Printing

The Altamira Cave painting in northern Spain. Paintings from the Lost Tomb of Nebamun

 

The visual image has always been important in the communication history of man. From the cave paintings of the early man to the wall decoration of the tombs of the Pharaohs. With the advent of moveable metal type (Johannes Gutenberg 1440), for the first time mass production of books was possible. The draw back of the movable metal type was that it required a heavy weight to press the paper into the inked type. Although it was good for type it was not so good for images,  because of the size of the press it limited the size of the paper to be printed on.

Gutenberg press and metal type.

It was not until the discovery of the lithographic printing process (Aloys Senefelder 1794), and his drive was to come up with a process that was cheaper than early types of printing. Larger than book sized prints and images were able to be printed.

  Lithography press for printing maps and Lithography stone and mirror-image print of a map of Munich

The litho process exploits the fact water and oil repels each other. Originally an image is drawn into a coating of wax or an oily substance applied to a lithographic stone usually limestone and this is the medium that transfers the ink to blank sheet of paper, producing a printed page. This process allowed for multi pass printing and the advent of colour printing.