color-printing was confined to comparatively crude products from wooden
blocks, most of which were hardly equal to the Japanese fan pictures now
familiar to all of us. The year 1799 gave us a new invention which was
destined to revolutionize reproductive art and add immensely to the
means for education, culture and enjoyment.

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