It may perhaps be said, that so apparently simple a matter could surely not have taken so long a time to contrive, nor have cost so much as has been implied, in the way of preliminary experiments. But the printing press, in its origin, was an entirely novel invention. The whole contrivance,--although the idea, as we learn from Arnold de Bergel, (1541), was first suggested to Gutenberg’s mind by the wine-press,[46]--had to be thought out by its inventor, step by step, unhelped by any adventitious aid. Gutenberg, versatile genius as he was, may not have been an expert mechanic; he was certainly unable to avail himself of the many appliances which modern inventors find ready to their hand at every turn, for they were non-existent, and he had therefore to realize his designs the best way he could, without revealing their object to those whom he employed to carry them into execution. His partners indeed might know that a new kind of block or book printing was intended, but yet be ignorant of the real purpose for which the costly and still unfinished machines were meant; for it is evident, judging from the depositions of Anthonie Heilmann, concerning the _formen_, (‘frames or models’), and of others who speak of presses (_pressen_) in the plural, that more than one had been planned. Unless such knowledge had been imparted to them, and was further supported by specimens of block Alphabets, school Grammars, and Vocabularies, it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand how their faith in the ultimate success of “_the wonderful art_,” could have been so long sustained. Now, bearing in mind that three hundred and seventy years later, it cost a practical printer and engineer, aided by other men’s ideas, and by every facility which science could give for the quick and accurate production of whatever his ingenuity designed,--no less than seven years of labour, and an outlay on the part of his employers of £16,000, before he achieved success in the first cylindrical printing machine;[47] a machine which was merely required to print off sheets more rapidly than could be done by the hand-press;--the marvel is, not that Gutenberg’s invention cost him the time and labour and money it did; but that in realizing his ideas, he perfected them so thoroughly, that the principles of his hand-press have not to this day been improved. Different adaptations of leverage power may have been tried to produce the same effects, and different materials made use of in the manufacture of the machinery, but the hand-press of to-day is essentially the same as that with which the first Typographer printed his first book. The greater therefore is the honor due to its inventor.