Given that farmers had a hard time buying and operating a treshing machine on their own, I think the natural step would have been to create a company that owns treshing machines and windmills, buys grain and then sells flour.
Gutenberg’s enterprise also needed more people then just one carpenter that produces the machine and one farmer that uses it. Gutenberg needed to loan money to get his enterprise started.
Maybe there where companies that owned treshing machines and windmills but they are nonwhere to be found in the historical record because they kept their machines secret. While Gutenberg’s books could easily transported and sold all over Europe, it’s expensive to transport flour, so the market was tiny and it was hard to scale up the operation.
Historically, something somewhat different happened: if one farmer owned a threshing machine, other farmers might bring their grain to him and rent time on the machine.
Or, when portable threshing machines were built, someone would travel around to different farms and thresh there for a fee, then move on.
(But a portable machine was nontrivial, especially when the machines were horse-powered, check out this diagram [from this source]—a horse was hooked up to that harness at letter H on the diagram, so you can get a sense of how big that thing was. That model would have been stationary.)
Given that farmers had a hard time buying and operating a treshing machine on their own, I think the natural step would have been to create a company that owns treshing machines and windmills, buys grain and then sells flour.
Gutenberg’s enterprise also needed more people then just one carpenter that produces the machine and one farmer that uses it. Gutenberg needed to loan money to get his enterprise started.
Maybe there where companies that owned treshing machines and windmills but they are nonwhere to be found in the historical record because they kept their machines secret. While Gutenberg’s books could easily transported and sold all over Europe, it’s expensive to transport flour, so the market was tiny and it was hard to scale up the operation.
Historically, something somewhat different happened: if one farmer owned a threshing machine, other farmers might bring their grain to him and rent time on the machine.
Or, when portable threshing machines were built, someone would travel around to different farms and thresh there for a fee, then move on.
(But a portable machine was nontrivial, especially when the machines were horse-powered, check out this diagram [from this source]—a horse was hooked up to that harness at letter H on the diagram, so you can get a sense of how big that thing was. That model would have been stationary.)