Part 7 (1/2)

Freiherr von Aretin wished that the management of the business be in the hands of a man who possessed his own fullest confidence, but whom I did not consider at all suitable, as he was a royal official and as such could not do business in a public shop. Consequently the trade was carried on in his own residence, which was known to only few people and where n.o.body looked for the manifold things that we could have produced to good profit. This at last lowered our establishment to a mere job printery, which finally could not maintain itself, because more and more similar establishments were started in Munich, and the prices for work became lower and lower through their hungry compet.i.tion.

It may not be uninteresting to tell briefly how so many printeries happened to be undertaken.

The first was established by Gleissner and myself, and was continued afterward in my name by my brothers Theobald and George, until 1805.

They sold the secret to the Feyertag School, where an excellent art inst.i.tute developed gradually under Herr Mitterer.

Strohhofer learned the elements of the process from my brother Karl, and a.s.sociated himself, in 1806, with Herr Sidler, royal court musician, who had studied first with my brothers, then with Madame Gleissner, and then in the Aretin printery. When Strohhofer left Munich, Sidler erected a stone-printery for the Government, and after he had obtained an official permit before the expiration of my franchise, he established his own inst.i.tution, producing very good work.

During this time Madame Gleissner had pet.i.tioned the Government frequently for sufficient work to a.s.sist her, and had obtained the promise through His Excellency the Minister of State, von Montgelas.

Then it happened that the chief of a newly organized bureau, Freiherr von Hartmann, having a great deal of writing to do in beginning his new work, decided to introduce lithography for the purpose of saving labor.

His intention was to have it all done in our inst.i.tution. No doubt he had communicated this plan to von Montgelas; for as he met Madame Gleissner about this time, and she asked again for work, he said that he had given Senefelder enough work to keep ten presses busy, and if he had not yet received it, he would get it soon through Freiherr von Hartmann.

There evidently was a misunderstanding here on account of the name. When Freiherr von Hartmann sent one of his subordinates to call Senefelder to him, he brought my brother Theobald, who immediately got orders to establish a lithographic office, and shortly afterward was appointed Inspector of Lithography. Beside a considerable salary, he received the following other incomes, first, excellent pay for all work that was turned in; second, an agreement that if his ten presses could not be sufficiently employed by the bureau, he might work for other governmental bureaus and for private persons. Thus he received a great deal of work, among other jobs the printing of pa.s.sports for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which earned large sums for him in a short time and placed him in very good circ.u.mstances.

He could not conceal his good luck, and so it came that many people imagined that stone-printing was a means for getting rich quickly, which resulted in a disproportionate growth of new shops. Out of his own there sprang two, namely, those of Helmle and Roth, who erected their own printeries under the permit of the police.

At the same time a lithographic inst.i.tution was erected in the Royal Asylum for the Poor on the Anger; and a Herr Dietrich, of a government bureau, also established one.

My own prospects became worse and worse toward the year 1810. Though I may flatter myself that I perfected myself very greatly through unceasing practice and thousands of experiments, still, without a fortunate accident, it might well have happened that I would have been forced to think it lucky if I could obtain work under one of my former apprentices.

I even suffered the insult of having the papers declare that though I had invented the art roughly, I had kept it secret for a long time through selfishness, and had never understood how to use it for anything except merely printing music. The falsity and humiliating character of this statement were bound to pain me the more bitterly, since all other stone-artists and stone-printers had learned only from me, and not one (not even Herr Mitterer, the most expert and, perhaps because of that, the most modest) possessed the art as a whole, in all its parts, as perfectly as I did. I hope that my text-book will prove this.

So far as the secret was concerned, the statement was an evident falsehood. Since the moment when I received the exclusive franchise in Bavaria, in the year 1799, I had made no secret of any part of my process toward any living being. I showed the whole manipulation to my workmen as well as to all strangers. Those who knew me more intimately and realized, therefore, that I could not resist the desire for communicating anything that I discovered to benefit mankind, often censured me severely for my frankness, saying that I could have been a millionaire had I kept my art a secret. But this was equally erroneous.

I never could have succeeded to any degree with my own means.

The false belief that I desired exclusive enjoyment of the results of stone-printing, is in direct contradiction of the fact that the lack of secrecy was held to invalidate my exclusive franchise. The idea may have arisen, at least partly, through the circ.u.mstance that several of my former workmen, or others who learned something of the art, made a wonderful secret of it, in order to be considered more important. This was carried to such an extent that some traveled from place to place and sold their knowledge to many people for large sums under the seal of confidence. I pity those who thus received in exchange for their money something of little or no use, when they could have learned from me for practically nothing, as it always was my greatest delight to converse with intelligent men about those subjects that interested me so deeply as inventor.

