Prologue: Life Before the Printing Press

          The grandfather clock of mass media is Johannes Gutenberg. He was a German man born in 1398, in the town of Mainz, Germany. He was birthed by very wealthy and often described as “well-to-do” people, his father Friele Zum Gensfleisch and his mother Elsgen Wyrich [Gutenberg]. Johannes was taught to read at a very young age and he took to reading on his own free will; which isn’t quite out of character for the man who invented the printing press with metal moveable types. However, the soon to be inventor did not learn to read so well with standard literature, but with a more precious medium: manuscripts. There was only one option to writing or copying a book, and that was by hand. They called it a manuscript because that is the Latin word for “hand written”. As the young Johannes progressed in his bookworm lifestyle, he couldn’t help but long for innovation to strike the libraries of the world; he desired printing efficiency so that man’s hands would spend more time holding the books than scribbling them out. Hand written copies took far too long to mass produce, so Johannes Gutenberg snatched the reigns and allowed those old scribes to raise their hands and wave good bye to the past.