Original subtitles

- [Male Narrator] 1984, the Vatican.

Pope Benjamin II has failed.

Surrounded by his few remaining faithful,

he can only acknowledge his defeat.

After five years of bitter fighting,

Protestant forces have succeeded in overwhelming

the armies of the Holy See.

The Vatican has just fallen.

When they emerged in the 16th century,

the antiestablishment ideas of the Protestants

were brutally stifled by the Catholic Church.

Secretly, century after century,

they grew underground, safe from repression,

spreading through all levels of society.

In the 20th century, they became sufficiently powerful

to oppose the Catholic armies.

The great war of religion then broke out.

But none of this ever happened.

In 1455, a tiny grand of sand will lead

to the invention of the printing press,

and the dissemination of ideas throughout Europe.

Our history is no more than a series of incredible events.

Every one of us can influence its course.

(dramatic music)

The most infinitesimal of our decisions

can influence the future of humanity.

To know the past is to foresee the future.

1438, Strasbourg.

Witnesses spot a mysterious machine

hidden at the back of a certain Gutenberg's workshop.

15 years later, to general stupefaction,

Gutenberg publishes the first book ever printed, a bible.

1517, Martin Luther produces a mass printing

of his 95 Theses

denouncing the excesses of the Catholic Church.

These three intimately connected events

are key moments in the birth and in the development

of the printing press.

It will revolutionize European society.

Present-day Iraq, a little over 5,000 years ago.

In this vast, fertile territory,

humanity is on the point of entering a new age.

They have just invented writing.

This revolution is driven by necessity.

The appearance of the first cities

forces the people to manage their food stocks,

settle conflicts.

Writing allows them to keep a note of exchanges,

to record events.

Humanity is writing itself into history.

From the third millennium BC,

all the great cultures of the Middle East

adopted some system of writing.

At first, this is only a few signs or symbols.

Then the systems diversify

according to the writing medium used.

In Mesopotamia, scribes punched clay tablets.

The Romans used wax tablets,

the Chinese bamboo or tortoiseshell.

To defeat time, they carved the history of the gods

and the pharaohs into the stone of obelisks

or the gold of funerary chambers.

Placed end to end, the sheets of papyrus form rolls

that can reach 30 meters in length, called volumena.

The Greeks use them to relate their epic adventures.

They say that under Julius Caesar,

the Library of Alexandria had 700,000 of them.

The Romans also used wax tablets,

the Chinese bamboo or tortoiseshell, then paper.

The invention of the sturdy parchment,

made of skin and not vegetable,

enables better conservation of writings.

The codex is soon preferred over the voluminous scrolls.

Forerunner of the book, it introduces the notion of pages

that need to be turned.

In the Middle Ages, the manuscript book,

consisting of bound and indexed pages,

is considered a priceless treasure.

In scriptoria scattered across Europe,

armies of monk copyists reproduce not only biblical texts,

but also the ancient works of Plato,

Aristophanes, and Hippocrates,

letter by letter.

Century after century,

by copying texts from one medium to another,

their painstaking labor allowed countless works

to come down to us.

All the texts that were not regularly

transferred to new media

were lost forever.

- [Female Narrator] Welcome to the memory of humanity.

Here, we can control time,

analyze and compare billions of events,

and alter them to rewrite history endlessly.

All the events in our history, however minute they might be,

are memorized and interconnected.

It only requires one to be changed

for all the others to be shaken to the core.

Man has been using spoken language

for more than 100,000 years,

but has only been writing for some 5,000 years.

Writing means transcoding language in a visual form,

drawing the word.

There are several systems in existence.

Hieroglyphs consist of using a symbol

for each word, person, or notion.

Therefore, it requires an enormous number

of different symbols to represent the world.

Egyptian scribes needed to memorize a great number

of different hieroglyphs.

The invention of the alphabet is a revolution.

Describing sounds and not notions,

this phonetic system means one can form

any word, any idea.

The alphabet is a code.

We encode when we write, we decode when we read.

More complex to master, it is also much more powerful.

It enables the transcoding of any language.

However, all these systems have the same Achilles heel.

If for one reason or another the code is forgotten,

it is then impossible to decode the texts.

This is what almost happened with the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

(chattering) (bell chiming)

(medieval music)

- [Male Narrator] Mainz, 1450.

Johann Gensfleisch, known as Gutenberg,

has a meeting with a businessman.

Although from a wealthy family,

he needs funds to complete his grand project,

which is a jealously guarded secret.

He doesn't know it yet,

but he is about to turn history upside down.

Gutenberg was born around 1400, in the small town of Mainz,

in the Holy Roman Empire.

His father is one of the town's leaders,

so his family is secure from want.

But Gutenberg is not a man to be contented

with a private income.

Obsessed by engineering and mechanics,

he loves manual activities and crafts.

Perfecting mechanisms and new designs

seem to particularly stimulate his inventive spirit.

In 1428, he leaves Mainz for Strasbourg.

