Western Culture Global Presents The Top 100 Heroes of Western Culture These individuals have most contributed to replacing ignorance with knowledge, savagery with civilization, disease with health, tyranny with liberty, poverty with abundance, and despair with happiness. #73: Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468) Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468) was a German goldsmith and printer whose important contributions regarding printing would revolutionize European book making. Gutenberg pioneered a process for mass-producing movable type, the use of oil-based ink, and the use of a wooden printing press. More importantly, he combined these elements into a practical printing system. The use of movable type was a large improvement over the handwritten manuscript, which was the existing method of book production in Europe, and upon woodblock printing. The significance of Gutenberg’s invention is often overstated when one considers that the great civilizations of the ancient world developed spectacularly without the use of movable type printing. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Gutenberg's contributions were an ingredient in fueling and hastening the European Renaissance, including the Scientific Revolution Go to #74: Andrew Carnegie Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — Home Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Numerical Order Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Century Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Category
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