Johannes Gutenberg was a goldsmith. He understood metals, oils, and patience. Around 1450, in Mainz, he combined a wine press, an oil-based ink, and — most importantly — movable cast-metal type into a machine that could produce identical copies of a book at roughly 200 times the rate of a human scribe. His business eventually went bankrupt. The technology did not.
Within fifty years, every major European city had at least one press. The book — previously a luxury object hand-copied by monks, costing as much as a horse — became something a literate craftsman might own. Cheap pamphlets followed. Then newspapers. Then, in 1517, a German monk named Luther nailed his theses to a door, and within weeks they were being read in Paris, London, Krakow, and Stockholm. No one had to convert him; the press did the persuading. The Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the rise of the vernacular novel, the public sphere itself — none would have been remotely possible without movable type. Authority based on the control of texts survived for another century by sheer institutional momentum, and then collapsed.
Every disruption since — the radio, the television, the internet, the algorithmic feed — has been measured against Gutenberg as the standard. The printing press is the prior we use to think about new media at all: the question is always 'what kind of Reformation does this one trigger?'