The history
1,200 years from carved wooden blocks to ink tanks, laser drums and machines that print in plastic.
For centuries, printing meant pressing inked type or carved blocks onto paper, and every copy of every page had to be set up by hand. In the twentieth century computers needed a way to put their results on paper, so engineers built printers that hammer pins, boil ink, spray drops and draw with static electricity and light. Today the same idea of placing tiny dots has moved into homes across India and even into three dimensions.
868
Oldest dated printed book
The Diamond Sutra, Dunhuang, China
1377
Oldest surviving book printed with metal type
Jikji, Korea
1556
First printing press in India
St Paul's College, Goa
1938
First xerographic copy
Chester Carlson and Otto Kornei, USA
1969
First commercial thermal printing system
Texas Instruments Silent 700
1976
First commercial laser printer
IBM 3800
1984
First mass-market thermal inkjet
HP ThinkJet
1994
First 720 dpi colour inkjet
Epson Stylus Color
850 – 1850
Carved wooden blocks in China, movable type in China and Korea, then Gutenberg's press in Europe. Printing reaches India at Goa in 1556.
868
11 May 868
The Diamond Sutra is a scroll printed from carved wooden blocks. It carries a date equal to 11 May 868, which makes it the oldest dated printed book known. A whole page was carved into one block, inked and pressed onto paper.
Why it mattered. It shows the core idea every printer still uses: ink put down in a pattern, the same way, copy after copy.
1040
c. 1040
Bi Sheng made separate characters from baked clay that could be arranged into a page, printed, then taken apart and reused. We know about him from the writer Shen Kuo. His type was not widely used, but the idea was new.
Why it mattered. Reusable pieces that make up any page are the ancestors of the dots a modern printer arranges.
1377
Jikji, a Korean Buddhist text, was printed with movable metal type in 1377. It is the oldest surviving book made this way, older than Gutenberg's Bible. The only known copy is in the National Library of France.
Why it mattered. Metal type was stronger and more even than wood or clay.
1440
c. 1440
Gutenberg combined metal type cast in a hand mould, an oil-based ink and a screw press. His Bible was finished around 1455. Printing spread across Europe within fifty years and books became far cheaper.
Why it mattered. It made printing fast and cheap enough to change how knowledge spread, though every page still had to be set by hand.
1556
A press on its way from Portugal to Ethiopia stayed in Goa instead, and printing began at the Jesuit college of St Paul in 1556. Its first known pieces were religious texts. Printing in Indian languages followed over the next decades.
Why it mattered. It began India's own history of print, which leads to today's crowded print shops and home ink tanks.
1840 – 1965
Babbage designs a printer for his calculating engine, Carlson invents xerography, and ink is first squirted in continuous jets.
1847
1846–1849
Babbage designed Difference Engine No. 2 between 1846 and 1849, with a printing unit that would print results onto paper and press them into soft moulds for making printing plates. It was never built in his lifetime. London's Science Museum finished building the engine, and then its printer in 2002.
Why it mattered. It was perhaps the first design for a computer printer: a machine that writes its own answers, with no person copying them out.
1938
22 October 1938
Carlson and Kornei rubbed a sulfur-coated zinc plate to charge it, shone light through a glass slide reading "10-22-38 Astoria", then dusted it with powder. The powder stuck where the light hadn't reached. Carlson called the process electrophotography.
Why it mattered. Charge, light and powder is exactly how every laser printer works today.
1951
The first commercial devices that wrote with a continuous jet of ink came from Siemens in 1951. They were used for recording instruments, like chart recorders for medical signals, rather than for printing pages.
Why it mattered. It proved that a fine jet of ink could be steered to write.
1959
Twenty years after Carlson's first copy, his idea became the Xerox 914, the first automatic plain-paper office copier. It made copies in seconds on ordinary paper and was a huge success.
Why it mattered. It turned xerography into a machine, with a drum, toner and a fuser: the laser printer's direct parent.
1965 – 1983
Thermal heads, tiny calculator printers, dot-matrix pins and the first laser printers turn computer output into paper.
1965
1965 and 1969
Texas Instruments invented the thermal print head in 1965. Its Silent 700 terminal of 1969 printed on heat-sensitive paper with no ink at all, and became the first commercial thermal printing system.
Why it mattered. The same idea prints nearly every shop receipt and bus ticket today.
1968
September 1968
Shinshu Seiki launched the EP-101, a tiny electronic printer only 16 cm wide that was soon built into desk calculators. Later printers based on it were sold as the "son of EP", which is where the name Epson comes from.
Why it mattered. It showed that a printer could be small and cheap enough to go inside other machines.
1970
The Centronics 101, shown in 1970, printed 165 characters a second by firing a column of seven wire pins through a ribbon. Its plug became the standard printer connector for decades. Japan's OKI had shown a wire dot printer a little earlier, in 1968.
Why it mattered. Dot-matrix printers were how most computer users printed for twenty years, and they still print passbooks and forms.
