Print pioneer: Dr Hell\'s biography now available
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The life and work of one of the giants of the print industry, Dr –Ing Rudolph Hell is now available as a biography, entitled Dr. Rudolf Hell: Great Engineer of the 20th Century. German born Dr Hell, who died three years ago aged 101, was one of the major pioneers of print production technology in the last century, best known for his Hell scanners, Helio-Klischograph gravure cylinder engraving systems and Digiset phototype composing machines.His company, Hell, was one of the quartet of scanner manufacturers that dominated the prepress industry from the 1970s to the early 1990s, as together with rivals Crosfield, Scitex and Dainippon Screen it blazed a trail in colour reproduction. When inexpensive non-proprietary systems become widely available in the mid 1990s his company was bought by Linotype, which in turn was bought by Heidelberg.
A prolific inventor from an early age Dr Hell is also credited with inventing the fax machine, and had some 127 patents, with companies such as Siemens building their success on his inventions. Part of his success though was his business acumen, not always common among inventors.
Before the war his company was engaged in several groundbreaking activities, for instance he invented and manufactured the Hellschreiber, the device for the electronic transfer of letters that was used for mail in the media and by police and weather services. Hell sold the patent for 13,000 Reichsmark to Siemens, at the same time securing for himself the development contracts, and his company employed 1000 people in three different production centres.
During the war he headed up the German development of mines and mine prevention, where incredibly the man who was later to become his main competitor in scanner development, John Crosfield, was heading up the work for the Allies in exactly the same field, pitting the two men, who went on to become great friends, against each other for the first time.
The authors of the biography, Boris Fuchs and Christian Onnasch, were close friends of Dr Hell for many years. From 1958 to 1998, Fuchs was a leading mechanical engineer in the print industry and Onnasch joined the Dr Rudolf Hell Company in 1963. In the book, the two offer up-close perspectives and insights into some of Hell’s most revolutionary discoveries and provide a list of 127 of Hell’s personal patents.
The biography has been produced with the support of Heidelberg, and is published by Edition Braus in the Wachter Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany. The 208 page book has some 230 images and illustrations.
