Aug 08, 2023
Okay, pay attention today all. This puzzler is long, and it has a lot of detail to it. This is a bit of history.
Here goes.
It was a dark and stormy night in the summer of 1347 and a small Genoese trading post in the Crimea. The Hungarians and the Mongols had laid siege to this little trading post in the city-state of Genoa. So, some of the Mongolian soldiers began to get sick, during the siege. In fact, they got really sick and they began to die.
One of the Hungarian generals said, "Hey, I got an idea. We'll build a catapult and fling these bodies over the wall. So the soldiers inside will get sick and die too. And then we can win the siege of the outpost."
So, that's what they did. They catapulted the bodies over the wall into the outpost.
However, some of the people inside the trading post managed to escape the siege. They escaped the city by boat. They sail for a while until they wind up in the Sicilian city of Messina. So they arrive there safely, or so they think... They arrive in the town with all their gold, and unknowingly, carrying this disease.
Within a couple of months, half the city of Messina is dead. Within six months, half of Sicily is dead. Within two years time, it spread to Italy, and Southern Europe, and by 1350, it spread all over the continent of Europe, up the Baltics, and into England, and killed roughly half the population of Europe.
And of course, we all know this as the bubonic plague or the Black Death.
Okay, now we jump ahead about 75-100 years or so, and a fellow by the name of Gutenberg invents the printing press. So, there were other printing presses at the time, but they used wood and parchment. This one had a movable type and used lead and stuff. Very advanced for the time. And it printed on actual paper. And as luck would have it, there happened to be a lot of this special type of paper that Gutenberg would use to print on. There was a huge surplus of this paper available that made Gutenberg's invention a success.
Now the question is, how are these two things related?
How could the bubonic plague have benefited Gutenberg and his invention of the printing press?
Good luck, all.
Time for the answer to this very long, very historic puzzler.
So the question was, how are the bubonic plague and Gutenberg's printing press 75-100 years later possibly related?
How could the bubonic plague have benefited Gutenberg and his invention of the printing press?
So, here is the answer.
When Gutenberg created his printing press, it was different from others of the day. Others used wood type to print. Instead of this wooden type, he was using this metal type which was designed to print very well on paper. The wooden type presses were printed on parchment. So his new invention was printed on paper.
There just happen to be an abundance of the special kind of paper that was perfect for the printer and, more importantly, there was a huge quantity of it. There was in fact a huge surplus of this paper available that made Gutenberg's invention a success.
So, how did the bubonic plague affect the supply of printable paper years and years later?
When many, many people died from the plague, they left behind all of their belongings, and those belongings were inherited by the people who didn't die. Among all those belongings were their clothes. Half of Europe died and left behind all their clothing.
Around 100 A.D. the Chinese had discovered how to make paper. And shortly thereafter they figured out how to make rag paper. And today, books and currency are still printed on rag paper. And rag paper was what Gutenberg's press used, and there was so much rag paper available because of all the clothing that was left behind years before. Because they ended up using the clothing to create a new type of paper.
That one wins the prize for the longest puzzler on record, I think...
