Rotary Printing Press Invented by Richard March Hoe

In 1843, Richard invented the rotary printing press, a design much faster than the old flat-bed printing press.

The design was patented in 1847 (US patent 5199), and first commercially installed in 1847. In its early days, it was also called the "Hoe web perfecting press," the "Hoe lightning press," and "Hoe's Cylindrical-Bed Press."

Richard M. Hoe was a Freemason. He had considerable inventive genius and set himself to secure greater speed for printing presses. He discarded the old flat-bed model and placed the type on a revolving cylinder, a model later developed into the well-known Hoe rotary or lightning press, patented in 1847, and further improved under the name of the Hoe web perfecting press. In 1870 he developed a rotary press that printed both sides of a page in a single operation.

Had it been possible for any human intellect, at the close of the eighteenth century, or the commencement of this its nineteenth successor, so to grasp and comprehend the development of science, its expansion and diffusion, and, above all, its application to the every-day wants and conveniences of ordinary human life, as to predict, only fifty years beforehand, anyone of the almost incredible marvels which have long ceased to move especial wonder, as being now established facts, witnessed by all eyes, and of occurrence at all hours, the owner of that intellect would not have been merely laughed at as a crazy, crackbrained enthusiast, but would have run a very reasonable chance of being consigned to the cell of a madhouse, as an incorrigible and incurable monomaniac.