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🌊 Ripple · counterfactual

What if Gutenberg's printing press had gone differently?

1440 · rhineland

Movable-type printing begins in Mainz, collapsing the cost of the written word.

If it had gone differently: Books stay hand-copied and rare; literacy spreads at a crawl for another century.

What it set up
  1. 1517The Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity stays a single church; no confessional map of Europe forms.
  2. 1600The Scientific Revolution, Natural philosophy stays deferential to the ancients; no method, no acceleration.
  3. 1720The Enlightenment, Absolutism keeps its intellectual cover; 'rights of man' never enters common speech.
  4. 1870Compulsory mass schooling, Literacy and numeracy stay patchy; the workforce and the electorate of 1900 look much like 1800's.

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