Crandall Printing Press

It is 7:45 on a tuesday morning. I wake up in a panic, I accidently overslept after staying up until the wee hours of the morning finishing up my fifteen page research paper. I come to the sudden realization that my class, the same class that my research paper is due in, starts in fifteen minutes and I cannot afford to be late! I jump out of bed, throw on some clothes, and run up to campus. Before rushing into my class, I stop by the Harold B. Library to print off the fifteen page research paper that kept me up so late. I swipe my card in the  nearest printer, and watch as my paper comes out of the machine in the space of about five seconds, pick up the pages, and hurry off to class, arriving just as the clock strikes eight.

As much as I hate to admit it, this scenario has happened to me more than once. On several occasions, the amazingly fast printers have saved me. My experience at the Crandall Printing Press made me realize this fact, and appreciate the amazing technology of today's printers like I never had before. My tour of the museum began at a replication of Guttenberg's printing press. The tour guides explained the amazing inventive process that Guttenberg went through to create the press, and all of the obstacles he had to overcome in order to make his dream a reality. He had to figure out, through experimentation over a long period of time, how to make every single step of the process work, from how to spread the ink, what paper to use, what composition of metal to use as the type, and how to distribute the weight of the press. He truly was a complete pioneer in a completely new field. 

Something particularly amazing about his invention was that for being the first of its kind, it was constructed and thought through so well, that his original design was unchanged and replicated for centuries. It laid the foundation for a whole generation of printers and enabled a vast array of important documents throughout all of history-from the bible, to Common Sense, to the Declaration of Independence, to the Book of Mormon, hundreds of years later. The process of printing was extremely an time consuming practice, required meticulous attention to detail, and was a monotonous task to say the least. Because of this, one can be sure that the works that people chose to print and publish are worthwhile and important. People dedicated there lives to bring ideas and words to people, and I am guilty of often taking this for granted. What I can print off so quickly in the library, would have taken Guttenberg hours and hours. My experience at the Crandall Printing Press Museum really opened my eyes to how far the printing press has come, and gave me a testimony that it truly is a divinely inspired invention.