Today, a young man sees possibility in a laundry
list. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
One day in 1795, Alois
Senefelder's mother called him from his workshop.
She was sending out a load of laundry. She needed
paper to record the clothing items. Senefelder
didn't have any, so he penned the list on a flat
stone with a grease pencil.
He was 24. His father had been a noted German
actor. Senefelder wanted to go into theatre, too.
He'd already written a play that did pretty well.
He'd made a little money with it.
But then Senefelder's father died, and he was left
poor. Maybe he could make a living by writing, but
it cost too much to have material printed. So he
did an astonishing thing. He set out to invent
means for printing his own works. And, while he was
in his workshop, his mother asked for that laundry
We did two kinds of printing in 1795. In relief
printing you create an image that protrudes from a
plate. When you ink the surface, ink hits only the
parts that stick out. Both typesetting and woodcuts
work that way.
The second method is intaglio printing. You cut an
image into a plate, ink the whole thing, then wipe
the surface clean. Ink stays in the depressions and
transfers an image to the paper.
Now Senefelder was about to discover a third
method. He wanted to etch copper plates chemically.
Then he had to make that laundry list. He used a
limestone slab -- the kind printers mix ink on.
He'd planned to try etching stone as well as
He was about to erase the stone. Then, on a hunch,
he etched the surface with acid. Sure enough, the
grease pencil protected the stone. Words were left
standing. The depressions were far too shallow to
take ink. Yet, they did take ink.
Senefelder had stumbled on new means for setting
off inked and non-inked regions of a flat surface.
He'd found a way to make stone take ink chemically,
not mechanically. The full chemistry of the process
wouldn't become clear until long after his death.
It's tied to the makeup of limestone and fatty
We call the process "lithography." That's Greek for
Senefelder's own term, "stone printing." And it was
not simple. It took four years for Senefelder to
get the process under control.
By the time he died in 1834, lithography had become
the dominant means for putting pictorial images and
musical scores into books. Senefelder had passed
from seminal inventor to innovator. He gave us a
series of lithographic presses, each one better
than the one before it. He improved the chemical
And what of Senefelder the writer? Well, in 1819 he
wrote a wonderfully clear textbook on lithography.
And, as a writer, he kept right on serving printers
-- down through the 19th century.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Jennett, S., Pioneers in Printing.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1958, pp.
Weber, W., A History of Lithography.
New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1966. See
especially pp. 9-25.
Senefelder, A., A Complete Course of
Lithography. New York: da Capo Press, 1968.
Listeners near Houston, Texas, can see two early
lithograph presses based on Senefelder's design in
the Houston Museum of
Printing History (713-522-4652).
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.