Ismert vagy ismeretlen?
Known or unknown?

József Kliegl, the painter-inventor

Summary/Abstract: The name of the less-known József Kliegl is mostly mentioned in Hungarian and foreign works on the history of printing. Gifted with an inventive mind, Kliegl spent decades trying to solve the problem of mechanical typesetting, but he was also obsessed with a couple of other technical ideas that looked fantastic in the first half of the 19th century. He was a trained and talented painter: some of his miniatures of high standard have survived, but from the documentation of his inventions almost nothing has been handed down to us. Relying on sources from the period, the paper dispels the commonplace about the genius, who–due to his unappreciated works and lack of support–went to waste, even though the business capital and the industrial background was of course missing. The Hungarian reform era is about an emerging Hungary with a growing middle class, when any performance reflective of the new age was met with instant response in the more and more lively public life. Kliegl's typesetting and distributing machine, whose main promoters were, not accidentally, people involved in literature, became a national matter, and the continuous patronage was far from insignificant, given the economic situation of the society. We also need to mention that in the summer months of the 1848 revolution the radical opposition suggested that the inventor receive government support. Kliegl was a Hungarian nobleman, who was as socially embedded as most landowners or public officials and creators with a noble background, and his hard life is an illustrative example of how the bourgeoisturned nobility related to bourgeois life. But at the time both the business capital and the industrial background were still missing for a successful career in technology.

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