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From the primeval bird to the printing press

A little boy writes the name of Alois Senefelder in mirror writing onto a stone pedestal – viewed in the mirror everything can be read properly.
The printing press workers’ union invested a considerable sum for the Carrara marble the monument on Senefelderplatz is mad of. Senefelder, however, owes the invention, for which he is honored here, to a simple limestone.
A walk on a rainy day in 1796 provided the inventive theater writer with a groundbreaking idea. Senefelder had discovered the imprint of a leaf on a damp limestone and began to experiment with inks and smooth stones. Since the hallways in his hometown Munich were often paved with slabs of limestone, such stones were easy to hand. He drew on them with greasy inks he had mixed himself, etched them with nitric acid and, after numerous attempts, invented a completely new printing process: lithography (from the Greek lithos: stone + graphein: to write). Woodcut and letterpress are mechanical relief printing processes, copper engraving and etching are gravure printing techniques; now Senefelder had developed the first chemical planographic printing process based on the repulsion of fat and water and using a stone printing plate.
Limestone from the southern German town of Solnhofen, which, in addition to countless other fossils, has preserved the feather imprint of an archaeopterix today on show in the Museum of Natural History Berlin, proved to be particularly suitable because of its fine grain.
Be it sheet music, maps, postage stamps, banknotes, leaflets, newspapers or art, everything could suddenly be printed in much higher quality, larger editions and – most importantly – cheaper. When Senefelder finally moved on to use metal plates, this was the beginning of offset printing.