Excerpt from Historic Inventions The free cities of mediaeval Germany were continu ally torn asunder by petty civil wars. The nobles, who despised commerce, and the burghers, who lived by it, were always fighting for the upper hand, and the laboring people sided now with one party, and now with the other. After each uprising the victors usually banished a great number of the defeated faction from the city. So it happened that, John Gutenberg, a young man of good family, who had been born in Mainz about 1400, was outlawed from his home, and went with his wife Anna to live in the city of Stras burg, which was some sixty miles distant from Mainz. He chose the trade of a lapidary, or polisher of precious stones, an art which in that age was held in almost as high esteem as that of the painter or sculptor. He had been well educated, and his skill in cutting gems, as well as his general learning and his interest in all manner of inventions, drew people of the highest stand ing to his little workshop, which was the front room of his dwelling house. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.