Richard March Hoe

• Born: September 12, 1812
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: June 7, 1886
• Place of death: Florence, Italy

American mechanic

Hoe was a manufacturer and inventor of printing presses in nineteenth century New York City. His cylinder rotary presses for printing newspapers were so much speedier than the older flatbed models that they have been credited with helping create the modern world of mass-produced journalism.

Primary field: Printing

Primary invention: Rotary printing press

Early Life

Richard March Hoe was born to Robert and Rachel Mead Smith Hoe in New York City in 1812. Richard was their fourth child and oldest son. He attended New York’s public schools until he was about twelve, when he went to work in his father’s pattern shop. After eighteen months of work, he returned to high school. At the age of eighteen, Hoe began working in his father’s factory. Robert Hoe had started a company for printing presses, long and circular saws, and other tools with his brother-in-law Peter Smith in 1805. Robert and Peter manufactured two kinds of presses, the cast-iron “Smith” and the platen “Washington.” Both presses operated on a flatbed model in which a roller traveled backward and forward inking the paper. At the time Richard joined the firm, Robert Hoe was experimenting with cylinder presses. Richard inherited his father’s mechanical ability and his ingenuity as to both the manufacturing and business aspects of Smith, Hoe & Co.; he also received a thorough education in every aspect of the enterprise. During the 1830’s, Richard Hoe served as commander of the New York National Guard unit, the Washington Greys, achieving the rank of colonel, the title by which he would be known throughout his life.

Life’s Work

Robert Hoe, in declining health, retired in 1830, leaving management of the factory to Richard and Peter Smith’s son Matthew. Richard Hoe immediately set about improving the printing presses along the lines of a cylindrical operation with which his father had begun experimenting. In 1833, he introduced a single-cylinder press, adapted from presses operating in England. This press operated on a flatbed, but Hoe set the type in a fixed cylinder, with impression cylinders that held the sheets of paper and rotated around the type. Hoe also patented a novel method for grinding circular saws, which gained widespread usage.

In 1837, Hoe made further progress in the use of cylinders in his presses, introducing a double small-cylinder press and a single large-cylinder press. These presses were very popular and were used for books, prints, and woodcuts. Nevertheless, the firm was often short on funds and in 1842 went temporarily bankrupt. Hoe’s innovations continued, however. In 1844, he developed an adjustable type-high bearer on each side of the press bed, which improved the press’s impression control. In the late 1840’s, he developed methods for heating ink fountains so as to enhance viscosity, a double rack and sliding pinion drive mechanism, and a sheet delivery system called a flyer. He also patented new devices for toothing and grinding saws.

Hoe continued to experiment on a high-speed press that would satisfy the need for quickly produced newspapers. His great breakthrough came in 1846 with his invention of the four-cylinder rotary press—the “lightning”—making use of a central revolving cylinder with type-beds and four rotating impression cylinders. As each impression cylinder was able to print two thousand sheets an hour, the four-cylinder rotating press was able to print eight thousand sheets in that time. Over the next few years, Hoe continued to improve his rotary press until it could run with ten impression cylinders. The press had become a massive machine, more than twenty feet high and thirty feet long, staffed by a crew of about fifteen workers running the machine and feeding sheets of newsprint. As the ten-cylinder press was able to make twenty thousand paper impressions an hour, it was quickly adopted throughout the world.

Matthew Smith died prematurely in 1841, and Hoe’s younger brothers, Robert Hoe II and Peter Smith Hoe, joined R. Hoe & Company under Richard Hoe’s leadership. Hoe built a new factory between Broome and Grand Street, taking up an entire New York City block and covering more than four acres of floor space. Hoe was a farsighted employer, establishing a free apprentice school at night for his employees, a mutual relief society for disabled workers, and cooperative stores supplying goods for his employees at reduced prices. With his factory profits, Hoe became wealthy, branching out to Chicago and London. He also continued to improve his presses, introducing a stop-cylinder press for lithographic and letter-press printing and a collecting cylinder, called an accumulator, in 1853. In 1871, making use of a gathering and delivery device invented by his partner Stephen Tucker, Hoe designed a press that printed from a continuous roll, or web, of paper. This press represented a significant advance because it could automatically feed paper and print on both sides. As a result, it was able to print eighteen thousand newspapers an hour. In 1881, the company introduced a triangular former folder.

