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         In the past week, have you talked on the phone? Been driven somewhere in a car? Read a book, magazine, or newspaper? Turned on a light? Listened to some music? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions (and chances are, you said "yes" to most of them), then you have an inventor to thank! Inventors are amazing people who are filled with curiosity and know how to keep trying. Just like Willy Wonka (a fabulous inventor), inventors spend a lot of time building, tasting, drawing, thinking, asking, trying and making something new. Sometimes inventors take ideas that already exist and make them better. After all, in order to invent something, like a steamboat, something else has to have been invented first, like a steam engine! The coolest thing about inventors is that they make a lot of mistakes and sometimes these mistakes turn out to be their best inventions of all! Today we're going to visit the labs of several famous inventors. Our first stop takes us far back in time--the year is 1450, to be exact--to a city in Germany called Mainz. The world is a simpler place, so simple in fact, that people get most of their information by word of mouth. Newspapers haven't been invented yet (so forget radio, TV, or the internet!) and the books are all written by hand. Can you imagine how long it takes to copy a whole book by hand? Just think about how long it takes you to write one thank-you note! Around this time, someone invented a way to make books without writing each page or each word by hand. It was called woodblock printing. Basically, someone had to carve the words of a page into a big block of wood. Then ink was rolled over the woodblock and a piece of paper was laid over the ink. Then someone had to rub and press on the paper to get the ink to stick. If you rubbed too hard, the paper would tear. If you rubbed too lightly, the ink would be uneven and hard to read. It took a long time to make a whole book with woodblocks. As a matter of fact, it took longer to carve all the words into wood for an entire book than it did to write the book by hand! But once the woodblock was carved, then it was faster to print many copies of the book than it was to write them all by hand. Along came an inventor named Johannes Gutenberg (pronouced yo-HAN-es GOO-ten-berg). Johannes took a look around and thought, "How can I make printing easier?" He decided to make individual metal pieces for each letter, called moveable type. Each letter was cast in reverse on each piece of metal. Then, since the type was moveable, Johannes would line up the pieces of metal to form words and sentences. Next came the ink and then the paper, which was pushed onto the inked metal letters with a screw press. All the letters and words came out even and readable. And, for the first time ever, books could be made in about two days--instead of the old way, which took months! With the invention of the Gutenberg Press, the entire world changed. Suddenly, information could be produced and copied at a fast rate. Scientific ideas and the spread of knowledge could be printed quickly and sent all over the world! The Gutenberg Press gave birth to journalism. Eventually, there were daily newspapers because, thanks to the Press, it didn't take all day to print the news! Kings could print laws and announcements and plaster them all over their kingdoms. And books were made available to more people than ever! But who was Johannes Gutenberg? Not a lot is known about his childhood, because he lived so long ago. It's guessed that he was born around 1400 and was the youngest son in his family. Before he got interested in printing, Johannes had some knowledge of jewelry making and knew how to polish and cut precious stones like emeralds and sapphires. After that he made "pilgrim mirrors", small metal frames that held little mirrors in them. The mirrors were pinned onto the hats of people taking religious vacations. The mirrors were thought to catch rays from the religious statues they visited! Finally, when Johannes was in his early fifties, he settled on solving the problems of printing. With his new press, he printed Latin dictionaries, political pamphlets, and schoolbooks on grammar. But his most famous project was printing 180 copies of The Bible. From 1453 to 1454, Johannes Gutenberg employed the help of twenty workers in order to print so many bibles. Each bible had two volumes, with the page count totaling 1,282 pages! Once the printing was done, Johannes hired people to hand paint colorful initials and designs on the pages. Many historians agree that the printed bibles are every bit as beautiful as the hand-written, hand-colored books that came out before them. Today, 48 of Gutenberg's Bibles still exist. The United States has eleven of them (in Texas, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, California and Washington D.C.), two in Russia (Moscow), one in Japan (Tokyo), and the remaining thirty four are all over Europe. In Gutenberg's hometown city, Mainz, there are three copies in the Gutenberg Museum. See, one of the great things about being an inventor is when you invent something important, they'll build a museum for you in your hometown! 
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