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The wine press using a screw instead of a heavy weight. The press was used to for printing press with movable type. Image how tedious it would be if printing presses needed heavy stones instead of a screw.

Books pretty much just the bible at this point were cheaper due to mass production. People wanted them in their own language. Reading more meant as people got older they couldn't see the small words. Glasses were invented then later the lenses used for making telescopes and then microscopes.



I don’t see how the printing press could have triggered the invention of eye glasses, eye glasses being over a century older (ignoring any Chinese printing press, as I don’t see how Chinese books triggered Italians to invent reading glasses)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasses#Invention: “The first eyeglasses were made in Northern Italy, most likely in Pisa, by about 1290 […] By 1301, there were guild regulations in Venice governing the sale of eyeglasses”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press: “In Germany, around 1440, goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press“

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescope#History: “The earliest existing record of a telescope was a 1608 patent submitted to the government in the Netherlands”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_microscope#History: “Compound microscopes first appeared in Europe around 1620 including one demonstrated by Cornelis Drebbel in London (around 1621) and one exhibited in Rome in 1624”

On telescopes and microscopes, you probably have the order right, but I would call it a close tie.

Also, if eye glasses triggered the invention of the telescope, why did that take over three centuries?


Eye glasses were necessary, but not sufficient, for the invention of the telescope (and microscope).

It's about the knowledge to refocus light, which is (generally) done in an one-way fashion for spectacles, and in a two-way fashion for 'scopes.


> Reading more meant as people got older they couldn't see the small words. Glasses were invented then later the lenses used for making telescopes and then microscopes.

This is covered in a chapter on glass in Steven Johnson's book How we got to now: six innovations that made the modern world.




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