Bi Sheng

Bi Sheng (c. 990-1051) was a Chinese artisan of the Song dynasty credited with inventing movable type printing around 1040, using individually carved characters made of baked clay ceramic that could be arranged, inked, printed and then rearranged for a new text, in contrast to the carved wooden printing blocks that were the standard Chinese printing method of his time. His invention is known almost entirely through a detailed description written by the scholar official Shen Kuo in his Dream Pool Essays, since none of Bi Sheng's original type or printed works are known to survive. Ceramic movable type proved less durable and less widely adopted in China than later wooden and metal movable type systems developed there and, independently, in Korea and, centuries later, in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg. Bi Sheng is nonetheless generally credited as the first person known to have conceived and built a movable type printing system.