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The Gutenberg printing press - invented in the 1440s by Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith from Mainz in Germany - is widely considered to be one of humanity's defining inventions. Gutenberg figured out how to make large quantities of durable metal type and how to fix that type firmly enough to print hundreds of copies of a page, yet flexibly enough that the type could be reused to print an entirely different page. His famous bibles were objects beautiful enough to rival the calligraphy of the monks. The crisp black Latin script is perfectly composed into two dense blocks of text, occasionally highlighted with a flourish of red ink. Image copyright ISTOCK Actually, you can quibble with Gutenberg's place in history. The movable type press was originally developed in China. Even as Gutenberg was inventing in Germany, Koreans were ditching their entire method of writing to make printing easier, cutting tens of thousands of characters down to only 28. It is also not true...

The Comptroller General of Customs, retired Col. Hameed Ali, on Thursday promised to honour the Senate summon but vowed he will won’t appear in customs uniform. The Senate had on Thursday, following a motion raised by Senator Dino Melaye summoned the custom boss to appear before it in uniform to explain why Customs has not suspended its policy on vehicle duty despite the directive of the lawmakers. The angry senators gave him March 15 to come and explain why he should order all old vehicles to pay 60 per cent rebate for vehicles from 2015 below. But reacting in an interview with TVC, Ali, a former military governor of Kaduna State, accepted he was going to honour the invitation by the Senate but said he will never appear in uniform as the lawmakers demanded of him, arguing that he was not employed to wear uniform. “Let me say I will appear before the Senate. With regard to uniform, certainly no. Why is it so? I was not appointed to wear uniform. I am sorry to say, I don’...

Top secret(s): the truths behind the world's great wonders  Ever visit an incredible site in some exotic land and wonder how it was built? The notice board just lists a few meaningless dates, or a guide rattles off a bunch of jargon-packed phrases, but you want the real dirt. Here we reveal the ingenious engineering behind 10 of the world's most epic structures – and the little-known facts that lie hidden in their depths. 1. Taj Mahal, Agra , India   Legend has it that Mughal ruler Shah Jahan ordered the hands of the Taj Mahal builders to be chopped off after it was completed, to prevent them from ever building anything so beautiful again - although no written evidence supports this story. The elegance of the mausoleum can be attributed to clever engineering. To make the Taj Mahal appear perfectly straight from ground level, the architect designed the minarets to slant slightly outward, which also ensured that in the event of an earthquake they would ...