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Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type printing around 1440 in Mainz, Germany, is one of the most consequential technological events in human history — and the direct ancestor of every typographic decision made on the web today. Before Gutenberg, books in Europe were hand-copied by scribes, making them extraordinarily expensive and limiting literacy to the wealthy and clergy. Gutenberg's press didn't just change how books were made; it fundamentally transformed knowledge, power, religion, and culture.

The Gutenberg press used individually cast metal type — each letter a separate piece of metal that could be arranged, inked, pressed against vellum or paper, and rearranged for the next page. This "movable type" concept had appeared earlier in China and Korea with wood and bronze type, but Gutenberg's innovation combined durable metal alloys, an oil-based ink that adhered to metal, a modified screw press adapted from winemaking, and a type system precisely engineered for the Latin alphabet.

The Gutenberg Bible (completed around 1455) remains a landmark of typographic craftsmanship. Printed in blackletter — specifically Textura quadrata, the formal Gothic script of German manuscripts — it was designed to be indistinguishable from the handwritten manuscripts it replaced. Gutenberg understood that his market was accustomed to a specific aesthetic, and he replicated it mechanically with remarkable fidelity. The Bible uses 42 lines per column (earning it the name "B42"), with careful justification achieved through variable-width letterforms and ligatures.

The implications for typography were enormous. Printing required decisions at scale — choosing a typeface wasn't a creative exercise for each page but a single design choice applied to thousands of copies. Consistency, legibility, and reproducibility became the primary virtues of type design. Early printers like Nicolas Jenson in Venice (1470s) began moving away from blackletter toward the humanist roman types that more directly inform modern serif typefaces.

Gutenberg's invention also created the concept of a "reading public." As books became affordable, literacy rates grew and vernacular languages gained print legitimacy. The Protestant Reformation was, in significant part, a printing technology phenomenon — Luther's theses spread because presses could reproduce and distribute them at unprecedented speed.

The transition from manuscript to print established many conventions we still observe: page margins (originally for binding and notation), running headers, page numbers, chapter divisions, and paragraph indentation. The measure of a printed line — the column width that balances text density against reader fatigue — informed the 45-75 character optimal line length we still recommend for web typography today.

Modern CSS even has echoes of Gutenberg's innovations. font-variant-ligatures, optical sizing, and justification algorithms in browsers all trace conceptual lineage to problems Gutenberg's compositors solved with physical metal type. The font-kerning property addresses the same spacing refinements that punch cutters hand-adjusted in individual type molds five centuries ago.