Obituary Notices. lix 
may now be added as to bis characteristics as a man of business, 
and as a man. 
From his earliest years he showed a distinct and remarkable turn 
for mechanics. Both in bookbinding and in presswork, he devised 
many ingenious contrivances which are now generally adopted by 
printers and bookbinders. His greatest achievement in this 
department, however, was his invention, about the year 1850, of 
a rotary printing-press, with curved stereotype plates fixed on 
cylinders, and with a continuous web of paper. A working model 
of his machine, made by the engineers at Hope Park under his 
direction, was exhibited in the London International Exhibition 
of 1851, and attracted a great deal of attention ; and the same 
model was again seen at work in the Edinburgh Exhibition of 
1886. 
The essential points of a rotary press are : (1) Stereotype plates 
cast in curved form ; (2) a continuous web of paper ; (3) a serrated 
knife to cut the paper into sheets as delivered from the machine. 
In these three particulars, the ISTelson Press was unquestionably the 
original of all the rotary presses now in use 'for newspaper work. 
Long before Mr Helson took up the subject, the problem of rotary 
printing had engaged the attention of inventors, but it had not been 
solved. In 1790 William Hicholson of London patented a machine 
which anticipated many of the features of the modern press — in 
particular, the impression roller, and the distributing rollers on the 
ink-plate. But these features belong rather to the cylinder printing 
machine than to the rotary press. The only point in Nicholson’s 
specifications bearing on the rotary press was that the “ block, 
forme, plate, assemblage of types, or original,” V7as to be placed on 
the face of one of his cylinders. Unfortunately, Nicholson never 
made a machine in conformity with his patent. That was done 
twenty-one years later by Friedrich Koenig, whose machine, patented 
in 1811, was the original of the impression-cylinder machines now 
universally used for book printing, but did not include the proposed 
type cylinder. 
The latter idea was first realised in Applegath’s machine of 1848, 
which was used for several years in The Times office. In this 
case the cylinder bearing the formes of type was vertical, and the 
paper in sheets was fed in by hand from eight platforms. 
