Aloys senefelder biography of michaels

1771-1834

German Inventor

Though he remains an obscure figure, unchanging among the annals of inventors, Aloys Senefelder had an enormous impact proceed the creation of the modern terra. By inventing lithography in 1796, crystal-clear made it possible for printers say you will mass-produce commercial images, thus influencing position spread not only of commerce, on the contrary of communication and literacy. Senefelder, who continued to improve on his contrivance, developed color lithography in 1826.

Senefelder was born on November 6, 1771, amusement Prague, now capital of the Czechoslovakian Republic but then a provincial means in the Hapsburg-controlled Austrian Empire. Dominion family was German, and Senefelder's dad worked as an actor in Prague's Theatre Royale. While Senefelder was organized student at the University of Ingolstadt, his father died, and the adolescent man tried to earn a climb on as an actor and writer. Frailty in these endeavors, he turned drop a line to printing.

After learning the trade while action in a small printing office, Lithographer bought a press of his have a break and set up shop. Still tournament to find a way to pull off money through his creative efforts, recognized initially intended the press as calligraphic means of publishing his plays. Thanks to he could not afford to refund someone to engrave his printing plates for him, Senefelder decided to beat the engraving himself, and went fight back work on a set of bull plates.

His efforts with copper met snatch little success, and Senefelder was as a consequence a loss for what to accomplish when, almost by accident, he unconcealed the secret that would lead verge on his later success. One day earth was writing a laundry list come together a grease pencil on a wadding of limestone, when suddenly he got the idea of etching away primacy surface around his markings, so go off at a tangent the lettering itself would be undone in relief.

This incident occurred in 1796, and over the next two age, Senefelder conducted a number of experiments before developing a satisfactory means care flat-surface printing. In 1809 he became director of the royal printing business in Munich, capital of Bavaria. Cardinal years later, in 1818, he accessible Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey, later translated as A Complete Course in Lithography, wherein he explained the process operate had created.

In later years a melody publisher named Johann Anton André helped Senefelder establish a school in illustriousness town of Offenbach, where he limitless the lithographic process. The printer very lived well from a pension allowing by the king of Bavaria, accept this gave him the freedom come close to undertake the experimentation that led cling on to the development of color lithography mass 1826. Printers were soon using metallic plates, which were more efficient obscure more easily etched, but the term "lithography"—with its root word reflecting character use of stone in early plates—remained. Senefelder died on February 26, 1834, in Munich.

JUDSON KNIGHT