Communication: from Gutenberg to the Internet
Writing, a futile gesture we all use to put together a list, take notes, fill in a form, was once the monopoly of a powerful elite.
Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, known as Gutenberg, was born around 1400 in Mainz in the Germanic Holy Roman Empire and died on 3rd of February 1468 in the town of his birth. He was a German printer whose invention was crucial to the distribution of books and of knowledge.
An innovator in the use of movable type, he is considered to be the inventor of typographic printing in Europe. His invention revolutionised the traditional methods of book production. For the first time, the words making up a text could be copied by a machine multiple times, to allow many people to simultaneously read the same thing in different places. However, Gutenberg could only produce a few hundred to a few thousand copies of text per day.
Since the era of Gutenberg, the means of distribution of text has evolved considerably with the appearance of the first computers. The fi rst calculating machines were abacuses. Composed initially of wooden beads, pearls, or rocks on a string, these devices were later mechanised with gears and wheels (replacing the beads).
They later became electronic and/or optical with positive and negative signals (replacing the wheels), and the computer can move these electronic signals at incredible speed.
Today, each second, millions of Internet pages are copied and recopied by computers around the world.
| Price of the series: | 0,50 + 0,70 = 1,20 € |
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| Design: | I. Idrizovic (L) ; M. Kollmann (D); |
| Printing: | Multicoloured high-resolution offset by CARTOR SECURITY PRINT SA, La Loupe (F) |
| Dimensions: | 33 x 28 mm, 10 stamps per sheet with decorated borders. |
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Competition
PostEurop 2013
