8) History of Lithography

Tereza Benešová History of Lithography 1

8) HISTORY OF LITHOGRAPHY At the end of the 18th century, a new printing technique was invented in Germany: lithography. Until then prints had to be made by cutting or scratching a composition in wood or copper, but this invention made that no longer necessary, lithography being a surface printing technique. An advantage of lithography over other printing techniques was that it was easy to draw on the stone.

In fact the inventor of lithography, Alois Senefelder (Prague 1771-1834 Munich), was not an artist, but he written plays. His technology is based on the fact that oil and water do not mix. Over 20 years after this invention he described his invention. One day he replaced the copper plate with a polished stone and began to experiment with engraving on stone. The most important for lithography is material of printing form. Porous limestone from the quarries of Solnohofen is the most suitable for lithography. The stones are sawn in thicknesses varying from 6 to 10 centimetres, depending on their size. He had just polished a stone when his mother called him to write a laundry list. Senefelder could not find a piece of paper so wrote the list with his ink made of wax and soap on the stone. When he later tried to wash the stone clean he began to realize that it might be possible to print from the stone after working on it. After much experimentation, lithography, a technique based on the mutual repulsion of water and grease, was born. Senefelder called this process `Chemical Printing”.

Lithography is use as a medium for art. The first offset machine was constructed in the USA by Kaspar Hermann, who was born in Bohemia. After the Second World War was started the development of offset lithography, and at the beginning there were problems with quality of print. Nowadays offset is modern technology with digitalized preparation of printing form and with many electronic systems. Tereza Benešová History of Lithography 2

Alois Senefelder of Munich discovered the basic principle of Lithography, “writing on stone,” around 1798. Working with a highly porous stone, Senefelder sketched his design with a greasy substance, which was absorbed by the stone. He then wetted the entire surface with a mixture of gum Arabic and water (fountain solution). Only the stone areas absorbed the solution; the design area repelled it. Rolling on an ink made of soap, wax, oil and lampblack, this ureasy substance coated the design but did not spread over the moist blank area. A clean impression of the design was made when a sheet of paper was pressed against the surface of the stone. Artists soon used this new process to make reproductions of the works of old masters and, in time, recognized it as a valuable medium for their own original works. Lithography received its biggest boost during the mid 1900’s when new recognition and popularity encouraged printers to fi nd more practical and faster methods of printing illustrations.

The first steam “litho” press was invented in France in 1850 and introduced in the U.S. by R. Hoe in 1868. Lithographic stones were used for the image and a blanket- covered cylinder received the image from the plate and transformed it to the substrate. Direct rotary presses for lithography using zinc and aluminum metal plates were introduced in the 1890’s. The fi rst “offset” press was developed in 1906 by akcident by Ira A. Rubel (a paper manufacturer) by accident. An impression was un intentionally printed from a press cylinder directly onto the rubber blanket of the impression cylinder. Immediately afterward, when a sheet of paper was run through the press, a sharp image was printed on it from the impression which had been “offset” on the rubber blanket. A. F. Harris had noticed a similar effect. He then developed an offset press for the Harris Automatic

Press Company in the same year, 1906. The offset process came to be the most popu lar form of printing during the 1950’s as plates, inks, paper, etc. improved. By the late 1950’s, offset printing dominated all other printing pro cesses because it provided sharp clean images. While the offset printing process gave sharper, cleaner reproductions over letterpress, it was also less expensive in comparison to gravure. Today, the majority of printing (over 50%), in cluding newspapers, is done by the offset pro cess. Tereza Benešová History of Lithography 3