He quickly finds associates

to develop several small, profitable businesses.

All these very different experiments provide him

with a sound knowledge of working gold and metal,

but, hidden away at the back of his workshop,

he keeps his secret project to himself.

However, one day, some people claim to have spotted

a sort of machine.

They describe something technical,

made of metal that can be taken apart.

Apparently, it is driven by a press.

The inventor quickly shrouds himself in mystery.

There's no point in having ideas

if others steal them from you.

But Gutenberg cannot carry the project by himself.

He needs help, and above all, money.

(dramatic music)

He must run the risk of discussing it with a financier.

He turns to his associates, among whom Andreas Dritzehn,

who dies before he was able to see the completed work,

but not before having invested a large sum of money in it.

The dead man's brothers immediately

try to seize the precious machine,

bringing a lawsuit against Gutenberg.

In 1448, the inventor returned to Mainz,

for the work is not finished.

Everything remains to be done.

Gutenberg, an excellent engineer,

needs craftsmen, experts in their fields.

More seriously, materials cost a fortune.

At the time, paper itself is a rare commodity.

He needs fresh money.

So he takes the risk of presenting the idea

to a second person, Johann Fust.

The businessman believes in the project.

He decides to back Gutenberg,

who immediately gets back to the task,

the development of the first printing press

with movable letters.

(eerie music)

- [Female Narrator] We have just reached a turning point.

A turning point is a key event,

a crossroads in our history,

where the world swings one way or the other.

Alone, Gutenberg can do nothing.

By associating with Johann Fust,

he gains the financial piece that enables him

to devote himself 100% to his project.

Without that, he would've been constantly

lacking the materials and the indispensable skill.

It is nearly certain that the adventure

would've halted there.

The printing press would've been developed by somebody else,

but probably years later.

Like many another inventor,

Gutenberg would've emerged ruined.

His case is comparable to that

of Larry Page and Sergey Brin,

two 20th century American students.

Their aim was to create a new Internet search engine

more powerful than any in existence.

Having exhausted their own resources,

they managed to find a financial partner.

A few years later, they create Google.

Today, this mechanism is being challenged

by the system of participatory financing

known as crowdfunding.

Internet users can now finance all sorts of projects,

but the risk is high.

Their secret must largely be revealed to all.

(dramatic music)

- [Male Narrator] The work begins with

the meticulous carving of a letter,

imitating the writing of the period.

Once hardened, it becomes a highly resistant steel punch.

When hammered into a softer copper matrix,

the punch creates a character in relief.

This is then placed in a mold

into which is poured a very precise alloy

of lead, tin, and antimony.

When repeated, this operation is able to produce

thousands of identical characters.

We then move to the next stage,

composition of the page.

The characters are set out, one by one, line by line,

to form words, sentences, paragraphs.

Spaces are carefully calculated so that each line finishes

exactly at the edge of the column.

The frame is then bolted,

the characters coated with a black, greasy ink,

skillfully blended to be neither too liquid,

nor too sticky.

A sheet of damp paper is then placed on the characters

beneath a press.

All that remains is to work the arm.

It's as simple as that, but somebody had to think of it.

In a few hours, two craftsman complete a task

that would've taken a monk copyist several weeks to do.

A revolution.

And yet, Gutenberg invented nothing.

The press was already used in winemaking,

alloys and molds in goldsmith work,

while movable characters already existed in Asia.

Gutenberg's genius was to bring all these elements together,

divert them from their original use, improve them,

and orchestrate them like a musical conductor.

He is the originator of a process,

certainly the most important of the whole millennium,

mass printing.

Gutenberg not only set up the entire production method,

but he also applied it to an economic model,

production of cheap books rapidly and in quantity.

And for this, we can say that Gutenberg was a visionary,

and this vision will be crowned with success.

In 1454, after 21 months of production,

a masterpiece emerges from the Fust-Gutenberg workshops.

The bible, known as the Gutenberg Bible,

is the first printed book in history.

The 180 copies of the edition are said to have required

232,000 pressings,

and the print quality is so perfect

that it still amazes today.

- [Female Narrator] To invent.

An invention is a long process,

relying upon the research and progress of other people.

This long work always starts with a series of setbacks

that hamper motivation and sow doubts.

Then, logically, if you haven't given up,

you begin to see the first halting, fragile results.

By perfecting the method, polishing it,

you may then manage to adapt the invention for the market.

It is often only at this stage

that you know if the initial idea was a good one,

if all the effort was in vain, or not.

It all starts from an idea, an intuition, a vision.

Gutenberg imagined more than a machine.

He saw a global concept that would democratize reading.

In the 20th century, Steve Jobs didn't merely

solder components together,

he imagined a world where every home

would have a computer that was both friendly

and instinctive to use.

Today, Elon Musk, head of Tesla Motors and SpaceX,

is inspired by a vision of a future world

directed towards progress and sustainable development.

Our world will always need visionaries.

- [Male Narrator] 180 copies were published.

