Bi Sheng Inventor ofthe world’s first movable type technology
3 min readBi Sheng,a common artisan living during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), was the inventor of the world’s first movable type technology. Today, Bi is remembered worldwide as a key contributor to the invention of printing, one of the Four Great Inventions of Ancient China. The other inventions being the compass, gunpowder and papermaking.
Bi loved carving when he was a boy. Whenever he could find time, he would visit wood or stone carving shops to watch artisans at work. When he was 15, his father sent him to a printing shop in Hangzhou, capital of today’s Zhejiang Province in east China, to become an apprentice.
In the shop, Bi began to learn the skill of carving the woodcut, which was used then to prepare a wood block for printing text, patterns or illustration. For each page to be print-ed,a wood block needed to be carved into a relief matrix. The non-printing part of the wood would be chipped away so the printed text and illustration would be carved into low relief as a mirror-image of the final result of printing on paper or other materials.
To print a thick book it would take the artisans months or even years to carve hundreds of wood blocks. And, if the arti-san made a single mistake in carving, he would have to throw away the wood block and start from scratch again. Certainly, it was a tedious and unproductive way to make a print, particu-larly when printing many different books and materials.
So, Bi decided to improve the technology to make print-ing easier and more efficient. But how? He tried many ways, but all failed.
One day, Bi took his wife and their two young children to visit his home village to pay homage to his ancestors. After allthe rituals, Bi sat under a tree watching his two children play-ing. The two kids modeled clay into tables, chairs, cookers, pigs and other figurines and placed them in various combina-tions to imitate different real-life situations.
Suddenly, an idea flashed across Bi’s mind. He asked himself:”Why don’t I carve each character onto a piece of clay block and make as many of such blocks as I need, so I can combine those pieces into any text that I want to print?”In addition, he thought, after one printing, those clay types could be used again for printing other books.
After returning to the printing shop, Bi immediately be-gan his experiment. He first made many small clay blocks andthen carved the mirror-image of a Chinese character on each block. He carved several clay types for one character and more for some common characters in case they would be repeated on the same page.
After finishing carving, he baked the clay types in the fire to make them hard. Then, he prepared an iron plate covered with a layer of a mixture of pine resin, wax and paper ash. To do the typesetting, he used an iron frame the size of the printed area on the iron plate and placed the hardened clay types into the frame according to the original text.
When one frame was filled, he warmed the iron plate to make the resin-wax layer partly melt and then used a flat board to press the clay types to ensure an even surface.
To make the typesetting easier, Bi arranged the ceramic types of about 3,000 most-used Chinese characters into dozens of wood plates according to their rhymes. In the following years, clay was replaced by wood and metal in making the types.
Later, the movable type technology was used worldwide.
But, Bi invented his ceramic types about 400 years before Johannes Gutenberg developed the first movable type system in Europe.
