Koenig & Bauer AG - A Steam-Powered Printing Press in the Early 19th Century
A Steam-Powered Printing Press
in the Early 19th Century
For three centuries, printing businesses relied on the Gutenberg hand press invented in the late 15th century. Operating the heavy presses that put out about 240 sheets per hour was physically exhausting. In 1803, Friedrich Gottlob Koenig, a 27-year-old German printer who had studied mathematics, physics, and mechanics at Leipzig University became obsessed with the idea of creating a steam-powered printing press. Looking for funding, he traveled throughout Europe but was only greeted with deep-seated skepticism and rejections. In November 1806, he traveled to England and finally found a sponsor for his idea in Thomas Bensley, the country's most prominent book printer. With the help of Andreas Friedrich Bauer, a German precision instrument maker whom Koenig had met in London, he was able to make his idea a reality. In April 1811, the machine, for which Koenig had received a patent a year earlier, was first presented at a printing trade show in London. However, the 400-sheet output of the all-metal steam-engine-driven press was not enough to convince English printing houses to spend the considerable amount it cost to manufacture. Looking for a way to significantly increase the machine's output, Koenig came up with the idea to replace the flat platen used in the Gutenberg press by a rotating cylinder that was able to move the paper sheets rapidly under pressure over the flat type form. Using this principle, Koenig was able to double the output of his machine, which operated smoothly and created high-quality impressions. When John Walter, publisher of the daily newspaper The Times, saw the new press in action in December 1812, he ordered two of them. Put together secretly in a different building to avoid an uproar among his workforce, Walter's machines printed the entire circulation of The Times overnight on November 28, 1814. Koenig's cylinder press, the output of which was further increased to 1,100 sheets per hour, initiated the industrial revolution in printing. Another improvement of his machine was a model that was able to print on both sides of the paper in one step.
When Koenig and Bauer set out to sell their new type of machines outside of England, they met resistance from their business partner Bensley. Finally, the three men agreed to part. Koenig and Bauer went back to Germany and purchased a secularized monastery in Oberzell near Wurzburg, Bavaria. On August 9, 1817, the two partners, who had become close friends, also established their new company, Schnellpressenfabrik Koenig & Bauer. While the shipping of tools, machinery, and iron and coal from England took a few months, Friedrich Koenig traveled Germany in search of new customers. The first ones were Berlin-based publishers Decker and Spener, who received the two presses they ordered in 1822.
Soon after the first machine-printed newspaper in continental Europe had come out in early 1823, Germany's top printing establishments became interested in the new technology. While they all received their steam-powered presses made in Oberzell by retrained iron and steel workers, Koenig was already on the road again, this time looking for business outside of Germany. After a demonstration of his machine at a trade show in Paris, Koenig brought in orders from Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain, and France. The first order from Spain was sent by mule over the Pyrénées mountains. In 1828, Koenig established a paper mill as a side business in another former monastery in Bavaria. Two years later, when business was soaring, the July Revolution in Paris brought export business with France as well as domestic orders to a sudden halt. The paper mill became the young company's sole source of income, and its workforce was cut back from 120 to 14. Three years later, Friedrich Koenig died just before his 54th birthday, and Andreas Bauer became the company's managing director.
While the company's orders began to increase as Germany's economy slowly recovered in the second half of the 1830s, the growing demand for printing machines created a number of competitors. Oddly, most of them sprang from Koenig & Bauer. Bauer was a brilliant engineer but lacked Koenig's business sense, strategic thinking, and imagination. His resistance to trying out new designs and manufacturing procedures proposed by some of the company's younger staff led to the establishment of new enterprises by former Koenig & Bauer employees. One of them was Friedrich Koenig's nephew, Fritz Helbig, who set up a printing press factory in Vienna, Austria, in 1836. When the new competition began to threaten Koenig & Bauer's market leadership, Bauer created a new type of circular motion press and sold 24 of them in the year after the new machine was first presented to the public in 1840. However, Bauer resisted the idea of expansion until his death in February 1860. By that time, two other main players in the German printing machine industry, which together with Koenig & Bauer were to become the world's leading manufacturers in the business, had been established. In 1844, another nephew of Friedrich Koenig, Carl Reichenbach, founded a printing press factory that later became one of Koenig & Bauer's main competitors, MAN Roland. The other one, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, was founded by Andreas Hamm after he left a partnership with former Koenig & Bauer employee Andreas Albert.
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