Bi Sheng, an inventor in the Song Dynasty of China. He pioneered movable type printing, making it one of the four great inventions of ancient China and making outstanding contributions to the development of world civilization.
Francis Bacon, the great British philosopher, also said: "Printing, gunpowder and the compass have changed the face and state of things in the entire world." (Francis Bacon's "New Tools")< /p>
In the Sui Dynasty around 600 AD, people were inspired by engraving seals. After repeated research and improvement, the working people of our country invented engraving printing for the first time in human history.
The woodblock printing technology is relatively complex. Generally, pear wood, jujube wood, catalpa wood, boxwood, ginkgo, soap and other wood are used to make the plate.
After the emergence of woodblock printing, it greatly promoted the spread and development of ancient culture.
In the Song Dynasty, the engraving and printing industry reached its heyday. At this time, not only were there "official engravings" and "supervisory engravings" by the government, but the private book engraving industry was also very popular and spread all over the country. At that time, Sichuan, Fujian, Hangzhou and other places were the most developed. Not only were there many engraved books, they were also exquisite. After the Song Dynasty, copperplate engraving and unique color overprinting appeared, which shows that the engraving printing technology has reached an extremely sophisticated level.
Block printing has played a major role in the spread of culture, but it also has obvious shortcomings. First, engraving is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and material-intensive. It takes a long time and a lot of wood to engrave a book. If you engrave a masterpiece with a lot of content, it will take several years or even longer. Second, it is inconvenient to store a large number of book plates. The Tripitaka published during the Kaibao period of Song Taizu has more than 5,000 volumes, 130,000 pages, and 130,000 unique engravings. It takes up a lot of space for storage. Third, it is difficult to correct typos.
At that time, the Northern Song Dynasty had just moved from the divisions of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms to unity. Social life was relatively stable, so the social economy had developed greatly. It has brought about the prosperity of culture, science and technology, and many achievements have been made in various fields.
The prosperity of culture will inevitably require the advancement of communication tools. Due to the above reasons, woodblock printing could not meet the needs of society. Improving printing technology has become a requirement of the times, and the person who completed this historical mission is Bi Sheng.
Bi Sheng lived in the heyday of woodblock printing. He was an ordinary civilian intellectual in the mid-Northern Song Dynasty, and was known as a commoner at that time. Since he was a teenager, he has been an apprentice in a private bookshop. After Bi Sheng arrived at the bookstore, he was diligent in learning and inquiring, and quickly learned to engrave. During his apprenticeship, he paid close attention to every aspect of engraving and printing, studied hard, and mastered various printing procedures, as well as the techniques of engraving and printing. A few years later, Bi Sheng finally became a skilled bookstore printing craftsman.
After Bi Sheng was promoted from an apprentice to a printing craftsman, he quickly became an effective backbone in the bookshop. He is responsible for every process of engraving and printing books, and works very seriously. Gradually, he discovered the shortcomings of block printing. Around AD 1041, Bi Sheng began to make a single movable type. This work took Bi Sheng 8 or 9 years. Bi Sheng first used wood as a material for making movable type. However, it failed due to uneven wood grain, swelling due to ink absorption, blurred text, and the inability to reuse it next time.
This failure did not discourage Bi Sheng. He tried several materials, but none of them were suitable for making movable type. Inspired by the craft patterns on the pottery pots, Bi Sheng began his attempt to make movable clay type.
Bi Sheng first mixed the clay and mixed it evenly to make small square clay blocks of the same size. The corners of the small clay blocks were smoothed. Then the words are carefully carved on each small clay blank. Bi Sheng carved the words and calligraphy to protrude. The thickness of the protruding part is just like the edge of ancient copper coins. The clay is soft and much easier to carve than wood. After carving, the clay is dried in the shade for a while, and then placed in the fire to harden.
This time, Bi Sheng finally succeeded in producing movable clay type that has clear calligraphy and painting, does not absorb water, is as strong as an ox horn, and is black and shiny. Bi Sheng spent 7 or 8 years of hard work and made tens of thousands of clay movable type seals.
In the process of making clay type, Bi Sheng was very good at using his brain. He considered that there were often many repeated words on one page in the book. In order to facilitate the printing of the book, he usually carved several movable clay types for each word.
In particular, the characters "zhi", "hu", "zhe" and "ye" in ancient books were used very frequently. Bi Sheng made these characters into more than 20 clay movable types, which were very convenient to use. Convenient.
With a set of movable type seals, books cannot be printed immediately. To print books, the movable type must first be made into plates.