The Gutenberg Bible is an undeniable

technical and artistic success,

the irrefutable proof of enormous expertise.

But financially, it's another story.

Fust, the businessman, invested a huge amount of money.

He expects a return on his investment.

All the searching and perfecting the method

was a financial abyss that sales do not fill.

The relationship between the two men rapidly deteriorates.

They become suspicious of each other.

That's when Fust decides to take legal action.

He states that his investment was in fact a loan,

and demands repayment with interest.

Overall, Gutenberg ends up losing this case.

Even though he avoids financial ruin,

he loses part of his workshop and equipment.

But above all, he sees his former associate and financier

turn into his main competitor.

Because Fust, although chastened by the Gutenberg adventure,

has no intention of abandoning printing,

which he knows is revolutionary and promising.

More seriously, he forms a new association

with the inventor's former apprentice,

the talented Peter Schoeffer.

It's a harsh blow.

However, Gutenberg will continue his work.

For him, quantity comes before quality.

The revolution is underway.

The printing press will take off

and conquer the whole of Europe.

In the 15th century alone,

15 million copies will come off the presses.

In the following century, it's 100 million.

Although the first printed book was a bible,

this new technology will win over everyone,

including antiestablishment minds.

In 1517, Martin Luther publishes his 95 Theses

denouncing the abuses and deviations of the Catholic Church.

He is not the first to ideologically oppose the Holy See,

but clearly the first to take advantage

of mass production printing.

More than 300,000 copies of his writings

will be disseminated in this way.

His ideas will spread across Europe

like a trail of gunpowder.

This is the origin of the Reformation,

of the birth of Protestantism

that will change the face of Europe.

- [Female Narrator] The democratizing of knowledge.

The printing of thousands of books

will automatically reduce their price.

Knowledge will emerge from the great libraries,

the universities, and the scriptoria,

and will move into bookshops and businesses.

The major beneficiary is the Church,

which discovers an excellent way of spreading the Gospel

on a wider scale.

But it also enables large numbers of people

to consult books that were inaccessible before.

A critical mind is born.

Opposition is no longer confined to a geographical area,

but becomes widespread.

Without modern printing, it is almost certain

that Protestantism would've remained on the sidelines.

Our Internet plays the same role today.

New ideas flash across the globe at lightning speed,

and are reproduced in infinite numbers.

The walls of our world are suddenly torn down.

The wind of renewal and knowledge born in the 15th century

is again blowing in the 20th,

and does not seem about to die down.

(soft piano music)

- [Male Narrator] 15 million copies printed

in the 15th century, 100 in the next,

and one billion in the 18th.

Gutenberg'vention changed everything.

Our relationship to culture and knowledge,

our critical mind, our place in society.

We turned into demanding people,

thirsty for knowledge, curious about everything.

The 20th century witnessed other revolutions in its turn.

With the enormous advances made in microcomputing,

humanity was catapulted into the digital age.

The Internet changed everything.

(pulsing music)

We now live in a world where

the lightning evolution of communications terminals

and the proliferation of networks

are such that exchanges have become instantaneous.

Books have dematerialized, libraries, digitalized.

Knowledge stored online,

and memory achieved in connected databases.

If we had to digitalize all the knowledge created

from the dawn of humanity up till 2003,

it would represent five billion gigabytes of data.

In 2010, this amount is reached in just two days.

Every user is now author, composer, director.

Every minute we produce 350,000 tweets,

50 million SMS, and 200 million e-mails.

Our society is collapsing under an avalanche of data.

This tsunami requires the organization and management

of the Internet.

Like the medieval codex with its page numbers,

search engines help us find what we're looking for

in this digital ocean.

For a given question, an algorithm suggests

a selection of answers in a preferential order.

But how far are these engines influenced

by economic or political parameters?

In an age of fake news, it is now the user's task

to distinguish true from false.

Our brain no longer needs to remember everything,

but it must now be suspicious of everything.

But that is another story.

- [Female Narrator] The average lifespan

of an inscription on stone

is of the order of 10,000 years.

On parchment, around 1,000 years.

On film, 100.

Vinyl, 50.

Today, we are stocking exponential volumes of information

on media that will certainly not last longer than 20 years.

Never in the history of humanity

have we stored so much knowledge on such fragile mediums.

Equipment breaks down very quickly,

or becomes technologically outdated.

Will USB ports still exist in 100 years?

Will the JPEG compression codex still be used

so that our grandchildren can see all the photos

we take with our cellphones?

This is the reality.

Currently, we have no technical solution

to guarantee the preservation of our knowledge

beyond a few years.

We envisage computer museums,

Noah's Arks containing an example of every computer

kept in its original condition with no updates.

At exorbitant cost, we are managing to encode DNA strands

that could stock immense amounts of data,

but the only viable solution is to copy our entire knowledge

regularly onto new formats,

rather like the monk copyists of the Middle Ages.

It seems as if yet again we need another visionary.

(dramatic music)