Short answers, pulled from the story.
Movable type was invented by Bi Sheng, a Chinese artisan who lived from 990 to 1051, using ceramic characters around 1040 AD during the Northern Song dynasty. His method was recorded by the scholar Shen Kuo in the Dream Pool Essays.
Johannes Gutenberg developed his metal movable-type printing press in Mainz around 1450, casting type from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that remained standard for 550 years. His Gutenberg Bible, printed in 1455, demonstrated the new method's quality and low cost.
Jikji is a book printed in Korea in 1377 using metal movable type, and it is considered the world's oldest surviving metal movable type-printed book. It was printed by Choe Yun-ui during Korea's Goryeo dynasty using bronze alloy type.
Bi Sheng set individual ceramic characters into an iron frame on an iron plate, warmed the frame so a paste beneath the type softened, then pressed a smooth board over the surface to make it even. He kept duplicate types for common characters and stored spares in wooden cases sorted by rhyme group.
European movable type used a small alphabet of only a few dozen characters, which made casting and setting pages far quicker than systems built around thousands of Chinese or Korean characters. Gutenberg's lead-tin-antimony alloy also melted at a lower temperature than bronze, making reusable metal matrix moulds more practical than expendable sand and clay moulds.
Movable type declined during the 20th century after the 19th-century invention of hot metal typesetting and its successors, which mechanized the casting and setting of type.