Information and data boost from the medieval invention described in yesterday’s post. This is the European estimated output of books from 500 to 1800.
Note that the y-axis (left-hand scale) is logarithmic, not linear, with each step representing a ten-fold increase.Note the huge increase in the century just after Gutenberg’s medieval invention, with output rising 20-fold from 100,000 copies of books to 2 million copies of books in just one century, the largest sudden jump in the growth rate. (Interestingly, output of books fell in the 10th century, presumably do to the “dark” ages.).
The Internet presumably caused another huge jump in the growth rate, probably at least 100x, although the definition of “book” needs to changed to something closer to mass-distributed information to make that statistic work. So we can say that yesterday’s historical photo post of the metal alloy medieval invention (printing) caused a “sudden” 20x increase in the amount of information available to humans. However, not every region or country had immediate access to printed books. This will reappear shortly in our story, as we continue to struggle to connect this medieval invention with Conquistadors history & something to do with Carl Sagan.
Photo credit: Wikimedia/Tentotwo/CC-BY-SA-3.0 using source data from Buringh, Eltjo; van Zanden, Jan Luiten., Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries”, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 69, No. 2 (2009), pp. 409–445 (416–417, tables 1&2) A version of this medieval invention article originally appeared as a photo post on our Instagram feed.