Throughout his career, Hoe demonstrated that he was capable of combining his mechanical aptitude with shrewd and adroit industrial management. Acquiring the Isaac Adams Press Works in Boston in 1859, he successfully integrated its operation into his New York plant. He utilized the innovations of his partners, such as Tucker, and competitors, such as William Bullock of Philadelphia, who first patented the web press. Hoe’s printing presses won two awards at the famous 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. His branches in San Francisco, Chicago, and England thrived, as did his London repair shop. As a magnate and philanthropist, Hoe bought real estate, served as a director of the Magnetic Telegraph Company, and supported the New York House of Refuge.

Hoe had two daughters, Emily (born 1834) and Adeline (1836), with his first wife, Lucy Gilbert. After her death in 1841, he married Mary Say Corbin, with whom he had Anne (1852), Mary (1854), Fannie (1855), and Helen (1858). He named his stately home Brightside, located on fifty-three country acres in what is now the Bronx, and filled it with expensive works of art and fine, rare books. In 1886, on one of his frequent European trips, he died in Florence, Italy. His nephew Robert Hoe, who had worked for him for many years, took over the firm.

Impact

In a sense, the history of printing technology is the constant search for speedier printing presses. With mechanical skill and technological ingenuity inherited from his father, Richard Hoe was well suited to advance this search. His father’s printing company had already been successful in producing cylinder presses, an important advance over the hand press. Hoe accelerated this development. His cylinder rotary presses reached a speed of twenty times that of his father’s presses. Where it formerly took a day to print thirty thousand newspapers, it could now be done in two hours. It soon became apparent that it was more economical to produce mass-circulation newspapers by typesetting a single Hoe lightning press than by running several smaller machines simultaneously. As a result, his presses were adopted throughout the United States, the English-speaking world, and Europe. Hoe’s industrial success was counted as one of the first examples of the United States being able to compete against the industrial might of Britain and France. Over the following decades, R. Hoe & Co. continued to improve its presses, to the great satisfaction of the publishing world. His web perfecting presses of the 1870’s were able to print both sides of a page in a single impression.

Richard Hoe was the owner of a factory and was himself one of the chief innovators and inventors in his industrial field. In this way, he resembles other American inventors of the nineteenth century, such as Peter Cooper, Thomas Alva Edison, and Samuel F. B. Morse, who also combined entrepreneurial leadership and mechanical invention to reach industrial and scientific success and great wealth. Whether this combination of business and invention in the nineteenth century was a uniquely American phenomenon—or in the case of Hoe and Cooper, a uniquely New York one—is worth investigating.

With the rise of Jacksonian democracy in the 1830’s, the United States entered its golden age of newspapers. The common people were made aware of political developments, social events, and the bustling progress of the industrial world through a proliferation of inexpensively produced and widely circulating newspapers. Great newspaper enterprises were founded by such men as Horace Greeley, Joseph Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst. This golden age of journalism, so integral to the growth and democratization of the United States, relied to a large extent on the technological advances in the printing presses of Richard Hoe and his company.

Bibliography

Caspar, Scott, Jeffrey Graves, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship, eds. History of the Book in America: Volume III, 1840-1880. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Describes the burgeoning publishing industry of mid-nineteenth century United States, including the contribution made by Hoe’s rotary and web presses.

Comparato, Frank. Chronicles of Genius and Folly: R. Hoe Company and the Printing Press as a Service to Democracy. Culver City, Calif.: Labyrnthos, 1979. Includes a preface by Hoe’s descendant (great-grandson of Hoe’s nephew) and namesake, Richard March Hoe, who worked at the company in the 1960’s. Comparato’s tome is a sprawling, thousand-page history of printing, U.S. journalism, and R. Hoe & Co. based largely on Stephen Tucker’s memoir. Comparato claims that Hoe’s rotary press “created a modern world of journalism.”

Kaplan, Richard. Politics and American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865-1920. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Explores the relationships between political parties and partisan journalism. Emphasizes the importance of technological advances such as the Hoe cylindrical press.

Tucker, Stephen. “History of R. Hoe and Company, 1834-1885,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 82, pt. 2 (1972): 351-453. Originally written about 1890 by Tucker, Hoe’s partner and an outstanding mechanical inventor in his own right. Although this is a general history of the company, Tucker focuses on the projects that he supervised.