William Griggs (inventor)
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William Griggs (4 October 1832 – 7 December 1911)[1] was an English inventor of a process of chromolithography known as photo-chromo-lithography. He was associated with the India Office, and publications for which he produced coloured illustrations include many works about India.
Printing method
Griggs was born in 1832, son of a lodge-keeper to the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, Bedfordshire. Losing his father in childhood, he was apprenticed at the age of twelve to the carpentering trade; aged 18 he was employed in London as an artisan in the Indian Court of the Great Exhibition of 1851. He improved his scanty education at night classes, and in 1855 was selected to be technical assistant to the reporter on Indian products and director of the India Museum, then in East India House, Leadenhall Street.[1]
His artistic tastes and keen interest in photography were encouraged by Dr John Forbes Watson, who became his chief in 1858, and at his instance Griggs was installed at Fife House, Whitehall, pending completion of the India Office, in a studio and workshops for photolithographic work. He had familiarised himself with the processes of photozincography discovered by the director-general of the Ordnance Survey, General Sir Henry James.[1]
By careful experiment he found that the use of cold, instead of hot, water in developing the transfer left the gelatine in the whites of the transfer, thus giving firmer adhesion to the stone and serving as a support to the fine lines. He also invented photo-chromo-lithography by first printing from a photolithographic transfer a faint impression on the paper to serve as a "key", separating the colours on duplicate negatives by varnishes, then photolithographing the dissected portions on stones, finally registering and printing each in its position and particiliar colour, with the texture, light and shade of the original.[1]
He greatly cheapened the production of colour work by a simplified form of this discovery: a photolithographic transfer from a negative of the original to stone, printed as a "key" in a suitable colour, superimposing thereon, in exact register, transparent tints in harmony with the original. Opaque colours, when necessary, were printed first.[1]
So far from keeping secret or patenting these improvements, Griggs described and gave practical demonstrations of them to the London Photographic Society (14 April 1868). He was thus a pioneer in the wide diffusion of colour work and halftone block-making, and helped to bring about rapid cylindrical printing.[1]
