Cromolitografia

It was in France that the first development of colour lithography took place. In 1828 La Société d’encouragement pour l’Industrie national announced a competition for colour lithography. The winner was Godefroy Engelmann from Strasbourg who won the competition in 1839 with his trichromatic method. But already in 1837 Engelmann had received his brevet d’invention. The same year Engelmann published Album chromolithographique ou Recueil d'essais du nouveau procédé d'impression lithographique en couleurs inventé par Engelmann père et fils, à Mulhouse where he described the method of chromolithography, as he called colour lithography. It was the first time the term “chromolithographie” was consequently used. “Chromolithography” is now the standard term in English. In Swedish I prefer “färglitografi” that is colour lithography. The album consists of two pages of text and eight plates made by the Swiss artist Rudolf Huber with crayon and printed in the three primary colours and black by Engelmann himself. With the plates he fully demonstrated the capacity of the colour lithography rendering the whole spectrum with only three colour stones and one blackstone. 
Due to the state of lithographic printing technique and manufacturing of printing colours around 1840, printing houses usually used more than four stones for colour lithography. It was easier and cheaper to print colour lithographs from a greater number of stones. Engelmann had used crayon all over, but gradually it was replaced by ink and differing dotting techniques. You can say that the development of the print went from the primary elements dot, line and surface over the halftone cliché to the dot, now called pixels. The efforts of the lithographers to get halftone effects led to the halftone cliché in the end of the 19th century. And not before that time the trichromatic method became the norm. For colour lithography the use of many colour stones was the normal and time consuming procedure.