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1 Robert, Nicolas Louis
SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing[br]b. 2 December 1761 Paris, Franced. 8 August 1828 Dreux, France[br]French inventor of the papermaking machine.[br]Robert was born into a prosperous family and received a fair education, after which he became a lawyer's clerk. In 1780, however, he enlisted in the Army and joined the artillery, serving with distinction in the West Indies, where he fought against the English. When dissatisfied with his prospects, Robert returned to Paris and obtained a post as proof-reader to the firm of printers and publishers owned by the Didot family. They were so impressed with his abilities that they promoted him, c. 1790, to "clerk inspector of workmen" at their paper mill at Essonnes, south of Paris, under the control of Didot St Leger.It was there that Robert conceived the idea of a continuous papermaking machine. In 1797 he made a model of it and, after further models, he obtained a patent in 1798. The paper was formed on a continuously revolving wire gauze, from which the sheets were lifted off and hung up to dry. Didot was at first scathing, but he came round to encouraging Robert to make a success of the machine. However, they quarrelled over the financial arrangements and Robert left to try setting up his own mill near Rouen. He failed for lack of capital, and in 1800 he returned to Essonnes and sold his patent to Didot for part cash, part proceeds from the operation of the mill. Didot left for England to enlist capital and technical skills to exploit the invention, while Robert was left in charge at Essonnes. It was the Fourdrinier brothers and Bryan Donkin who developed the papermaking machine into a form in which it could succeed. Meanwhile the mill at Essonnes under Robert's direction had begun to falter and declined to the point where it had to be sold. He had never received the full return from the sale of his patent, but he managed to recover his rights in it. This profited him little, for Didot obtained a patent in France for the Fourdrinier machine and had two examples erected in 1814 and the following year, respectively, neatly side-tracking Robert, who was now without funds or position. To support himself and his family, Robert set up a primary school in Dreux and there passed his remaining years. Although it was the Fourdrinier papermaking machine that was generally adopted, it is Robert who deserves credit for the original initiative.[br]Further ReadingR.H.Clapperton, 1967, The Papermaking Machine, Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 279–83 (provides a full description of Robert's invention and patent, together with a biography).LRD -
2 Caro, Heinrich
[br]b. 13 February 1834 Poznan, Polandd. 11 October 1911 Dresden, Germany[br]German dyestuffi chemist.[br]Caro received vocational training as a dyer at the Gewerbeinstitut in Berlin from 1852, at the same time attending chemistry lectures at the university there. In 1855 he was hired as a colourist by a firm of calico printers in Mulheim an der Ruhr, where he was able to demonstrate the value of scientific training in solving practical problems. Two years later, the year after Perkin's discovery of aniline dyes, he was sent to England in order to learn the latest dyeing techniques. He took up a post an analytical chemist with the chemical firm Roberts, Dale \& Co. in Manchester; after finding a better way of synthesizing Perkin's mauve, he became a partner in the business. Caro was able to enlarge both his engineering experience and his chemical knowledge there, particularly by studying Hofmann's researches on the aniline dyes. He made several discoveries, including induline, Bismark brown and Martius yellow.Like other German chemists, however, he found greater opportunities opening up in Germany, and in 1866 he returned to take up a post in Bunsen's laboratory in Heidelberg. In 1868 Caro obtained the important directorship of Badische Anilin-Soda- Fabrik (BASF), the first true industrial research organization and leading centre of dyestuffs research. A steady stream of commercial successes followed. In 1869, after Graebe and Liebermann had showed him their laboratory synthesis of the red dye alizarin, Caro went on to develop a cheaper and commercially viable method. During the 1870s he collaborated with Adolf von Baeyer to make methylene blue and related dyes, and then went on to the azo dyes. His work on indigo was important, but was not crowned with commercial success; that came in 1897 when his successor at BASF discovered a suitable process for producing indigo on a commercial scale. Caro had resigned his post in 1889, by which time he had made notable contributions to German supremacy in the fast-developing dyestuffs industry.[br]Further ReadingA.Bernthsen, 1912, obituary, Berichte derDeutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft, 45; 1,987–2,042 (a substantial obituary).LRD -
3 Baxter, George
SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing[br]b. 31 July 1804 Lewes, Sussex, Englandd. 11 January 1867 Sydenham, London, England[br]English pioneer in colour printing.[br]The son of a printer, Baxter was apprenticed to a wood engraver and there began his search for improved methods of making coloured prints, hitherto the perquisite of the rich, in order to bring them within reach of a wider public. After marriage to the daughter of Robert Harrild, founder of the printing firm of Harrild \& Co., he set up house in London, where he continued his experiments on colour while maintaining the run-of-the-mill work that kept the family.The nineteenth century saw a tremendous advance in methods of printing pictures, produced as separate prints or as book illustrations. For the first three decades colour was supplied by hand, but from the 1830s attempts were made to print in colour, using a separate plate for each one. Coloured prints were produced by chromolithography and relief printing on a small scale. Prints were first made with the latter method on a commercial scale by Baxter with a process that he patented in 1835. He generally used a key plate that was engraved, aquatinted or lithographed; the colours were then printed separately from wood or metal blocks. Baxter was a skilful printer and his work reached a high standard. An early example is the frontispiece to Robert Mudie's Summer (1837). In 1849 he began licensing his patent to other printers, and after the Great Exhibition of 1851 colour relief printing came into its own. Of the plethora of illustrated literature that appeared then, Baxter's Gems of the Great Exhibition was one of the most widely circulated souvenirs of the event.Baxter remained an active printer through the 1850s, but increasing competition from the German coloured lithographic process undermined his business and in 1860 he gave up the unequal struggle. In May of that year, all his oil pictures, engravings and blocks went up for auction, some 3,000 lots altogether. Baxter retired to Sydenham, then a country place, making occasional visits to London until injuries sustained in a mishap while he was ascending a London omnibus led to his death. Above all, he helped to initiate the change from the black and white world of pre-Victorian literature to the riotously colourful world of today.[br]Further ReadingC.T.Courtney Lewis, 1908, George Baxter, the Picture Printer, London: Sampson Lowe, Marsden (the classic account).M.E.Mitzmann, 1978, George Baxter and the Baxter Prints, Newton Abbot: David \& Charles.LRD -
