The invention of the printing press is interesting.
There was a flourishing book trade in the Roman Empire, but like most everything else books were produced through slave labour, there was enough of it to go around - imagine a big room full of scribe slaves and a reader slave at the front dictating from the master copy. Even in a podunk backwater town like Oxyrhynchus you could buy mass-produced books of quality. What was different in the time of Gutenberg is that there was a demand for books again, but scriptoria couldn't keep up with it. Mass production of books just had to happen, and this time around it had to be done without a plentiful supply of literate slaves.
There is something to be said for idea that circumstances determine what inventions will be made - it seems that right now the best minds in Western civilization are hard at work at Wall Street and Facebook, as if the most pressing problems were how to work the stock market and how to make better targeted advertising.
That is an interesting thought, but actually I would say that there have never been so many people been inventing new important things at the same time.
Smartphones, new ways of communication (such as Facebook), finding information (Google, Wikipedia), artificial intelligence (such as deep learning), ... just to name a few examples from the technology field, one of many.
There was a flourishing book trade in the Roman Empire, but like most everything else books were produced through slave labour, there was enough of it to go around - imagine a big room full of scribe slaves and a reader slave at the front dictating from the master copy. Even in a podunk backwater town like Oxyrhynchus you could buy mass-produced books of quality. What was different in the time of Gutenberg is that there was a demand for books again, but scriptoria couldn't keep up with it. Mass production of books just had to happen, and this time around it had to be done without a plentiful supply of literate slaves.
There is something to be said for idea that circumstances determine what inventions will be made - it seems that right now the best minds in Western civilization are hard at work at Wall Street and Facebook, as if the most pressing problems were how to work the stock market and how to make better targeted advertising.