic thinking that would also preclude the development of other manufacturing techniques.
 
Also, remember that movable type printing and printing were not a one-off invention; there were multiple developments of movable type and printing more generally in East Asia, to a limited extent in the Middle East and Islamic world thanks to block printing of short inscriptions or amulets, and maybe elsewhere I don't know of. There were also of course things like textile stamps and woodcuts even in Europe. The question I have is why printing doesn't take off; if we look at comparison to areas where printing was relatively limited but literacy was higher we might have a better answer to this. Possibly there's a very large supply of trained scribes and paper rather than parchment is ubiquitous, or there is some aesthetic ideal, or what have you.
 
The Protestant Reformation would probably fail because it was the mass production the printing press enabled that differentiated the reformation from the previous schisms in the Western Church. It's hard to start a revolution if you can't even get your message to the masses cheaply.
 
The Protestant Reformation would probably fail because it was the mass production the printing press enabled that differentiated the reformation from the previous schisms in the Western Church. It's hard to start a revolution if you can't even get your message to the masses cheaply.

I see will in that case what would be the fallout of such a thing happening? A failed Protestant Reformation. Would we see people fleeing to the new world or would the new world even be found in such a timeline?
 
The Protestant Reformation would probably fail because it was the mass production the printing press enabled that differentiated the reformation from the previous schisms in the Western Church. It's hard to start a revolution if you can't even get your message to the masses cheaply.

I don't think it would fail, exactly. It would just be more like what Luther intended it to be when he published his 95 Theses - an internal debate within the Catholic Church itself. AFAIK, Luther never intended to start a Reformation. It was others who got hold of his ideas and turned him into this massive figurehead for a new kind of faith, which in turn forced the Catholic church to come down harder on Luther than they might otherwise have done...
 
I just have to ask how would the fact that the printing press doesn't exist in this timeline stop the industrial revolution from happening?

Sure it allowed for ideas to move around faster but at most, the ideas that allowed it to happen in OTL are just slower to come about. So please explain that line of reasoning to me.
Printing machine is the first machine which displays how could we work fast if we use specialise machine
 
The Invention of the printing press was the starting gun of the modern world. I can imagine if it printing press never happened, we would be still living in a very closed medieval world, waiting for it.
 
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