4 Clymer, George E.
SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing[br]b. 1754 Bucks County, Pennsylvania, USAd. 27 August 1834 London, England[br]American inventor of the Columbian printing press.[br]Clymer was born on his father's farm, of a family that emigrated from Switzerland in the early eighteenth century. He attended local schools, helping out on the farm in his spare time, and he showed a particular talent for maintaining farm machinery. At the age of 16 he learned the trade of carpenter and joiner, which he followed in the same district for over twenty-five years. During that time, he showed his talent for mechanical invention in many ways, including the invention of a plough specially adapted to the local soils. Around 1800, he moved to Philadelphia, where his interest was aroused by the erection of the first bridge over the Schuylkill River. He devised a pump to remove water from the cofferdams at a rate of 500 gallons per day, superior to any other pumps then in use. He obtained a US patent for this in 1801, and a British one soon after.Clymer then turned his attention to the improvement of the printing press. For three and a half centuries after its invention, the old wooden-framed press had remained virtually unchanged except in detail. The first real change came in 1800 with the introduction of the iron press by Earl Stanhope. Modified versions were developed by other inventors, notably George Clymer, who after more than ten years' effort achieved his Columbian press. With its new system of levers, it enabled perfect impressions to be obtained with far less effort by the pressman. The Columbian was also notable for its distinctive cast-iron ornamentation, including a Hermes on each pillar and alligators and other reptiles on the levers. Most spectacular, it was surmounted by an American spread eagle, usually covered in gilt, which also served as a counterweight to raise the platen. The earliest known Columbian, surviving only in an illustration, bears the inscription Columbian Press/No.25/invented by George Clymer/Anno Domini 1813/Made in Philadelphia 1816. Few American printers could afford the US$400 selling price, so in 1817 Clymer went to England, where it was taken up enthusiastically. He obtained a British patent for it the same year, and by the following March it was being manufactured by the engineering firm R.W.Cope, although Clymer was probably making it on his own account soon afterwards. The Columbian was widely used for many years and continued to be made even into the twentieth century. The King of the Netherlands awarded Clymer a gold medal for his invention and the Tsar of Russia gave him a present for installing the press in Russia. Doubtless for business reasons, Clymer spent most of his remaining years in England and Europe.[br]Further ReadingJ.Moran, 1973, Printing Presses, London: Faber \& Faber.—1969, contributed a thorough survey of the press in J. Printing Hist. Soc., no. 3.LRD -
5 Eisler, Paul
[br]b. 1907 Vienna, Austria[br]Austrian engineer responsible for the invention of the printed circuit.[br]At the age of 23, Eisler obtained a Diploma in Engineering from the Technical University of Vienna. Because of the growing Nazi influence in Austria, he then accepted a post with the His Master's Voice (HMV) agents in Belgrade, where he worked on the problems of radio reception and sound transmission in railway trains. However, he soon returned to Vienna to found a weekly radio journal and file patents on graphical sound recording (for which he received a doctorate) and on a system of stereoscopic television based on lenticular vertical scanning.In 1936 he moved to England and sold the TV patent to Marconi for £250. Unable to find a job, he carried out experiments in his rooms in a Hampstead boarding-house; after making circuits using strip wires mounted on bakelite sheet, he filed his first printed-circuit patent that year. He then tried to find ways of printing the circuits, but without success. Obtaining a post with Odeon Theatres, he invented a sound-level control for films and devised a mirror-drum continuous-film projector, but with the outbreak of war in 1939, when the company was evacuated, he chose to stay in London and was interned for a while. Released in 1941, he began work with Henderson and Spalding, a firm of lithographic printers, to whom he unwittingly assigned all future patents for the paltry sum of £1. In due course he perfected a means of printing conducting circuits and on 3 February 1943 he filed three patents covering the process. The British Ministry of Defence rejected the idea, considering it of no use for military equipment, but after he had demonstrated the technique to American visitors it was enthusiastically taken up in the US for making proximity fuses, of which many millions were produced and used for the war effort. Subsequently the US Government ruled that all air-borne electronic circuits should be printed.In the late 1940s the Instrument Department of Henderson and Spalding was split off as Technograph Printed Circuits Ltd, with Eisler as Technical Director. In 1949 he filed a further patent covering a multilayer system; this was licensed