Four Centuries Before Gutenberg
Bi Sheng set movable type in the 1040s. Gutenberg got the statue. The mechanism behind that is more ordinary than malice, which is exactly why it is probably running right now.
Around 1040, in Song dynasty China, a commoner named Bi Sheng worked out how to set text from individually movable pieces of type. He carved characters into clay, fired them hard, set them in an iron frame on a bed of warm resin, printed, then melted the resin to release the type for reuse.
Four hundred years later Johannes Gutenberg did the same thing in Mainz with metal type, oil-based ink and a screw press. His version was, in several respects, technically better.
It was also four centuries later.
None of this is disputed. Every serious historian of technology knows it. And yet in the popular imagination Gutenberg invented printing and Bi Sheng is a footnote, when he is anything at all.
This essay is about that gap. Not the four hundred years. The other one.
Movable type is where the list starts, not where it ends.
Paper. Gunpowder. The magnetic compass. The seismograph. The blast furnace. Cast iron. The chain drive. The spinning wheel. Canal locks. The stern-mounted rudder. Porcelain. Matches. The crossbow. Seed drills and row planting, which arrived in Europe in the eighteenth century as agricultural revolution and had been standard in China for about two thousand years.