The Printing Press.

If you asked a large number of people what the most important invention has been, many would say the printing press. Others minght say the wheel.
But even though its debatable whether the appearance of the printing prees affected the course of history more than the wheel, the printing prees ranks within the top two or there inventions in history.
Long be fore the telephon, the television, the radio, the cumputer, then written word was the only way to communicate ideas to people too far away to talk with. Until the sixth or seventh century, all books had to be written by hand. Creating a book was difficult, and in comparison whit today, very feww books existed. Therefare, very feww people read books.
In the sixth and seventh centuries, the Japonese and Chinese invented a way to print pages by carving character and pictures on wooden and ivery. They would put ink on the blocks and then press paper on to the ink, printing a page from the block.This process is called letterpress priting. The invention of letter presss printing was a great advance in communication because each block could beinked many times and many copies of each page could be made. Many books could read the same book.
Later, in the 11th century, another great advence ocurred. The Chinese invented "movable" type. Each character was made as a separate blook which could be used many times in many texts. This meant that pages could be created by putting together individual characters rather than hoving to have whole pages carred. Movable type was much more efficient than the earlier Japonese and Chinese print blocks because books could be created much more quickly by people with less skill.
In Europa, movable type wis used for the fyrst times in the 15th century. And there, Johannes Gutenberg invented type castihg, a way to make movable type more quicky, by melting metalond pouring in to the forms of the letters. This greatly in creased the speed of priting, and eventually made books available to mamy more people.