AURORA - Few inventions in the history of human kind can rival the invention of printing.

This allowed text to be more readily copied and disseminated throughout the world, ushering in the beginning of an era when communication, ideas and theories could be more readily shared, drawing the world closer together.

On Thursday night, Mark Dimunation, chief of rare books and special collections at the Library of Congress, spoke at Wells College's recently opened Margie Filter Hostetter Lecture Room at Stratton Hall on the subject of the revolution and impact of printing and how that influenced the development of scientific thought in Europe in a lecture titled “Science as an Open Book: Early Printing and the Scientific Revolution”.

Dimunation began his talk with Galileo.

“It was November 30th, 1609,” he said. “Galileo looked through his telescope at the moon and he made a drawing and from those he made watercolors and he chose four engravings for his small pamphlet “Starry Messenger.” Five years later, a copy of this book was found in Beijing, China, all from the revolution of printing.”

While Guttenberg is popularly believed to be the inventor of moveable printing, Dimunation pointed out that there is evidence to support that a version of this method was already in place in Korea more than 100 years before Guttenberg.

But, he said, as his talk mostly pertained to the impact of printing on Europe, he focused on Guttenberg.

“It was a world ready for change,” Dimunation said. “This took place in the medieval world. The process of copying one text was slow and the world was ready for a change.”

The process of copying text by hand also led to other problems such as derivations and inaccuracies created by the copyists who worked with the text.

“Scribes worked so hard,” Dimunation said. “They worked to protect knowledge, but no matter how hard they had worked, the knowledge was lost to the corruptions of copying.”

With the invention of moveable metal face print, not only could copies of text be made more rapidly, they could be made far more accurately.

“This was a means to preserve knowledge,” Dimunation said. “The effect of this led to the Renaissance, to the Reformation and to the Scientific Revolution. Without this revolution Martin Luther's 95 Theses would have just been a piece of paper hammered to the door of a church.”

The impact of new printing methods was felt all through Europe, with books covering a wide variety of topics, from lettering to arithmetic.

Dimunation said this ability to print also had a considerable impact on the scientific community, from studying Euclid's geometry to human anatomy.

“These ideas were no longer isolated,” Dimunation said. “Having these text printed made it possible for everyone to be on the same page, the same level in terms of sharing information and new discoveries.”

Throughout this period, scientists would publish works with detailed descriptions and drawings representing discoveries, such as the face of the moon or the moons of other planets.

“It gave substance,” Dimunation said. “It put form to something people couldn't see, something abstract. Suddenly new aspects of the world could be explained.”

With the publication of the works of Kepler, Galileo and Newton, the understanding of the world, the planet and the universe took huge leaps forward.

“The printing revolution ushered in another revolution,” Dimunation said. “It helped to shape the world of scientific endeavors and the rest of the world.”