Printing Press

The soothing sound of the sunday times being tamped out sounds more like a metal mastodon munching on a midnight snack rather than the world's news being neatly assigned to section A of the weekend paper. Surprisingly, this iconic industrial environment is the perfect place to pack it in for a nice nap. Widely believed to be the most important invention after the wheel, by 1500, printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million volumes. In the 16th century, it rose tenfold to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies. A single Renaissance printing press could produce 3,600 pages per workday, compared to forty by hand-printing. The ready availability and affordability of the printed word to the general public boosted the democratization of knowledge and laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=17318