Two Hundred Years Ago, Nine-Tenths of the World Was Illiterate.

Global literacy leapt from one in ten adults to nearly nine in ten over two centuries, yet this transformation never registered as an event because it happened on no single day. The printing press arrived 370 years before the shift began; what finally moved the needle was cheaper wood-pulp paper, compulsory schooling laws that often followed literacy rather than caused it, and economic returns that made reading worthwhile. Today's 739 million illiterate adults include 466 million women, a two-thirds share unchanged since 1990. Progress lifted everyone without closing the gap.

You'll learn:

- Why Gutenberg's press took four centuries to matter

- How signature counts distort historical literacy estimates

- The generational lag that shapes today's adult rates