manroland: groundbreaking
in print for more than 160 years
Tradition continues
The manroland group engaged in the manufacturing of printing systems, fulfilling practically all requirements - from commercial through publications to packaging printing. With result-oriented machines for web offset, digital and sheet-fed printing coupled with innovative software and reliable components, the present manroland group is the outcome of a gradual evolution.
Its history extends back as old as 1845. And it is this tradition which defines the group’s philosophy: proximity to the customer and continuous all round development.
I
n 1844, Carl August Reichenbach, nephew of the founder of KBA, Friedrich Koenig, and Carl Buz established the “Reichenbach’sche Maschinenfabrik” (Reichenbach’s machine factory) in Augsburg. Six month later the two printing press pioneers supplied their first ‘Schnellpresse’ (automatic cylinder press) to Nikolaus Hartmann’s printing plant in Augsburg.
Besides the automatic cylinder press, the 19th century saw another innovation in printing press construction and a newspaper publisher supporting the initiative. Around 1850, the question was being asked whether the rotary press principle was suitable for letterpress printing. John Walter III, publisher of The Times in London, commissioned the two engineers JC MacDonald and John Calverly to develop and build the world’s first rotary press for newspaper printing. This became known as the ‘Walter press’. In June 1872, Maschinenfabrik Augsburg sent its development head Gustav Bissinger to England as fact-finding visit to factories and workshops. After that the first rotary press from Maschinenfabrik Augsburg was quickly designed. Although it also worked on the Walter principle, it was smaller, lighter and easier to operate. In May 1873, it was presented at the World Fair in Vienna.
Parallely two years earlier, in 1871, the two engineers Louis Faber and Adolf Schleicher founded the company Faber & Schleicher as an ‘Association for Production of Automatic Lithographic Presses’ in Offenbach am Main. This city has played a very important part in the history of lithography because it was here that Alois Senefelder built his first lithographic stone presses for the André music publishing company. Faber & Schleicher built their first automatic litho stone press in 1879, the Albatros, which had an output of 600 to 700 sheets per hour. Along with the experience and know-how gained from lithography as well as printing on zinc and other metal plates, the real breakthrough came with the emergence of offset printing at the beginning of the 20th century. The inventors Ira Washington Rubel and Caspar Herrmann took over the indirect printing principle known from printing on metal plate and developed this new process between 1904 and 1907. Faber & Schleicher’s specialization in offset printing began in 1911 with the model ‘Roland’, the world’s first sheet-fed rotary offset press, which was awarded a gold medal at the World Fair in Turin. The name Roland was chosen because ‘Faber & Schleicher’ can hardly be pronounced in English-speaking regions.
Milestones
| 1840: | The Sander´sche Maschinen-Fabrik was founded (the embryo of manroland AG) |
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| 1845: | Carl August Reichenbach built the first automatic cylinder press with railway motion |
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| 1873: | The first German rotary press for newspaper printing |
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| 1911: | The first ROLAND sheetfed offset press |
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| 1912: | The world’s first web offset press in the blanket-to-blanket principle |
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| 1925: | The biggest German-built rotary press with 15 printing units |
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| 1928: | Introduction of the ROLAND RZS, a two-colour press in common impression cylinder design |
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| 1951: | The first ROLAND four-colour press |
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| 1958: | The first high-speed rotary letterprss machine for newspaper printing with 30,000 cylinder rph (speed increase made possible by a new type of printing unit encapsulation) |
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| 1962: | Introduction of the LITHOMAN, a new generation of commercial web offset presses in long grain format for printing with heatset inks on coated paper |
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| 1972: | ROLAND 800: a four-colour large-format press, the first sheetfed press to have an integrated colour control system |
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| 1974: | The biggest rotary offset press in Europe – a COLORMAN with 62 printing units |
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| 1995: | Presentation of the ROLAND 900, a large-format sheetfed offset press |
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| 1996: | The longest newspaper pressline in the world. A GEOMAN for O Globo, Brazil (250 meters long) |
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| 1998: | Introduction of the REGIOMAN 4-1, a four-plate wide newspaper press |
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| 2001: | Introduction of the COLORMAN, XXL for newspaper printing (web widths up to 2,100 millimeters) |
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| 2005: | Start of the PRINTVALUE services concept |
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| 2007: | World premiere of the ROLAND 700 HiPrint and ROLAND 700 DirectDrive Introduction of the 80-page LITHOMAN |
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| 2008: | Introduction of the ROLAND 50 – XXL technology in small format
Introduction of the One Touch philosophy on the COLORMAN autoprint
MAN Roland Druckmaschinen AG becomes manroland AG. The new logo was presented on 28 May 2008 at the drupa press conference in Düsseldorf. |
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