Can a Particle Accelerator Trace the Origins of Printing?

Other Asian innovations, like paper and gunpowder, have a clear record of dissemination to Europe, with artifacts and record-keeping that trace their travel westward along routes of trade and conquest. There is no evidence that European printers saw the fruits of Asian printing, like money or pamphlets, and then tried to reverse engineer the processes that made them—though it’s plausible, given increasing contact between east and west in the 13th and 14th centuries. A close look at both printing technologies has also revealed more differences than similarities: different inks and different processes to create the metal types, which stamp ink into the page. But in the early 2000s, in front of a packed house at a literary club in New York City, a pair of Princeton researchers outlined a startling theory: Perhaps Gutenberg’s creations represented less of a singular technological triumph than people had previously thought. As a way of kicking off a deeper study of Gutenberg’s methods for the Jikji project, Silverman asked Jonathan Thornton, a retired librarian and craftsman at the State University of New York at Buffalo, to see whether he could recreate the typographic flaws using sandcasting techniques in his own workshop.