The History of the Printing Press: From Bi Sheng to DTF

The story of printing is usually told as starting with one German goldsmith in the 1450s. The real story starts four centuries earlier, in China and Korea, and the popular version leaves most of it out. Here's the fuller timeline — and where a modern DTF printer fits into it.

Bi Sheng and ceramic type, China, c.1040

The earliest known form of movable type is credited to Bi Sheng, a Chinese artisan working around 1040, who created individual characters from baked ceramic material that could be arranged, inked and reused — a fundamentally different approach to the woodblock printing already in use across China, where an entire page had to be carved as one fixed block.

Wang Zhen's wooden type, segments-1297

Ceramic type was fragile and difficult to work with at scale. Around 1297, the official and inventor Wang Zhen developed a system of wooden movable type, along with a revolving typecase that made it faster for a printer to find and arrange the characters needed for a page — a genuine production-engineering improvement, not just a material swap.

Korea's metal type: 1234 and Jikji, 1377

Korea's Goryeo Kingdom took movable type further, casting individual characters in metal rather than wood or ceramic. Korean records describe books printed from metal type as early as 1234, though none of those specific early printings survive today. What does survive is Jikji, a collection of Buddhist teachings printed in Korea in 1377 — the oldest known surviving book printed with movable metal type anywhere in the world, predating Gutenberg's Bible by nearly eighty years.

Gutenberg and the European press, 1440s–1455

Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith in Mainz, spent the 1440s developing a printing system suited specifically to European alphabets and paper markets: metal type cast from a reusable mould, oil-based ink, and a screw-driven wooden press adapted from wine and olive presses of the period. His workshop was operating by around 1450, and by 1454–1455 had produced the Gutenberg Bible — the first major book printed in the West using movable type, and one that still survives in around 180 copies today.

So who "invented" printing?

Both things are true at once: movable type printing existed in East Asia centuries before Gutenberg, and Gutenberg independently built something genuinely new — a complete, commercially scalable system suited to alphabetic script, capable of long print runs at a cost that made books available to a much wider public than ever before. His system, not the isolated idea of movable type, is what triggered Europe's information revolution: literacy spread, and printed material became cheap enough to be genuinely common for the first time in history.

From the hand press to the machine age

Gutenberg's wooden screw press remained the basic design for over three centuries. Steam-powered cylinder presses in the 19th century, and later offset lithography, each multiplied printing speed and dropped the cost per copy again — the same pattern repeating: faster, cheaper, more accessible, every generation.

Printing on fabric: a parallel story

Everything above concerns printing on paper. Printing on fabric followed its own separate path — stencil-based screen printing developed in China around the Song Dynasty and eventually reached England as a patented process in 1907. If you want that side of the story, from silk-screen patents to Andy Warhol to the modern t-shirt, see our History of Screen Printing & the Graphic Tee.

Today: on-demand digital printing

Direct-to-film garment printing is the latest chapter in the same long trend that started with Bi Sheng's ceramic characters: each innovation makes printing faster, cheaper and available to more people, with less waste and lower setup cost than the method before it. A single, one-off design printed to order with no minimum run size would have been unthinkable at almost any earlier point in this history — it's only possible because of everything that came before it.

Frequently asked questions

Who really invented movable type printing?

Movable type began in China with Bi Sheng's ceramic characters around 1040, was refined with wooden type by Wang Zhen around 1297, and advanced further with Korean metal type, with the surviving book Jikji printed in Korea in 1377. Johannes Gutenberg independently developed a separate, mechanised European system in the 1440s and 1450s.

What is the oldest surviving book printed with movable type?

Jikji, a Korean Buddhist text printed in 1377, is the oldest known surviving book printed using movable metal type.

Why is Gutenberg still credited as such a major figure?

Gutenberg built a complete, commercially scalable printing system suited to European alphabets and paper markets, which triggered a rapid spread of literacy and printed material across Europe — a different kind of achievement to the earlier, separate invention of movable type itself.

How does modern garment printing connect to this history?

DTF and other digital printing methods continue the same long-running trend: each new printing technology makes printing faster, cheaper and available in smaller runs than the one before it.