printing press: How America Would Change Without It
printing press — the quiet engine of modern life. Take it away and the United States tilts into a slower, smaller world where ideas crawl, knowledge costs a fortune, and national debates never quite go national. This isn’t mere nostalgia for ink and paper; it’s a counterfactual that spotlights how deeply the printing press underwrote American literacy, politics, science, and identity. A nation without mass duplication
Before the printing press, books were hand-copied, error-prone, and rare. Scale solves these problems. The printing press multiplied accurate copies, cut prices, and let ideas travel far beyond local gossip networks. Remove it, and information becomes localized and fragile again—dependent on memory, itinerant lecturers, and letters that may never arrive. “Imagine if th...