RUDOLPH

See also:

• ACKERMANN, JOHANN CHRISTIAN GOTTLIEB (1756–1801)
• RUDOLPH ACKERMANN (1764-1834)

ACKERMANN (1764-1834)  , Anglo-German inventor and publisher, was born on the loth of April 1764 at Schneeberg, in Saxony . 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 applied it in 1817 to the illustration of his Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, . Ei'c . (monthly until 1828 when forty volumes had appeared) . Rowlandson and other distinguished artists were regular contributors . He also introduced the fashion of the once popular English Annuals, beginning in 1825 with Forget-me-not; and he published many illustrated volumes of topography and travel, The Microcosm of London (3 vols., 18o8-1811), Westminster Abbey (2 vols., 1812), The Rhine (1820), The World in Miniature (43 vols., 1821–1826), &c . Ackermann was an enterprising man ; he patented (18o?) 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 . Indeed the introduction of lighting by gas owed much to him . After the battle of Leipzig Ackermann collected nearly a quarter of a million sterling for the German sufferers . He died at Finchley, near London, on the 3oth of March 1834 .