Art publisher, born in Saxony, E Germany. In 1795 he opened a print shop in London and published a well-known set of coloured engravings of London. He is said to have introduced lithography as a fine art into England.
Rudolph Ackermann (April 20, 1764–March 30, 1834) was an Anglo-German inventor and publisher.
He was born at Schneeberg, in Saxony, where he visited the Latin school.
He had been a saddler and coach-builder in different German cities, Paris, and London for ten years before, in 1795, he established a print-shop and drawing-school in the Strand. Ackermann set up a lithographic press and a trade in copper lithographies.
He applied the press in 1817 to the illustration of his Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, etc. and he published many illustrated volumes of topography and travel, The Microcosm of London (3 vols., 1808-1811), Westminster Abbey (2 vols., 1812), The Rhine (1820), The World in Miniature (43 vols., 1821-1826), etc.
Ackermann was an enterprising man; he patented (1801) a method for rendering paper and cloth waterproof, erected a factory at Chelsea for the purpose and was one of the first to illuminate his own premises with gas. After the Battle of Leipzig, Ackermann collected nearly a quarter of a million pounds sterling for the German sufferers.
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