'From Gutenberg to Google,' how human inquiry became a networked activity

When Johannes Gutenberg was born in the German city of Mainz around the turn of the 15th century, knowledge in the Western world was largely localized, artisanal, and intensely exclusionary. Books were expensive luxuries, the products of time-consuming specialized labor; each one was unique in both its beauty and its errors. And because of their relative scarcity, books were also considerably controllable: locking them in libraries and chaining them to lecterns turned their contents into private property. 

As Tom, all that began to change around 1450 when Gutenberg combined a suite of technological innovations to revolutionize the way books were made. “The Western world had never before seen the rapid production of hundreds of perfect-quality pages, each one identical to the others,” Wheeler writes. “It was a moment to be savored, a decade-long quest with a transformative result.”