There are over 50,000 different Chinese characters, while the latin alphabet only has around 25

Back in the mid-90s, there was a Chinese display that came to the Boston Museum of Science. Silk and masters of making silk, paper and masters of making paper. Ditto textiles (fairly amazing loom with a webwork of pull strings to set the different over/unders for the shuttle). All the masters were mid 50s or older - except the person with the typesetting machine. If you've never seen a typesetting machine, The operator sits at a large panel of small characters. They drag a pointer (via a knob on top) to point at a character, then presses a foot pedal, and the character is pressed into the material that will be used to print.

The operator was in his mid-30s. When I asked him why it wasn't an older person with the display, like the other master craftspeople his answer was "Eyes get too bad".

This stuck with me as in a previous life, I'd dome WEB printer setup and in my current position I had a (very small!) part in the universal digital character set then being devised (ASCII works fine for smaller character sets, but to be able to represent all characters in all character sets?).

Oh, as a sidenote, I know bullets used in Gutenberg’s time were hardened with tin, antimony — or arsenic. It wouldn’t surprise me if the same three made their way into moveable type.