Alois Senefelder, born 1771, at Prague (Austria), started life with writing plays, and too poor to pay a printer, he determined to invent a process of his own which should serve to print his manuscript without dependence upon the (to him) too costly types.

A born inventor, this Alois Senefelder, a genius, supported by boundless hope, immense capability for hard, laborious work, and an indomitable energy; he started with the plan of etching his writings in relief on metal plates, to take impressions therefrom by means of rollers.  He found the metal too costly for his experiments; and limestone slabs from the neighboring quarries—­he living then in Munich—­were tried as a substitute.  Although partly successful in this direction, he continued through years of hard, and often disappointing trials, to find something more complete.  He hit upon the discovery that a printed sheet of paper (new or old) moistened with a thin solution of gum Arabic would, when dabbled over printers’ ink, accept the ink from the dabbler only on its printed parts and remain perfectly clean in the blank spaces, so that a facsimile impression could be taken from this inked-in sheet.  He found that this operation might be repeated until the original print gave out by wear.  Here was a new discovery, based on the properties of attraction and repulsion between fatty matters (printers ink), and the watery solution of gum Arabic.  The extremely delicate nature of the paper matrix was a serious drawback, and had to be overcome.  The slabs of limestone which served Senefelder in a previous emergency were now recurred to by him as an absorbent material similar to paper, and a trial by making an impression from his above-mentioned paper matrix on the stone, and subsequent gumming, convinced him that he was correct in his surmise.  By this act lithography became an established fact.

A few short years of intelligent experimenting revealed to him all the possibilities of this new discovery.  Inventions of processes followed each other closely until in 1818 he disclosed to the world in a volume of immortal interest not only a complete history of his invention and his processes, but also a reliable description of the same for others to follow.  Nothing really new except photo-lithography has been added to this charming art since that time; improvement only by manual skill and by chemical progress, can be claimed by others.

Chromo-lithography (printing in colors from stone) was experimented on by the great inventor.  He outlined its possibilities by saying, that he verily believed that printed pictures like paintings would sometimes be made thereby, and whoever has seen the productions of our Boston firm, L. Prang & Co., will bear him out in the verity of his prediction.