History of Printers: From Gutenberg to Wireless Printing – When Were Printers Invented?

Every printer on your desk descends from a machine that pressed ink onto paper in Germany about six centuries ago. Between that press and the wireless printer you use today sit dot matrix noise, laser breakthroughs, a lucky ink bubble and a UK link to Victorian computing. Here is the full story in order, with the reason each step mattered.

Printer History Timeline: Every Major Printer and Its Specs

Printing Before Printers

Printing began long before electricity. Woodblock printing was used in China for centuries, and around 1040 the inventor Bi Sheng made movable type from clay. In Europe, Johannes Gutenberg developed a movable metal type press in Mainz around 1450, and the Gutenberg Bible followed in the mid 1450s. It made books affordable and fast to produce, which changed education, religion and science.

But these machines printed fixed pages that someone had to typeset. The idea of a machine printing any data on demand came later.

Babbage and the First Machine That Printed Results

In the nineteenth century Charles Babbage designed a mechanical calculating machine, the Difference Engine, with an output mechanism meant to print results directly into type. His reason was practical: hand copied number tables were full of errors. A Swedish father and son, Georg and Edvard Scheutz, built a working difference engine that printed tables in 1853, and a copy was used by the General Register Office in London.

The Science Museum in London later built Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2 with its printing apparatus and showed the design worked. That is the seed of the computer printer: a machine that takes calculated data and marks paper without human typesetting.

Line Printers and Early Computer Output

Early computers needed fast paper output. In 1953 Remington Rand introduced a high speed printer for UNIVAC, and IBM’s 1403 line printer followed in 1959 and became a workhorse of business computing. These machines printed a whole line of text at once using rotating characters and hammers, and they were loud.

Xerography: A Different Way to Make a Mark

While engineers improved impact printing, Chester Carlson invented xerography in 1938, using static electricity and toner powder rather than ink pressed by hammers. Commercial success came with the Xerox 914 copier in 1959. Xerography is the foundation of laser printing.

The Dot Matrix and Daisy Wheel Era

The 1970s put printers on desks. Centronics introduced an early dot matrix impact printer in 1970, which formed characters from tiny pins striking a ribbon. Daisy wheel printers such as those from Diablo produced typewriter quality text but could not do graphics. In 1978 the Epson MX 80 made dot matrix cheap and popular, and it set the sound of the office for a decade.

Laser Printers Change the Office

Gary Starkweather at Xerox began combining a laser with xerography in 1969, and the technology reached the market in stages. IBM’s 3800 in 1976 was a huge, high speed laser system for data centres, followed by the Xerox 9700 in 1977. The breakthrough for ordinary desks came in 1984 with the HP LaserJet, built around a Canon print engine.

The following year Apple’s LaserWriter added Adobe PostScript, and with Aldus PageMaker it created desktop publishing. A small business could suddenly produce professional looking documents without a print shop.

Inkjet: Bubbles Become Printing

Inkjet printing had several early forms, but the technique that won used heat. Canon researchers discovered in the late 1970s that heating ink in a nozzle creates a tiny bubble that pushes out a droplet, which Canon called bubble jet. HP developed its thermal inkjet, and the HP ThinkJet in 1984 was among the first widely sold models. Inkjets were cheaper than lasers, quieter than dot matrix and excellent for colour, which made them the default home printer through the 1990s and 2000s.

3D Printing Adds a Dimension

In 1984 Chuck Hull invented stereolithography, building objects layer by layer from liquid resin, and his patent was granted in 1986. 3D printing began as an industrial prototyping tool and now produces medical parts, aircraft components and hobby models.

Wireless Printing Removes the Cable

By the 2000s printers gained USB, then Ethernet, then built in WiFi. In November 2010 Apple launched AirPrint with iOS 4.2, letting iPhones and iPads print without installing drivers. If you have a modern printer, you can follow our printer WiFi setup guide, or use the connect an HP printer walkthrough for HP models. To understand why wireless printing became possible at all, read the complete history of WiFi.

For mobile devices, these guides help: printing from an iPad and how to connect phone to printer. The phone behind that revolution has its own timeline in iPhone history from 2007.

Printers in the Modern Workplace

Computers changed too, and printers changed with them. The desktop machines that printed those first documents are traced in our laptop history from 1981 guide. Today most offices print far less, but what they do print, such as contracts, badges, invoices and event signage, must be reliable.

That is why many businesses now rent instead of buy. Hire includes supplies, servicing and replacement, so teams avoid downtime and surprise costs. If that suits you, see printer rental for business for how to choose. And when print sits alongside screens and sound in a live environment, our guide to what is audio visual shows how the pieces fit together, while iPad Pro versus iPad Air helps you pick the tablet that sends jobs to the printer.

Where Printing Goes Next

Printers are moving toward subscription ink, secure release printing, sustainable materials and more powerful 3D systems. The core idea has not changed since Gutenberg though: take information from one place and make it appear, permanently and accurately, on another surface. Every generation just made that process faster, cheaper and easier to reach.

Modern businesses do not always need to own every piece of printing equipment they use. A company may need printers for an event, temporary office, training programme or a busy project period, but not have a reason to keep the equipment afterwards.

Hire Tablets can help businesses arrange suitable printer solutions for short-term requirements, giving teams access to reliable equipment, support and replacement options without the upfront cost of buying specialist machines.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. When were printers invented?

The history of printers began long before modern electronic devices. Johannes Gutenberg developed the movable-type printing press around 1440, while the first computer printers appeared in the 1950s. Modern desktop printers later evolved through dot matrix, laser, inkjet and wireless printing technologies.

2. What does a printer do?

A printer converts digital information from a computer, phone or tablet into a physical copy. Depending on the type of printer, it can use ink, toner or other materials to create documents, images, labels and specialised outputs.

3. What are the main types of printers?

The most common printer types include inkjet, laser, dot matrix and 3D printers. Inkjet models are popular for colour images, laser printers are common in offices because of their speed, and 3D printers create physical objects layer by layer.

4. Why did printers become wireless?

Printers became wireless as WiFi, mobile devices and cloud technology improved. Wireless printing removed the need for direct cable connections and allowed users to send documents from laptops, tablets and smartphones more easily.

5. Should a business buy or rent a printer?

Buying can work well for businesses that print regularly throughout the year. Renting may be more suitable for temporary offices, events, exhibitions or projects where equipment is only needed for a limited period. It can reduce storage needs, maintenance responsibilities and replacement costs.