to Pye and the Telegraph Condenser Company. A further refinement, patented in the 1950s, the use of the technique for telephone exchange equipment, but this was subsequently widely infringed and although he negotiated licences in the USA he found it difficult to license his ideas in Europe. In the UK he obtained finance from the National Research and Development Corporation, but they interfered and refused money for further development, and he eventually resigned from Technograph. Faced with litigation in the USA and open infringement in the UK, he found it difficult to establish his claims, but their validity was finally agreed by the Court of Appeal (1969) and the House of Lords (1971).As a freelance inventor he filed many other printed-circuit patents, including foil heating films and batteries. When his Patent Agents proved unwilling to fund the cost of filing and prosecuting Complete Specifications he set up his own company, Eisler Consultants Ltd, to promote food and space heating, including the use of heated cans and wallpaper! As Foil Heating Ltd he went into the production of heating films, the process subsequently being licensed to Thermal Technology Inc. in California.[br]Bibliography1953, "Printed circuits: some general principles and applications of the foil technique", Journal of the British Institution of Radio Engineers 13: 523.1959, The Technology of Printed Circuits: The Foil Technique in Electronic Production.1984–5, "Reflections of my life as an inventor", Circuit World 11:1–3 (a personal account of the development of the printed circuit).1989, My Life with the Printed Circuit, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: Lehigh University Press.KF -
6 Koenig, Friedrich
SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing[br]b. 17 April 1774 Eisleben, Thuringia, Germanyd. 17 January 1833 Oberzell, near Würzburg, Germany[br]German inventor of the machine printing press.[br]Koenig became a printer and bookseller. Around 1800 he was among those who conceived the idea of mechanizing the hand printing press, which apart from minor details had survived virtually unchanged through the first three and a half centuries of printing. In 1803, in Sühl, Saxony, he designed a press in which the flat forme, carrying the type, was mechanically inked and passed to and from the platen. Whether this ma-chine was ever constructed is not known, but Koenig found little support for his ideas because of lack of technical and financial resources. So, in 1806, he went to England and was introduced to Thomas Bensley, a book printer off Fleet Street in London. Bensley agreed to support Koenig and brought in two other printers to help finance Koenig's experiments. Another German, Andreas Bauer, an engineer, assisted Koenig and became largely responsible for the practical execution of Koenig's plans.In 1810 they patented a press which was steam-driven but still used a platen. It was set to work in Bensley's office the following year but did not prove to be satisfactory. Koenig redesigned it, and in October 1811 he obtained a patent for a steam-driven press on an entirely new principle. In place of the platen, the paper was fixed around a hollow rotating cylinder, which impressed the paper on to the inked forme. In Bensley's office it was used for book printing, but its increased speed over the hand press appealed to newspaper proprietors and John Walter II of The Times asked Koenig to make a double-cylinder machine, so that the return stroke of the forme would be productive. A further patent was taken out in 1813 and the new machine was made ready to print the 29 November 1814 issue—in secrecy, behind closed doors, to forestall opposition from the pressmen working the hand presses. An important feature of the machine was that the inking rollers were not of the traditional leather or skin but a composite material made from glue, molasses and some soda. The inking could not have been achieved satisfactorily with the old materials. The editorial of that historic issue proclaimed, 'Our Journal of this day presents to the public the practical result of the greatest improvement connected with printing, since the discovery of the art itself Koenig's machine press could make 1,200 impressions an hour compared to 200 with the hand press; further improvements raised this figure to 1,500–2,000. Koenig's last English patent was in 1814 for an improved cylinder machine and a perfecting machine, which printed both sides of the paper. The steam-driven perfecting press was printing books in Bensley's office in February 1816. Koenig and Bauer wanted by that time to manufacture machine presses for other customers, but Bensley, now the principal shareholder, insisted that they should make machines for his benefit only. Finding this restriction intolerable, Koenig and Bauer returned to Germany: they became partners in a factory at Oberzell, near Würzburg, in 1817 and the firm of Koenig and Bauer flourishes there to this day.[br]Further ReadingJ.Moran, 1973, Printing Presses, London: Faber \& Faber.T.Goebel, 1956, Friedrich Koenig und die Erfindung der Schnellpresse, Würzburg.LRD
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