In 1798 Austrian actor and playwright Alois Senefelder (1771-1834) created a print by using a press to copy an image onto paper from the smooth surface of a section of limestone. Senefelder erroneously referred to his process as chemical printing. It would go on to become the most significant innovation in printing since relief printing in the fifteenth century.
Although the precise details of his discovery are vague at best, the most commonly accepted story is that, when asked by his mother to prepare a laundry list, he was unable to find a suitable piece of paper, so he used a grease pencil to write the list on the flat surface of a piece of dense Solenhofen limestone. Senefelder then at some point must Jnave observed how the greasy residue left by the pencil became absorbed and embedded into the porous limestone, retaining its ink even after having its surface washed. Washing the stone then caused the remaining surface areas to repel ink, leaving only the drawn image and thus eliminating the need for etching. Senefelder had discovered a new way of setting off inked and non- inked surfaces, though it was to take him another four years to fully actualize the process.
The great advantage of lithography was its ability to endlessly reproduce an image without any parts of the process wearing down. By 1800 Senefelder had refined the process and established a lithographic press in London to produce sheet music. In 1802 he set up a press in Paris, where the French ignored his rather cumbersome name for the process—Chemical Printing for Bavaria and the Electorate—and referred to it as lithographic, meaning "writing on stone."
