History

In the beginning there was the Solnhofen stone – stone printing. It is a touching story of a laundry list that Alois Senefelder (1771–1834) wrote on the said stone in Munich for his mother since he had no paper at hand, thereby inventing “polyautography,” which later became known as “lithography.” It all sounds very improbable, but is actually historically authenticated. This was, however, only the final dramatic act in the longer history of the playwright and actor Alois Senefelder, whose real aim was the relief etching of a cheap letterpress printing form for his own use.

It was during his attempts to develop an inexpensive reproduction technology for expensive sheets of music that in 1797 he discovered that Solnhofen limestone reacted differently to grease and water and that printing using the greasy drawing no longer required the stone to be etched in relief, but only had to be kept constantly damp after prior blackening as well as a light one-off etching and treatment with a gum solution.

Senefelder also invented a special hand press for his new printing process, the so-called “lever press”. This applied the impression by sweeping over the successive sheets of paper positioned on the stone with a type of swiveling wooden blade, to avoid the sensitive stone being too heavily loaded by a platen. Because this lever press was difficult to operate, he constructed another version with a large impression cylinder several years before Friedrich Koenig registered the cylinder design for his automatic cylinder press in London (replacing the platen principle). Both systems existed side-by-side for a long time, probably for reasons of cost.

The first lithographic automatic cylinder presses were produced in France. The year 1846 is given for Nicolle’s press. Georg Sigl’s press followed in Vienna in 1852. Alexander Dupuy built his first lithographic automatic cylinder press in Paris in 1860. He employed Louis Faber and Adolf Schleicher, both from Swabia, who later became his partners. The Franco-German war of 1870/71 drove Faber and Schleicher out of France, whereupon they set up their own workshops in Offenbach am Main to build lithographic printing presses – the sheet-fed offset press section of present MAN Roland Druckmaschinen AG.

Hand presses developed by Alois Senefelder at the end of the eighteenth century

• Lever press
• Cylinder press

A lithographic automatic cylinder press with thrust crank drive from around 1815, such as continued to be used for a long time for art prints (posters). Operation involved 3 persons: one for driving the wheel (on the right), one for feeding the sheet, and one for catching the sheet (on the left, rear); the supervisor is standing in front

Senefelder had already developed ideas as to how the flat form of the stone plates could be replaced by a round form, by milling the stone material and applying it to flexible metal plates with solvent, for example. But it was only the discovery of the zinc plate with a lightsensitive coating as a suitable image carrier and the accompanying “zinc rotary” that brought success. The first of these is attributed to Ruddiman Johnst on in Edinburgh in 1886. The first patent, taken out by a Frenchman, had already been in existence since 1835. To replace the slow back-and-forth motion of the heavy stone came the rotating cylinder with the clamped-on, light weight, flexible metal plate. The Americans later replaced zinc by aluminum, because they had the raw material and suitable rolling mills.

The basic principle of the “Zinc Rotary” using a bent printing plate for lithographic printing, in the middle of the nineteenth century (IFRA)

The invention of the offset printing,developed from indirect letterpress in order to print tin substrates, is attributed to two inventors: an American, Ira W. Rubel, and a German immigrant, Caspar Hermann, who both had the idea around 1904 of printing from lithographic plates indirectly, that is, via a blanket cylinder.

Rubel ran a small lithographic and zinc plate printing works in Rutherford, NJ (USA). According to reports, problems arose one day when printing hard bank note paper with halftone images. To achieve a better print result Rubel therefore had a soft rubber blanket mounted on the impression cylinder. The feeder operator sometimes missed out a sheet through inattention, resulting in the ink impression being unintentionally deposited on the blanket. It was transferred from there to the reverse side of the following sheet.When Rubel inspected one of these misprints more closely, he found to his astonishment that the impression on the reverse side, though a mirror impression, was considerably better than that on the front. Further tests confirmed his observations.He gave up his printing works and devoted himself henceforth solely to the construction of indirect lithographic printing presses, for which he was soon using the term “offset printing”.

The indirect letterpress technology for tin (sheet metal) printing (IFRA)

Hermann, the other person to whom the same invention is attributed at the same time (in practice, the idea was in the air as a result of prior inventions arising from tin printing), offered at the end of 1904 to adapt the letterpress sheet-fed rotary presses of the brothers Alfred and Charles Harris for offset printing. A cooperation agreement was signed in Niles, Ohio (USA) at the beginning of 1905 and the Harris Automatic Press Company then became the first offset press factory alongside that of Rubel and was, in fact, considerably more successful than Rubel’s.

Indirect lithography (offset printing), invented by Ira W. Rubel and Caspar Hermann around 1904.
a) Diagram of the printing unit (IFRA);
b) Caspar Hermann and the first German offset printing press, the “Triumph”, 1907

Hermann developed further new ideas for multicolour printing presses, web offset presses, and presses for simultaneous printing on both sides of the web (perfecting). In May 1907 he returned to Germany since he saw no chance of furthering these developments in the USA at that time. Four days before he was awarded a patent by the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin.He alone realized the implications of this. It involved the construction of blanket-to-blanket presses for simultaneous printing on both sides of the web (perfecting).

Just as Friedrich Koenig a century before had had to travel all over Europe to find financial backers for his inventions, Hermann wrote to all leading press factories in Central Europe, but without success. Only in September 1910 did Ernst Herrmann, who at that time owned the well-known Felix Böttcher rubber coating factory in Leipzig, reply to Koenig’s advertisement.

Indirect lithography (offset printing), invented by Ira W. Rubel and Caspar Hermann around 1904. a) Diagram of the printing unit (IFRA); b) Caspar Hermann and the first German offset printing press, the “Triumph”, 1907

Ernst Herrmann was so convinced of the concept of a web offset press that he then and there commissioned VOMAG (Vogtländische Maschinenbau AG), a press factory in Plauen/Vogtland (for which he was the general agent in his own area), to design and build a web offset press on his own account. In June 1912 the press, which was given the name “Universal”, was presented at Felix Böttcher in Leipzig . It was set up at the exhibition “Bugra 1914” in Leipzig, where it won recognition with many publishers and printers. In this way VOMAG became the first web offset press manufacturer and with Caspar Hermann’s patent the company soon came to dominate the market.shows a further development of the first web offset press.

The world’s first web offset press. The basic principle had been conceived by Caspar Hermann before 1907 and tallied with the blanket-to-blanket printing patent.
a) Basic principle;
b) “Universal” web offset press (1912)