Prompt: Please write a 500-700 word response on your experience visiting the Crandall Printing Museum.

Response: The Crandall Printing Museum was incredibly amazing. I am so happy I was able go and learn a lot more about the history of the printing press and how it directly affected the restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This was such an awesome experience. I even want to go again to catch things I might have missed. Initially I was thinking, I can’t believe this is going to be two hours but it was the best two hours and very intriguing. I was so amazed at how time consuming it was for Gutenberg to perfect the details for the first printing press.

I had never thought about it before but before he invented this people could not just pick up a book to read (other than the bible and even that was pretty scarce) like we can today. I cannot even imagine what that would be like because I love to read books. My life would be incomplete without books so I am grateful for the inspiration Gutenberg had to create this critical machine.

I was fascinated at the process of making even just one letter of type, then to think that he had to make hundreds in order to have enough to print one page. I was impressed that he got the idea for a printing press from design of the olive press. It is so cool that he just used the ideas of things he was familiar with in his own time.

I am continually amazed that of all the little details that fell into place that were crucial parts to make the restoration of the gospel possible. I mean having the Eerie Canal completed in time for the cast iron printing press to be able to make it to Palmyra New York in order for the Book of Mormon to be printed, when otherwise there is no way it would have made it by wagon and oxen across land. God’s hand has definitely been in this work from the beginning. Between inspiring a man to have the knowledge to create a printing press hundreds of years before Joseph Smith would need a printing press to print the Book of Mormon. God knows the end from the beginning and everything in between.

My favorite discussion was about the fact that over hundreds of years since Gutenberg invented this incredible piece of technology pretty much the only thing that has changed is the material it has been made out of in order to make it lighter and easily accessible to more people. The overall process is exactly the same. Unlike other technology we have today that as soon as you purchase a computer there is already something better then what you have.

I loved the insight about Benjamin Franklin and his contribution to this government. It was cool to see the impact the printing press had on the founding of America the resource it gave the founding fathers.

I could not believe the time it would take to set all those tiny little letters and then have to sort them all back out again once you were finished with all of them. I find it amazing how things get their names and how that always just seems to stick. With the cases that held the letters with the capital letters in the “upper case” and the small letters in the “lower case”. It is just funny how we pick things up and then never change it.

This opportunity was incredible. I would recommend it to anyone. I cannot believe how far we have come in the technology of printing the written word and yet there are a lot of things that have not even changed at all. I cannot even imagine how life would be like without this luxury. I have a fantastic experience. Brother Crandall, and Wally were very entertaining as well.

Tags: Printing Press Book Of Mormon American Heritage Books Gospel Of Jesus C

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