Making movable type plates was an important part of Bi Sheng's invention of movable type printing. Before each printing, he first took out an iron plate and laid it out, evenly sprinkled it with a layer of rosin, wax, paper dust and other sticky substances, placed an iron frame on top of the iron plate, and then printed according to the instructions. After reading the manuscript, I picked out the required clay type and arranged them one by one in the iron frame in order. Fill an entire frame to form one page. Put the arranged plate on the fire and heat it. The rosin, wax and other substances in the iron frame will melt when heated. At this time, use a flat wooden board to press the plate flat. When the material in the iron frame cools and solidifies, the material in the iron frame will The clay type is firmly stuck together, and the layout is very smooth. Finally, it is inked and printed, and you can get a book with a very good printing effect.
It is said that the books printed by Bi Sheng using clay movable type plates are "as ink as glossy as lacquer" and are very beautiful.
In order to improve printing efficiency, Bi Sheng installed two iron plates and used them alternately. While the first block is being printed, typesetting begins on the second block.
When Bi Sheng was printing books, he sometimes encountered some uncommon and uncommon characters. He immediately found some clay, made small squares of dry clay, and then carved the required characters. Take it and burn it in a grass fire, and in a short time it will be made into a clay movable type seal. Bi Sheng's method is very simple and very fast. Bi Sheng also made many wooden frames, divided into grids, specially used to store unused clay type. In order to make it easy and fast to search during use, Bi Sheng divided the clay movable characters he made into several categories according to the finals of the characters, and arranged them neatly according to the categories. The movable clay characters of each rhyme part are affixed with paper and marked. When selecting characters, first look at the marks, and then find the required clay type according to the marks.
Bi Sheng was the first person to invent movable type printing in the world, and the clay type he created was also the first movable type in the world. The German Gutenberg invented metal movable type printing based on Bi Sheng's clay type, which was many years later than Bi Sheng. Movable type printing is another major contribution of our ancestors to human culture. It is also a great pride of our Chinese nation.
Compared with woodblock printing, the movable type printing invented by Bi Sheng has many advantages: fast speed, economical printing, good book quality, and reduced labor intensity.
Although the movable clay type printing invented by Bi Sheng was a very remarkable thing, because Bi Sheng was an ordinary craftsman, his status was humble. The owner of the bookstore also thought that he was not doing his job properly. The movable clay type printing invented by Bi Sheng was regarded as a "little skill" worth mentioning. The set of movable type that he worked so hard to create failed to spread widely in society.
Bi Sheng became ill due to overwork and died of depression. Before his death, he asked his family to take good care of his clay calligraphy.
Decades after Bi Sheng's death, the clay movable type he carefully made was passed to the great scholar Shen Kuo, who regarded it as a treasure and carefully collected it. In his book "Mengxi Bi Tan", he recorded in detail how Bi Sheng invented printing.
Although movable clay type printing was not widely promoted at that time, this technology continued to develop as later generations continued to imitate it. The materials of movable type are also constantly improving, from non-metal movable type such as clay type and wood type, to metal movable type such as copper type, lead type and tin type.
From the Yuan Dynasty until the Qing Dynasty, people continued to imitate Bi Sheng’s method and make clay movable type.
Bi Sheng once tried to use wood to make movable type, but failed, so he switched to clay to make movable type. In the early Yuan Dynasty, scientist Wang Zhen succeeded in making wooden movable type. He spent two years designing and guiding craftsmen to make more than 30,000 wooden movable types using pear and jujube wood, and printed the book "Jingde County Chronicle". In order to promote wooden movable type printing, Wang Zhen wrote his method of making wooden movable type in a book called "Making Movable Type Printing Calligraphy", which was attached to the back of "Agricultural Book" and introduced his wooden movable type printing method in detail. Wang Zhen's book is the world's earliest systematic description of movable type printing.
The movable type printing invented by Bi Sheng soon spread to Korea, Japan, Vietnam and other countries in Asia. Later, printing spread to Europe. Westerners inherited and perfected the movable type printing invented by Bi Sheng, and the German Gutenberg created and adopted lead movable type printing. Movable type printing soon spread from Germany to other countries around the world.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, after experiencing the Industrial Revolution, Europe applied machines to the printing industry. Lead movable type printing became mechanized, and the West bid farewell to the manual era of printing technology. By the 19th century, these technologies were introduced to our country and soon replaced the ancient woodblock printing.
In today's world, although photographic typesetting and printing processes are increasingly widely used, traditional clichés are still used all over the world. This printing process has become the most basic and commonly used printing method in the world since its invention in the 15th century. Investigating its origin, the person who laid the foundation is Bi Sheng of our country, and its basic principle is exactly the same as Bi Sheng's principle of clay movable type.
The movable type printing invented by Bi Sheng spread all over the world and made a significant contribution to human culture. His achievements are indelible.