Senefelderplatz biography

German actor, playwright and inventor (1771–1834)

Johann Alois Senefelder (6 November 1771 – 26 February 1834) was a German actor and playwright who invented the printing technique of lithography in the 1790s.^[1]

Actor, playwright

Born Aloys Johann Nepomuk Franz Senefelder in Prague, then capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, where his actor father was appearing on stage.

He was educated in Munich and won a scholarship to study law at Ingolstadt. The death of his father in 1791 forced him to leave his studies to support his mother and eight siblings, and he became an actor and wrote a successful play Connoisseur of Girls.

Discovery, development of lithography

Problems with the printing of his play Mathilde von Altenstein caused him to fall into debt, and unable to afford to publish a new play he had written, Senefelder experimented with a novel etching technique using a greasy, acid resistant ink as a resist o