The Past Lives of Thomas Edison

The Past Lives of Thomas Edison

The past lives of Edison are T’sai Lun of China, who invented paper, and Johannes Gutenberg of Germany, who invented the printing machine.

T’sai Lun (AD 50~121) is regarded as the inventor of paper and the paper making process. He was born in Guiyang, China, during the Eastern Han Dynasty and worked as a paper secretary for Emperor He. After trying a variety of materials including bark and silk, T’sai
Lun eventually produced the formula for modern paper in AD105. The emperor was pleased with his invention, and T’sai Lun was granted a title and great wealth. Immediately paper became widely used in China, enabling civilization to develop much faster than with earlier writing materials such as bamboo. It was not for another 600 years until the techniques of papermaking spread to the West.

Johannes Gutenberg (AD 1400~1467) was born in Mainz, Germany. In 1455 he perfected the method of printing with moveable type. This caused a revolution in the development of culture as books could be mass- produced rather than copied by hand, leading to the education of the general population. Using his new printing machine, Gutenberg began printing copies of the bible so that it could be widely distributed. He managed to print close to two hundred bibles in three years, the same amount of time it took to create one bible by hand. Gutenberg’s revolutionary invention remained little changed into the 19th century.