The 'Father' of Information Dissemination

There are a few key persons in history to which we can point and say that person was at the start of something really big. Printing presses changed the world by making copies of information available to people in a way never before realized.

Johann Gutenberg made what may seem a simple contribution by his invention that printed pages of books, leaflets, flyers, and news papers. We might dub this inventor as the father of information dissemination simply because printing then and now is an important vehicle by which humanity shares information.

Science and Scripture circle the globe... in fact, the most published of all books — the Bible — could not be broadcast in printed form in so many languages and to every country on the face of the globe if it were not for the printing press. The printing of the Bible, especially in an early era, made the distribution of this source of information a plank in the global stage of human consciousness for all time to come. In years to follow, religious events may seem to be overshadowed by the secular realm, the science discoveries, the advancement of global travel, economics, politics and the like. But these are the players that strut across the stage built earlier.

Eventually electronic media gain ground (especially in the 20th century), but even in an age of broadband video and audio transmission, printed information is today still as much a part of the dissemination started with Gutenberg's invention. All forms of information today grow at an exponential rate — well beyond any one person's comprehension. Here again is change in motion!

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