Johannes Gutenberg
Approximate date inferred for Gutenberg's earliest printing-related work in Strasbourg
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The whole date rests on a goldsmith telling a court three years later that he had earned about 100 guilders for something “belonging to printing.”
A year reached by subtraction
No surviving document records Johannes Gutenberg beginning work on a printing press in 1436. The year is inferred backwards from testimony given in a Strasbourg lawsuit in December 1439, when the goldsmith Hans Dünne said Gutenberg had paid him about 100 guilders roughly three years earlier for work connected with printing.
Because Dünne's statement does not describe the work, historians cannot establish whether it involved movable type, block printing, punches, moulds or another metalworking process.
What Strasbourg records do show
Gutenberg's presence in Strasbourg is documented from 1434. The business consortium involving Andreas Dritzehn and Andreas Heilmann — often attached to this date — was formed later, around 1438.
The only surviving personal-life reference from 1436 itself is not a printing record but a lawsuit alleging that Gutenberg had broken a promise of marriage.
The limits of the evidence
The medieval word translated as “printing” or “pressing” is not sufficient by itself to prove movable-type typography, and there was no single documented moment when Gutenberg “invented the printing press”: the European system combined presses, type casting, matrices, ink and production practices developed over time. Movable type also existed in East Asia well before him.
The International Gutenberg Society characterises the Strasbourg years as an experimental phase and states that whether Gutenberg had already invented letterpress or printed a book cannot be answered definitively.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 4 sources 3 audit passes Date disputed
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~1436.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The year is calculated from a witness’s approximate recollection in 1439, not from a document created in 1436. Source: https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/ppn118543768.html
- The medieval word translated as “printing” or “pressing” is not sufficient by itself to prove movable-type typography. Source: https://www.gutenberg-gesellschaft.de/en/johannes-gutenberg/gutenberg-in-strasbourg/seite
- The Gutenberg Society characterizes Strasbourg as an experimental phase and states that the questions of whether Gutenberg had already invented letterpress or printed a book cannot be answered definitively. Source: https://www.gutenberg-gesellschaft.de/en/johannes-gutenberg/gutenberg-in-strasbourg/seite