Rudolf Hell –
„Edison of graphic arts industry“

Rudolf Hell was born at December 19 of 1901 in Southern Germany. Finished his study in electrical engineering in Munich, he founded his first company for developing and producing devices for telecommunication. The “Hell-Schreiber” (Hell writer) has been used to give out letter forms instead of morse signals. Later the fax (“Telebildschreiber”) and – very important – the “Klischograph” for engraving printing image clichees came out. In 1964, with the “Chromagraph”, the worlds first drum scanner has been invented.

After WW II, Hell decided to re-built his company in Kiel in Northern Germany, setting Hellschreiber into function again for the first time. Over the years, the company acted world-wide and became a 100% subsidiary (?) of the Siemens concern. Drum scanning has been perfectionated, at the end the functions of the machine have been split up into smaller, more productive units, and the drum was put into a vertical position.

Rudolf Hell was the inventor of digital photo typesetting, too. The “Digiset” has been the first and very prodictive sytems of its kind. The elements of a whole page have been small digital spots, out of which the letterforms and raster images have been generated. This basic technology is used til nowadays, even in the most modern output devices for newspapers and magazines and digital printing machines. The “Pressfax” was intended to transfer the data of the complete page around the whole world. There were other basic technologies, e.g. the setting of the degrees for raster images.

Hell also worked in the field of electronic image manipulation, the system was called “Chromacom” in analogy to the scanner series “Chromagraph”. The “Chromacom” has been the first fully digitized system for the graphics arts industry. Its successor “DaVinci”, built up on a PostScript basis, was able to integrate text and graphic files. The “Tango” drum scanner may probably be the best scanner ever built.

You may find more information about the company and the person of Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell at the website of the HELL-Verein Kiel.

A life story of Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell in english language from Hell Gravure Systems Kiel

From top to bottom:

a) Portrait Rudolf Hell

b) Hell-Schreiber

c) Klischograph

d) Chromagraph (drum scanner)

e) Digiset (digital photo typesetting)

f) Chromacom (image manipulation)