What caused the change?
Labs / History
The Printing Press
On the left, a scriptorium of monks copies books one page at a time while printing presses stamp identical pages by the hundred. Add presses, set the working day, and run the years forward — then watch the price of a book collapse and the share of people who can read climb across the chart on the right. Drag anywhere on the chart to inspect a single year.
Labs / History / The Printing Press
The Printing Press
On the left, a scriptorium of monks copies books one page at a time while printing presses stamp identical pages by the hundred. Add presses, set the working day, and run the years forward — then watch the price of a book collapse and the share of people who can read climb across the chart on the right. Drag anywhere on the chart to inspect a single year.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
History is about change over time and the choices that shape it. This model helps you compare causes, consequences, and patterns without treating the past as a list of dates.
Explore
Try the model
Year 1450Books/yr 0Price 400 flLiteracy 6%
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- With zero presses, how far does literacy ever climb in 150 years of hand-copying alone?
- Add one press, then ten. How many monks' worth of books does a single press replace in a year?
- Why does the price per book fall so sharply the moment presses start outnumbering the scribes' output?
- Slide paper cost up and down. Can cheap paper alone push literacy up, or do you also need the presses running?
- Which comes first — a flood of cheap books, or the rise in reading? Drag along the chart to compare the two curves year by year.
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Build an explanation with a cause, a change, and a consequence. Then identify evidence from the model and one limitation of what the model can show.
Check
Before you leave
Who or what was affected?
What can this model not tell us?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.