1971
1969–1971
In 1969 Starkweather, an optics engineer at Xerox, had the idea of drawing on a copier's drum with a laser instead of a photo of a page. He moved to Xerox PARC in 1971 and built a working laser printer there, which later became the Xerox 9700.
Why it mattered. It let a computer draw any page, letters or pictures, at high speed.
1976
IBM's 3800 printed 215 pages a minute at 240 dots per inch on continuous paper. It was a room-sized machine for big computer centres. Xerox followed with its 9700 in 1977.
Why it mattered. Businesses could now print bills and statements by the million.
1977
At Canon, a hot soldering iron touched a syringe needle full of ink, and drops shot out of the tip. Canon's researchers turned this into the Bubble Jet idea and filed a basic patent in 1977. At about the same time, John Vaught's team at HP found that thin-film resistors could fire ink drops too.
Why it mattered. Boiling ink with a tiny heater became the thermal inkjet, the most common home printer in the world.
1980
1979–1980
The MX-80 was a cheap, reliable 9-pin dot-matrix printer that became one of the most popular printers of the early personal computer age.
Why it mattered. It put a printer beside millions of home and office computers.
1983 – 2005
Bubble jet and laser printers shrink and get cheap. Colour inkjets reach photo quality, and 3D printing is born.
1984
HP's ThinkJet (short for thermal inkjet) was the first low-cost, mass-produced thermal inkjet printer. The printhead was built into a throw-away ink cartridge, so each new cartridge brought fresh nozzles.
Why it mattered. Quiet, cheap inkjets began replacing noisy dot-matrix printers at home.
1984
22 May 1984
The first LaserJet printed 8 pages a minute at 300 dots per inch and cost $3,495. Inside was Canon's CX engine, with the drum and toner in one replaceable cartridge.
Why it mattered. Laser quality came to ordinary offices, and the desktop publishing boom followed.
1984
filed 8 August 1984
Chuck Hull applied for a patent on stereolithography, which builds an object layer by layer by hardening liquid plastic with ultraviolet light. The patent was granted in March 1986.
Why it mattered. It started 3D printing: the idea of a printer that builds solid things.
1985
December 1985
Canon launched the BJ-80, its first printer using Bubble Jet technology, eight years after the soldering-iron discovery.
Why it mattered. Thermal inkjet now had two big makers, and prices began to fall.
1989
filed 9 June 1989
Scott Crump filed a patent on building objects from melted plastic squeezed out of a moving nozzle, laying down one layer on top of another. The same year he and his wife Lisa founded the company Stratasys to sell the machines.
Why it mattered. FDM is the kind of 3D printer found in schools and homes today.
1994
Epson's Stylus Color was the world's first 720 dpi colour inkjet. It used Epson's Micro Piezo head, which squeezes drops out with a bending crystal instead of boiling them.
Why it mattered. Home printers could now print photographs people were happy to keep.
By the numbers
From the first room-sized laser printer to home machines, resolution rose fivefold.
2005 – today
Open-source 3D printers spread, and refillable ink tank printers make pages cheap in India and across Asia.
2005
2004–2005
Bowyer proposed RepRap in 2004, and the project got going at the University of Bath in 2005: an open-source, cheap 3D printer that could print many of its own parts. Its Darwin model of 2008 printed about half of its own plastic parts, and hundreds of people worldwide joined in.
Why it mattered. Open designs made hobby 3D printers cheap, which is why schools and makers now have them.
2011
2010–2011
Epson launched its L100 and L200 ink tank printers in Indonesia in 2010, designed for emerging markets, then brought them to India and other Asian countries. Reports put the Indian launch in 2011 at about ₹9,000. Other makers followed with their own refillable models.
Why it mattered. Bottled ink cut the cost of a page from rupees to paise, which suits students, shops and small offices.
Did you know?
The name Epson means "son of EP", after the EP-101 mini printer of 1968.
The first xerographic copy just said "10-22-38 Astoria", the date and the place.
Canon's thermal inkjet began with an accident: a hot soldering iron touched a syringe full of ink.
The first HP LaserJet weighed about 32 kg and cost $3,495.
Babbage's printer was designed in the 1840s but only built in 2002, and it works.
The people
c. 970 – 1051 · Artisan and inventor · China
Made the first known movable type, from baked clay.
c. 1400 – 1468 · Goldsmith and printer · Germany
Combined metal type, oil ink and a press into a practical printing system.
1791 – 1871 · Mathematician and inventor · England
Designed a calculating engine with its own printer.
1906 – 1968 · Physicist and patent lawyer · USA
Invented xerography, the charge-light-powder process behind copiers and laser printers.
1938 – 2019 · Optical engineer · USA
Invented the laser printer at Xerox.
20th century · Engineer at Canon · Japan
Led the work that turned a boiling drop of ink into Canon's Bubble Jet.
20th century · Engineer at HP · USA
Led HP's team that developed thermal inkjet printing.
born 1952 · Engineer and lecturer · England
Founded RepRap, the self-copying open-source 3D printer.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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