Ever since the invention of the wheel, great ideas have not only been eclipsed, they have been stolen. The R. Hoe Company, once a mammoth builder of newspaper presses, had incredible scandals and court case. George Gordon snapped Stephen Ruggles ideas for a platen press then fought for years to protect his trumped patents. In more contemporary times, many German offset technologies have shown up elsewhere as near identical clones, which were eventually adapted to stand for their own quality. The passage of time allows us to learn valuable lessons about the evolution of printing technology.

Heyl and the Brothers Brehmer
Take for instance the story of Mr. Henry Heyl and the Brehmer brothers. These three men had a major impact on the printing industry. One a gifted inventor, the others observant partners. Their story illustrates how little has changed in the way ambitious people, in pursuit of fame and fortune, live their lives.

Henry Renno Heyl, an American, was born in Columbus, Ohio, around 1842, when America was an incubator of industrial innovation. In 1870, Heyl invented the world’s first device for projecting [moving] pictures on a screen. In front of 1,600 people, in Philadelphia, Heyl demonstrated his invention but never patented it. Well before Edison, the Phasmatrope showed a group of still images (himself and his niece) mounted onto a stereopticon projector. When the wheel holding the glass images rotated, the projector cast the images with candlelight onto a screen and created the illusion of motion. Heyl could be thought of as the father of the movie industry.

Many other important printing innovations followed. A folding cardboard box machine was patented in 1871. Previously, almost all goods were wrapped in paper and tied with string. Heyl’s machine folded and glued a collapsible box and revolutionized what today is a major part of the industry. Perhaps we should also credit Heyl as being the father of the paper box industry too. Matchbox and tag making machinery was also invented by Heyl, who also received credit for fashioning the office stapler. All of this took place in Philadelphia.

One giant book-making bottleneck caught Henry’s eye in the 1870s: Hand sewing of signatures. American Sterling Elliott had invented a device to pierce and thread pamphlets. It even tied a knot at the end stroke, but ultimately made bulky signatures terrible for case binding.

Ellicott Averell from Brooklyn, NY, developed a wire stitcher in 1874. It was patented as the first machine to stitch book blocks onto a spine. Very little became of it, but the invention attracted many eyeballs, among them a Canadian.

Louis Goddu was a shoemaker born in Quebec. Presumably noticing Averell’s machine, he made further inroads using wire. Goddu was a prolific inventor, patenting several automations (300 in total) primarily in the shoe industry, sewing, nailing and tacking machinery. He is considered as one of the early innovators of the staple. Working from his new home outside Boston, Goddu went on to build his own car, which included a first of its kind overhead camshaft. With a new material called drawn wire, the American industry soon expanded but mainly for flat stitching with single-head machinery.

Even with the advent of wire staple, thread sewing was still being done by hand. Northern Irishman David Mc- Connell Smyth, who arrived in America in 1835 at age two, would eventually solve the thread-sewn dilemma. Though Smyth didn’t invent the sewing machine (Elias Howe, 1830s, patented in 1846), Smyth did move this technology into the bindery in 1867 (patented 1871). As pictures testify, the early days of stitching a signature with a Smyth sewer were daunting, but the machine eventually paved the way to a thread sewing standard in the industry. Even today we refer to a quality stitch as Smyth Sewn. It would be many years, however, before the massive book industry accepted the Smyth system, leaving a giant hole to be filled.

The advent of book binding
Having already worked with drawn metal wire, Henry Heyl entered the scene because of the upcoming Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition in 1876. He aimed to build a machine that would use metal wire instead of thread to automatically stitch a signature. Heyl wanted to produce a million copies of a special edition book for the Exposition. He modified a standard sewing machine to feed wire capable of making 1/4-inch staples at a rate of 50 per minute. The Centennial books were delivered on time.

The Centennial Exposition, first official World's Fair in the United States, was held in Philadelphia in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Nearly 10 million visitors attended.