- 1456 – The printing of the Gutenberg Bible is completed.
- 1690 – Job Charnock of the East India Company establishes a factory in Calcutta, an event formerly considered the founding of the city (in 2003 the Calcutta High Court ruled that the city has no birthday).
- 1891 – Thomas Edison patents the motion picture camera.
- 1909 – Workers start pouring concrete for the Panama Canal.
- 1998 – First RFID human implantation tested in the United Kingdom.
The Gutenberg Bible was the first major book printed with movable type in the West and the first major book produced on a printing press anywhere in the world. It marked the start of the “Gutenberg Revolution” and the age of the printed book in the West. Widely praised for its high aesthetic and artistic qualities, the book has an iconic status. It is an edition of the Vulgate, printed by Johannes Gutenberg, in Mainz, Germany, in the 1450s. Forty-eight copies, or substantial portions of copies, survive, and they are considered by many sources to be the most valuable books in the world, even though a complete copy has not been sold since 1978.
Interested in knowing more about the Gutenberg Bible? Listen to this: In 1450, all of western Europe’s books were hand-copied and amounted to no more than are in a modern public library. By 1500, printed books numbered in the millions. Johann Gutenberg’s invention of movable type ignited the explosion of art, literature, and scientific research that accelerated the Renaissance and led directly to the Modern Age. In Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words, you’ll meet the genius who fostered this revolution, discover the surprising ambitions that drove him, and learn how a single, obscure artisan changed the course of history.