# Lithography > Printing from flat stone with grease and water - Date: 1796 - Era: Industrial age - Domain: [Writing & Communication](https://lastcodex.org/en/domains/communication/) - Rebuild stage: IV (Science & industry) - Difficulty: 3/5 - URL: https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/lithography/ Lithography prints from a flat surface. An image is drawn with a greasy crayon or ink on a fine-grained limestone. Because grease and water repel each other, oily printing ink clings to the greasy drawing and is refused by the damp bare stone, and a sheet pressed against the stone takes the image. Alois Senefelder, a playwright in Munich, began printing from stone in 1796 and soon worked out this purely chemical method. Lithography made drawings, maps and sheet music cheap to reproduce, and its successor, offset printing, remains in wide use. ![Lithography · Printing from flat stone with grease and water](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/plate.CFfg1AdI_d5FU8.webp) ## Legend 1. Limestone slab 2. Greasy drawing on the stone 3. Inking roller 4. Hinged tympan 5. Scraper pressing on the tympan 6. Crank that draws the bed under the scraper ## What it is Lithography, from the Greek for "stone writing", is a way of printing from a flat surface. In letterpress the parts that print stand up in relief, and in engraving they are cut into the plate. On a lithographic stone the drawing and the blank areas lie on the same level, and they differ only in how they take water and grease. For this reason lithography is called a planographic process, and Senefelder himself called it chemical printing. ![A hand drawing with a greasy crayon on a stone lying on a wooden board, a house and a tree drawn back to front, and beside it the printed sheet with the house and the tree the right way round](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v1.Df1ob4Dc_1bqisf.webp) _The drawing on the stone is made back to front, and the print comes out the right way round._ The artist draws directly on a polished slab of fine-grained limestone, with a greasy crayon or a greasy ink, and can work with a pen, a brush or the side of the crayon. The stone prints a mirror image of the drawing, so text and anything that must face a particular way are drawn reversed. A single drawing can give many prints, and the process cost less than copper engraving or woodcut, so it spread quickly for drawings, maps and sheet music. In 1818 Senefelder also obtained a privilege for printing from metal plates, the forerunners of the plates used in offset printing. ## How it works Grease and water repel each other. The greasy crayon or ink clings to the limestone where it is drawn, and those parts of the stone shed water. Gum arabic makes the bare stone around the drawing hold water and refuse grease. On a damp stone, water therefore lies in the bare areas and beads up on the drawing. ![A wet natural sponge resting on a drawn stone: drops of water bead up on the greasy drawing and soak into the bare stone around it](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v2.CcbLAcsV_bAhs.webp) _Water soaks into the bare stone and beads up on the greasy drawing._ Oily printing ink, rolled over a damp stone, behaves the opposite way. The film of water on the bare stone keeps the ink from settling there, while the greasy drawing, which holds no water, takes the ink. Only the image is inked, although it lies at the same level as the rest of the stone. In the lithographic press the paper lies on the stone under a hinged frame, the tympan. A blunt wooden scraper bears down on the tympan, and a crank draws the bed carrying the stone beneath it, so the paper is pressed hard against the inked stone along a moving line. The sheet carries the image facing the right way. A colour print needs one stone for each colour, all printed on the same sheet. Lithography workshops use acids, solvents and very heavy stones. The preparation of the stone and the press work belong in an equipped studio, under the supervision of trained printers. ## History and evolution Alois Senefelder, born in Prague in 1771 and the son of a Munich actor, wrote plays and wanted to print them and other works more cheaply than with copper engraving. In 1796 in Munich, with the composer Franz Gleissner, he began printing from stone. His first prints, among them a military march for the Bavarian army, came from stones etched with acid, so that the drawn lines stood up in relief to be inked. He used polished slabs of Solnhofen limestone, the stone then often laid in the corridors of Munich houses. The purely chemical method, printing from the flat stone, followed soon afterwards: in 1797 according to the city museum of Offenbach, in 1798 according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1797 he also built a wooden press with a scraper in place of a roller, which solved the problems he had met when printing stones in a copperplate press. In 1799 the Elector of Bavaria granted Senefelder and Gleissner an exclusive privilege for fifteen years, and Senefelder sold his process to the music publisher Johann Anton André of Offenbach, where the first lithographic music prints, among them piano concertos by Mozart, appeared in 1800. Senefelder went to London, where he obtained patents in 1801. In 1818 he published his handbook of stone printing, translated into English the following year, and the process spread across Europe. Artists used it for prints, publishers for maps, scores and illustrations. ![Four lithographic stones side by side on a wooden table, each carrying, in reverse, one part of the same flower picture, in yellow, red, blue and black, and the finished print laid in front with all four colours combined](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v3.BYJw_WOq_dKjFv.webp) _In colour lithography each stone prints one colour, and the colours add up on the same sheet._ Senefelder had printed in colour by 1826, and in 1837 the lithographer Godefroy Engelmann patented colour lithography in France with his son Jean. His demonstration album of the same year built a full range of colours from three colour stones and one black stone. Colour lithography was soon printing posters, labels and book illustrations, beside the relief type of the [printing press](/en/inventions/printing-press/). In the early twentieth century printers found that an inked image transferred to a rubber blanket and then to the paper gave a sharper print. Offset printing, which still uses plates on which greasy image and damp blank areas lie on the same level, largely replaced stone lithography during the twentieth century. Artists still draw on stone in print studios. ## Key facts - Inventor: Alois Senefelder, Munich, 1796 - Principle: Grease and water repel each other - Printing stone: Fine-grained limestone from Solnhofen, Bavaria - First privilege: Granted for 15 years by the Elector of Bavaria, 1799 - Colour lithography patent: Godefroy Engelmann, France, 1837 ## Requires - [Paper](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/paper/): A cheap surface for memory (c. 150 BCE) - [Printing Press](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/printing-press/): Movable type, copied by the thousand (c. 1440) ## Sources - [Alois Senefelder (Great inventors)](https://dpma.de/english/our_office/publications/milestones/greatinventors/senefelder/index.html), Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt - [The invention of lithography](https://www.offenbach.de/microsite/haus_der_stadtgeschichte/sammlungen/neuzeit/die-erfindung-des-steindrucks.php?loc=en), Haus der Stadtgeschichte, Offenbach am Main - [Specimens of Polyautography (catalogue note on Senefelder's invention)](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/390755), The Metropolitan Museum of Art - [Materials and techniques: lithograph](https://www.metmuseum.org/en/perspectives/materials-and-techniques-printmaking-lithograph), The Metropolitan Museum of Art - [Engelmann, Godefroy (1788-1839), notice de personne](https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb12604427k), Bibliothèque nationale de France - [Traité théorique et pratique de lithographie](https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2014/01/03/traite-theorique-et-pratique-de-lithographie), Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton University Library - [Chromolithography in Sweden in the 19th century (Engelmann's patent of 1837 and album)](https://www.aepm.eu/publications/conference-proceedings-2/from-stone-to-chip-alois-senefelder-and-the-invention-of-lithography-in-an-international-context/chromolithography-in-sweden-in-the-19th-century/), Jan af Burén, Association of European Printing Museums - [Pioneers of Printing: the origins of offset printing](https://origin-www.drupa.com/en/Media_News/drupa_blog/Print_Technologies/Pioneers_and_History_of_Printing/Pioneers_of_Printing_The_Origins_of_Offset_Printing), drupa, Messe Düsseldorf Fact-checked on 2026-10-19. --- The Last Codex · https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/lithography/ · © The Last Codex. 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