Speeding Up the Production of the Printed Word

The rotary press was made by Richard M. Hoe, a prolific New York City inventor of presses and press components in the early 1800s. Hoe's company began making hand presses in 1822 before switching to the production of faster-printing cylinder presses nine years later. The speed of the cylinder press was limited, however. It printed just one page with each back-and-forth motion of its bed. Hoe hit upon the idea of fastening lead type around the circumference of a very large cylinder in the center of the press. By rotating the cylinder, he thus created a rotary press that turned constantly in one direction. The number of pages printed per hour now depended on how fast this large cylinder turned and on how many impression cylinders were fitted around its circumference. The Hoe rotary press had four.

A rotary printing press is a printing press in which the images to be printed are curved around a cylinder. Printing can be done on large number of substrates, including paper, cardboard, and plastic. Substrates can be sheet feed or unwound on a continuous roll through the press to be printed and further modified if required (e.g. die cut, overprint varnished, embossed). Printing presses that use continuous rolls are sometimes referred to as "web presses". Rotary drum printing was invented by Richard March Hoe in 1843, perfected in 1846 and patented in 1847.

Today, there are three main types of rotary presses; offset commonly known as web offset, rotogravure, and flexo (short for flexography). While the three types use cylinders to print, they vary in their method.