Hundreds of Years Before Gutenberg, Books Existed

A few years ago, an Amherst writer named Dick Teresi came to interview me about a story he was writing for the AARP magazine about RV'ing. I picked up the recent issue of the magazine tonight, and found out that the article ran in the May/June issue.

While trying to find the text on line I instead found a review of one of Teresi's books called 'Lost Discoveries," in which he challenges the notion that Europeans and whites were the great and earliest inventors in math and science. The paragraph below was especially enlightening.

"The specific non-European discoveries that make up nearly all the book are too numerous to detail. In India, for example, the atomic theory appeared centuries before it did in Greece. Indian mathematicians not only used the zero and devised algebra, logarithms, trigonometry, and the ancestors of our current numerals, but also developed a form of calculus centuries before Leibnitz and Newton.

These discoveries were adopted and expanded by medieval Moslems, who among other accomplishments invented decimal fractions (e.g., .5 for 1/2). Again, all three of the discoveries that Francis Bacon credited with marking the beginning of the modern world -- gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and printing -- came from China.

When Gutenberg set the Mainz Bible in print in 1456, Chinese libraries already held editions of numerous books printed in movable type, a technology developed in the 1040s. The Chinese still preserve thousands of printed texts from every period going back 2,000 years."