Re: Dr. Rudolf Hell passes away
Re: Dr. Rudolf Hell passes away
- Subject: Re: Dr. Rudolf Hell passes away
- From: "wgall" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 14:52:12 +0100
on 19/03/2002 01:07, Steve Cheng at email@hidden wrote:
>
Wasn't Dr. Hell the inventor of the electronic analog scanner using
>
photomultiplier tubes and ocilliscope? eg. Hell 286.
>
If someone could elaborate on this, Please Do!
>
>
Steve Cheng
The following is rather long, but I hope that some space is allowed in
such a case.
The 286 was one of the very successful products. Nearly all of Hell's
inventions and products were based on the idea of splitting up images
into pixels. The first one was a pixelisation tube for tv (1925,
together with Max Dieckmann), followed by the Hell Recorder in 1927.
This was a kind of teletype machine which transmitted the letters
pixel by pixel according to their visual appearance in very low
resolution. The advantage was that the text was stilll readable even
under poor transmission conditions. This product was extremely
successful and was used worldwide by newspapers, news agencies and
others. During WW II Rudolf Hell worked mostly for the German army on
coding machines and sonar devices (BTW: The sonar technology somehow
seems to be another root of the prepress technology: John Crosfield,
who in later years became one of the major competitors of Hell in the
scanner business, at that time worked in the same area in Great
Britain).
Rudolf Hell started again after the war in Kiel and turned back to
images and pixels. A very successfull device was the
Vario-Klischograph which was a clichi engraver with the ability of
enlarging and reducing.
His first successful scanner color scanner was the Chromagraph 286,
followed by many successor models. I was told that one of the people
working for Hell and contributing some good ideas in the very early
days of scanner development was K.S. Paul. He then left Hell and
formed the K.S. Paul company in the UK, which was later acquired by
Linotype (Linotype-Paul) and more later became ICG (in Cheltenham,
UK), which is now a part of Global Graphics. K.S. Paul and its
successor companies became the source of several spin offs in the UK.
A short overview about the Hell product history can be found on
http://www.hell-gravure-systems.com/.
An overview on the Hell Recorder with some Rudolf Hell related links
is on
http://www.algonet.se/~lovelinf/biblio.htm.
Rudolf Hell's name was sometimes the source of problems and jokes. The
word "hell" in German means "light", which makes a big difference to
the far less positive English meaning. Thus, (at least this is what I
was told) Rudolf Hell for many years was afraid of placing a Hell logo
on machines going to the US. And I remember that in the early 80s when
I showed my business card to a receptionist of a bay area company, she
looked at this ugly word somehow frightened, looked at me again, then
pointed at this word and asked with some tremble in her voice: "Is
this an abbreviation?". Also there were many plays upon the word
"hell". One was "a hell of typesetting" for the Digiset T3 (a
typesetter of the early 70s with a full newspaper page size , too high
end for its time and not too successful). Another really good one can
be found on the support page of www.highwater.co.uk describing the
company's name as coming from the saying "come Hell or HighWater".
Winrich Gall
_______________________________________________
colorsync-users mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/colorsync-users
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.