ABSTRACT
Before the World Wide Web, no other invention in human history challenged the powerful as much as printing. For the first time, ideas circulated directly to a mass audience and inevitably challenged the received wisdom of churches and states who had a vested interest in perpetuating long-established notions of their right to rule. Equally inevitably, established rulers attempted to censor that potential power. Those attempts were ultimately as pointless as those in the twenty-first century which seek to constrain the free expression of views via electronic media. However, unlike the decline of the printed newspaper, which has been dramatic and swift, the rise of a political press was slow and, literally for many brave pioneers, tortuous.