After making this little excursion, which was needed for my justification, I return to my story.

There were, then, in 1809, six public printeries in Munich besides mine, without reckoning those which several artists had made for their own use. The foremost among the latter was Herr Mettenleithner, Royal Copper Plate Engraver. He was one of the first to whom I had shown specimens, as early as 1796, of the new process, but he had paid little attention to it. Partly through various very excellent specimens from Herr Mitterer's print, and partly through the work of Strixner and Pilotti, he was induced to make experiments. A son of Herr von Dall'

Armi, who was taking lessons just then in drawing and copper etching for his own pleasure, interested himself in the process. As a result, the latter established a lithographic inst.i.tution in Rome, which, so far as I know, never achieved any decided success.

Soon afterward Herr Mettenleithner, in a.s.sociation with one of the best of the Aretin printers, a man named Weishaupt, laid the foundation for the stone-printery of the Royal Tax Commission (Konigliche Unmittelbare Steuer-Kataster-Kommission), which is now the most important of all the lithographic inst.i.tutions of Munich. A little later a similar inst.i.tution was founded for reproduction purposes by the Royal Privy Council, through Herr Mettenleithner's son-in-law, Herr Winter.

Herr Mettenleithner was appointed director of the great establishment, which employed some thirty engravers, to etch the plans of the Steuer-Kataster, which received fifteen to twenty thousand impressions each. At this time the Kingdom of Bavaria was being charted in great detail for tax-regulation purposes, under the management of Privy Councilor von Utzschneider, the man who has done so much for Bavaria's home industries. There were required at least two exact copies of each map, and close calculation proved that it would be possible to etch the charts on stone and make several hundred impressions for the money that these two copies would cost if done by hand. In addition, each of these impressions was good enough to serve as an original.

The lithographic inst.i.tution of the Royal Steuer-Kataster had been in operation for some time when a trivial occurrence had the most important effect on my fate.

It became necessary to print a sheet of such great size that there happened to be no stone in Munich large enough. Weishaupt remembered that he had seen stones in my possession which I had purchased partly for map-work and partly for printing cotton and tapestries. He sent a printer to me with a letter from Royal Tax Councilor von Badhauser, requesting that I sell the Government a stone of the necessary dimensions. Herr von Badhauser was a friend of my father, and I myself always had entertained the highest respect for him. He was also a friend of Herr Gleissner, and had done many things to oblige him. I embraced the opportunity of doing him a favor with joy, and the matter probably would have had no further consequences, had not Madame Gleissner arrived just as the stone was being taken away.

She suspected that the stone might be desired for a purpose other than the one stated, and sought Herr von Badhauser to ascertain the truth. On this occasion she complained to him that the Government, not content with infringing our franchise by erecting its own printeries, also took away our workmen after I had trained them with much labor and expense.

Herr von Badhauser was surprised. He said that Privy Councilor von Utzschneider had wished to turn work over to me, but that my reply to his proposal, which had been laid before me by a designer named Schiesl, had been that it was against my arrangements to collaborate with any other establishment, and that, on the contrary, it was my intention, with the a.s.sistance of Freiherr von Aretin, to press our suit against the Government for infringement.

This Herr Schiesl, a pupil of Herr Methleithner, had worked for us occasionally, and, indeed, was one of the first to use the new process for drawings, especially pen-drawings. As he was rather adept and showed great interest, I gave him full instructions in everything, and he knew all my circ.u.mstances exactly. Thus he understood thoroughly that my future depended on the turn that Freiherr von Aretin's affairs might take, and that our situation was precarious, owing to the compet.i.tion of so many establishments. Therefore, I cannot understand how he came to utter a statement so contrary to the truth.

Madame Gleissner hurried to Herr von Utzschneider and explained my real intentions to him. He promised to consider the matter earnestly.

Herr Professor Schiegg, an excellent geometrician and astronomer, was member of the Steuer-Kataster-Kommission, and had the supervision over the entire inst.i.tution. He was not well satisfied. Too many costly proof-prints were being made, and the impressions did not please him.

Accidentally he saw my receipt for payment for the stone which I had furnished, and he observed that I did not ask more for it than the Commission had to pay for stones only half as large. Also I charged only twenty-four kreuzer for polis.h.i.+ng, whereas the Commission had been paying one gulden for stones of four square feet. He took occasion to represent to the Commission that it might be well to give me the management of the establishment.