The origins: Advances in printing technology

The foundations for the poster as we know it today were laid at the end of the 18th century in the course of technical developments in paper production and printing technology. Invented in China, paper was originally made by hand from textile fibres in a laborious process; from around the middle of the 19th century, it could be produced by machine from wood fibres, making it very affordable and therefore widely usable. Lithography, invented by Alois Senefelder in 1797, made it possible to print serial reproductions of drawings for the first time, and the invention of chromolithography in 1827 first made the printing of multicoloured images possible. Jules Chéret, who owned a printing company in Paris, further developed and simplified the originally slow and expensive lithographic printing process, and the triumphant advance of lithography could no longer be stopped.

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