Chinese Inventions Packet - Wyoming City Schools

PrintingIn early Chinese history, all writing hadto be copied by hand but that was bothtime-consuming and expensive. TheChinese needed a way to quickly andeasily spread information. At the time,the Chinese were already pressingletters and images into coins and officialseals and were carving letters into stone.They found that by putting ink onto acarving on a stone and then pressingpaper against it, the ink would betransferred onto the paper in the shapeof the carving. It worked just like like astamp. A printer could use this stampto copy the image hundreds of times.It didn't take long before theChinese were using this technology toreproduce whole pages of information.A thin piece of paper with writing wouldbe glued face down onto a block ofwood. The characters could be seenthrough the paper like a faint tracingexcept the image was backwards. Theprinter would cut away the wood aroundthe characters. What would be left is a“stamp” of that page which could beused to reprint the information as manytimes as necessary. While one bookmight need hundreds of these woodenstamps but the blocks could be storedand used again.ChineseInvention ofPrintingChineseInvention ofPaper