Bi Sheng

Bi Sheng (990–1051 AD) was the Chinese inventor of the first known movable type technology. Bi Sheng's system was made of Chinese porcelain and was invented between 1041 and 1048 during the Song dynasty.

Movable type printing

Bi Sheng was a commoner, and his ancestry and details were not recorded. He was recorded only in the Dream Pool Essays by Chinese scholar-official and polymath Shen Kuo (1031–1095). The book records detailed description on the technical details of Bi Sheng's invention of movable type:

For each character there were several types, and for certain common characters there were twenty or more types each, in order to be prepared for the repetition of characters on the same page. When the characters were not in use he had them arranged with paper labels, one label for each rhyme-group, and kept them in wooden cases.

Some Korean scholars claim Bi Sheng's clay types were fragile and not practical for large-scale printing. However, this claim was refuted by facts and experiments. Bao Shicheng (1775–1885) wrote that baked clay moveable type was "as hard and tough as horn"; experiments show that clay type, after being baked in an oven, becomes hard and difficult to break, such that it remains intact after being dropped from a height of two metres onto a marble floor. Korean scholars could have tried clay movable type, but with little success, probably due to misinterpration of Shen Kua's description "as thin as coin", which likely referred to the depth of the character matrix, not the total length of the moveable type body. The length of clay movable types in China was 1 to 2 centimetres.

Bi Sheng (crater)

Bi Sheng is a lunar crater located on the lunar far side in the LAC-7 quadrant near the northern pole. The crater is located in close proximity to the prominent craters Seares, Karpinskiy, and Milankovic. The crater was adopted and named after Chinese inventor Bi Sheng by the IAU in August, 2010.

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