The letters are never cast

Mainz, on the Rhine, around 1450. A goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg has spent twenty years and two fortunes on a secret: letters cut in steel, struck into copper, cast in lead by the thousand, so that a page can be set, inked, and pressed instead of written. What he does not have is money. He goes to Johann Fust, a wealthy Mainz merchant, and borrows 800 guilders against his equipment, and two years later 800 more. With Fust's capital he builds the shop that prints the 42-line Bible, about 180 copies, the first great printed book in Europe. In 1455 Fust sues him and takes the press, but by then it no longer matters. The letters exist. Within fifty years, a thousand towns have presses.

In the timeline recorded here, Fust weighs the risk and closes his purse. The proposition is, on its face, absurd. A secretive tinkerer past fifty, two fortunes already sunk, asks a sum that would buy a fleet of manuscripts, for a machine no one may see. Fust has ledgers, and the ledgers say no. Gutenberg tries Strasbourg money, then church money, and finds winter everywhere. The forges go cold one creditor at a time. The little steel letters, the punches he has cut by hand over twenty years, are sold in a sack for the weight of the metal. The buyer melts them without ever asking what they spelled.