Why simplifying complex knowledge leads to a better world order?
Nearly 600 years before Gutenberg, Chinese monks were setting ink to paper using a method known as block printing, in which wooden blocks are coated with ink and pressed to sheets of paper.
Then, an important advancement to woodblock printing came in the early eleventh century, when a Chinese peasant developed the world's first movable type.
Despite early successes with movable type, this method of printing didn't catch on as quickly in Asia as it did in Europe. This was most likely due to the complexities of Asian writing systems. Unlike the concise, alphabetic script of many Western languages, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are made up of thousands of characters, which would each have to be cast individually for printing using movable type. Such a daunting task may have made woodblocks seem like a more efficient option for printing in these languages.
However, in the middle of the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg developed a more efficient method of printing, which changed the world to what we are today, since all major scientific inventions happened after this print technology.