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com.

(dramatic music) - You're watching Biography of the Millennium on A and E, as we count down to the
number one person of the past 1 000 years.

Scientists and kings, artists, and even mad men, we've met them all on our list.

Now we reach the top, the number one choice of our panel, the person they picked as the most
influential of the past 1 000 years.

As always, our experts did not exactly speak with one voice.

- I thought about how you define influence.

Who did something that was both helpful and essential, and that's how I came up with Copernicus.

- There's no doubt in my mind and no question that Isaac Newton not only belongs in the top 10, but if
I had a vote in it, he'd be number one.

- [Harry] Newton and Copernicus were bonafide geniuses, but our panel's number one person of the
millennium was a hard working German tradesman born 600 years ago.

He wasn't a brilliant philosopher or theorist, he wasn't even a very good businessman, but he was
persistent and ingenious, laboring for years to perfect one invention.

The invention was the printing press; the man, Johann Gutenberg.

- Gutenberg would be surprised, I think, to be number one because he was not a genius.

Newton knew he was a genius, Copernicus knew he was changing the whole way we looked at the
world.

Gutenberg was sort of a tinkerer, a shopkeeper, somebody who puts together something, and yet the
inventing of the printing press, even if it isn't the great genius who does it, transforms our society
perhaps as much as the theory of gravity or the theory of calculus.

- [Harry] When Gutenberg printed 200 copies of the Holy Bible in 1455, it marked a turning point in our
civilization.

- Before Gutenberg, if you wanted news it almost always was oral.

The only communication, if you lived in some village somewhere in Europe, the only time you ever
heard anything about the outside world was not because a letter or a book arrived, it was because
someone arrived, someone came and brought news.

- [Harry] Printing was not a new idea.

The Chinese and Koreans had used wood and metal type to print, but the process was slow and
unwieldy.
In the West, most books were hand-copied by monks, but a single volume might take months to
produce.

Gutenberg's breakthrough came when he combined earlier printing techniques with a new design for
movable metal type.

Then he put it all together with a press similar to one used to make olive oil.

And with this, printing history was made.

Gutenberg would continue in the printing trade until his death, but he was always short of money.

In fact, when his splendid Bible appeared, all the profits went to his creditors.

Yet, what Gutenberg wrought was astonishing.

Within 50 years, 20 million books had been printed in Europe.

In another hundred years, that number increased tenfold.

- We evolved from being a society that was all city states and villages that didn't communicate to being
a global society in which all information could be communicated, that starts with the printing press.

- [Harry] Gutenberg's breakthrough helped Renaissance thought to flower and spread, and Martin
Luther's Protestant Reformation to attract new followers.

Then came the scientific discoveries of Descartes, Galileo, and Newton, and of course the Industrial
Revolution.

News of technological breakthroughs, innovations in politics and the arts, all spread swiftly through
newspapers, pamphlets and journals.

Gutenberg's printing press unleashed the power of ideas and in many ways, his information revolution
is only just beginning.

- Gutenberg allowed us to transmit information so much more easily and freely.

That continues through the current day, through the invention of the beginning of the century of radio,
then of television, then of the internet and email.

It begins with Gutenberg, and it's a 500-year process.

- [Harry] Over the past five centuries, that information has altered the face of history.

Power left the hands of the elite, a literate middle class was born, and all around the world
authoritarian states have found it more and more difficult to keep their citizens in the dark.

- Governments may say don't print this in the newspaper, don't pass this information around, but it's
all being faxed around.

You can't hide that much from the people any more.

- The effect of the press on our lives is essential.

We can't, as a democracy, live without it.

It infuriates us, there's lots of bad press, but I've seen the opposite.

I've lived in the Soviet Union in the bad old days.

I've seen the effect of a non-press on a people, and if that's the option, then I think every American
would say, "Count me out.

" - I think what the printing press does is it makes democracy more inevitable, because when people
have ideas, when people have information, people will have power.

That's what the French Revolution is about, the American Revolution is about.

And what happens in the years from Gutenberg's inventing of the printing press to today is the gradual
growth of democracy, freedom, liberty, and personal empowerment.

You don't have that if you don't have the printing press.

- [Harry] So much of what defines our millennium would never have happened without Gutenberg's
printing press and its astonishing ability to get the word out.

- If we had no Gutenberg, we wouldn't have had Shakespeare.

If we'd had no Gutenberg, we wouldn't have had Karl Marx.

If we'd had no Gutenberg, we wouldn't have had Albert Einstein.

- [Harry] Virtually every person on our millennium list of 100 owes a debt to Johann Gutenberg.

Consider those who wrote and published their theories and ideas like Darwin and his "Origin of Species
" Jefferson's "Declaration of Independence " even Hitler's "Mein Kampf.

" Were it not for Gutenberg, they might not have been inspired to greatness or infamy by reading the
works of others, and their own thoughts and ideas would not have survived beyond their own lifetime
to influence future generations.

Artists like Michelangelo or Picasso, Beethoven or The Beatles, scientists like Marie Curie, Alexander
Fleming, or Sigmund Freud; their creations and discoveries have been reproduced on the printed page,
broadcast on radio and television, and are now available to whole new audiences via the internet,
thanks again to the printer from Mainz, Germany.

It's hard to imagine who may be the number one person of the next millennium, but there's no doubt
they, too, will owe a great debt to Johann Gutenberg.

- Without Gutenberg, I would say that we wouldn't be entering the next millennium, we would now be
contemplating what it would be like to reach the 1600s.

We would be 500 years behind our time.

(dramatic music) - And so we come to an end, a hundred lives for a thousand years.

Of course our list is only a beginning.

So many remarkable figures were left off, so many creative geniuses and world leaders.

In the end though, the point of this list is not any one individual name, but all of them together, the
whole list itself, for it reminds us of the heights and the depths of which we are capable.

It shows us the ways that one human being can make a difference, that one life can influence the world
for all time.

From the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, I'm Harry Smith, goodnight.

- [Announcer] The Biography of the Millennium has--