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We need not guess at his technical gifts, in any case. His Bible was made from the type he himself designed and cast, and it renders in metal, with exquisite detail and balance, the fine calligraphy of the medieval scribes.

But as he honed these gifts, Johann seems also to have developed an impetuous personality. As a young man, he was sued for breach of promise of marriage by a young girl in Strasbourg. And in his business life, we see that same impulsiveness: Once he was sure his movable type could revolutionize printed communications, nothing could stop him from making that revolution happen in the shortest possible time.

Gutenberg was so sure of the potential of his invention that from the mid-1440s on he poured all of his resources into his dream. He built his press and perfected his type at enormous expense—in both his own time and money, and the resources of more than one investor.

In 1450 he gained the backing of a prominent burgher, Johann Fust. And with Fust's help, the famous 42-line Gutenberg Bible (so named because it fits 42 printed lines in every column) was published in the mid 1450s.

But by this time Gutenberg found himself overextended, and when Fust called in the loans, the brilliant inventor/printer had to forfeit his press along with all of the beautiful calligraphic type fonts he had created.

Here is the irony we so often find in the lives of innovators: Gutenberg invented the single most important machine in the modern era. His press made the Reformation possible by providing the means for instantaneous and widespread dissemination of Martin Luther's reforming ideas in books and broadsides. Beyond this, his invention created the information age. But he never profited from that invention.

That is not to say, as Victorian romanticizers used to tell the story, that Johann Gutenberg died a forgotten pauper. People in his own time did recognize his brilliant contribution to the world, and he was honored with noble titles and given a pension by the church.

But in stark contrast, for example, to the millionaire founders of Apple Computers® or Google®, Gutenberg never realized a penny in profit. Caught up in the vision of his world-changing invention, he pushed too far, too fast—and his invention and all its profit were taken from him.

We can imagine how this blow crushed him. Though he set up other presses with other partners, nothing emerged from them that approaches his Bible (and a psalter printed at about the same time) in beauty and importance.

We get few clues about Johann Gutenberg's spiritual state through all of this. But we do get a few. We know, for example, that before he built his press, he became involved in a religious project for the city of Aachen. The city fathers planned to exhibit Aachen's extensive collection of religious relics to thousands of pilgrims. They turned to Gutenberg to create the molds for the so-called "pilgrim-mirrors." These were small, decorated, framed mirrors that the pilgrims held above their heads to catch a better glimpse of the relics and to collect (and bring back to their relatives) some of the rays of blessing thought to emanate from those relics.

We also know that when he was not printing Bibles, Gutenberg used his press to create the "indulgences"—essentially, get-out-of-purgatory-free cards—sold by the papacy to raise money for lavish building projects. Yes, these were the same sort of indulgences that so infuriated Martin Luther that he nailed his 95 theses to the door at Wittenberg. And yes, those were the same theses that were printed on Gutenberg's invention and blanketed the land, spurring the Reformation. Isn't history delicious?

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August (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48