Hoe Under

"If it's a Hoe, it's the best." Not every pressroom foreman agrees with this proud motto of R. Hoe & Co., Inc., maker of presses since 1803. But the company's long history has been replete with startling achievements. The many presses it has sold make Hoe as synonymous for press as Gillette is for razor, Baldwin for locomotive, Colt for pistol. It was news last week when old R. Hoe & Co. bowed to the inevitable and passed into a receivership. Company officials blamed the decline in newspaper lineage, the fact that publishers are using their old presses to the limit, that "machinery is the last thing people buy in hard times." Yet publishers guessed that competition was also a cause for Hoe's plight, for the company has earned money on its common stock in only three of the past eight years.

The Hoe business dates from 1803 although the company as a corporation is much younger. In 1803 one Robert Hoe, fresh from England, began making wooden hand presses in Manhattan. The company made the first flatbed and cylinder presses in the U. S. and in 1861 built the first curved stereotype-making machinery for the New York Tribune. Ten years later it built for the same paper a stereotype rotary press which had a run of 18,000 eight-page papers an hour. Four years later it built for James Gordon Bennett's Herald a four-page wide supplement press with a run of 24,000 12-page papers per hour. In 1893 it made the first rotary colored press (for the New York World and Herald) and two years later it made the first octuple (64-page) newspaper press. In 1899 it introduced "Late News" devices; used chiefly for baseball scores at first. Soon after Arthur Brisbane became editor of the New York Journal, Hoe made a colored press for that paper which was the largest printing press ever built. In 1908 the perfection of a high-speed folder enabled it to enter the modern "high-speed era" in printing. At present the Philadelphia Bulletin has the largest individual plant using Hoe equipment (128 units) while the Chicago News has the largest Super-Production Press Hoe has yet installed. Several of the Hearst papers use big 24-cylinder Hoe presses. After 1927 Hoe stopped giving its sales figures. That year it produced 218$ new newspaper and magazine presses and 62 used ones, 425 small presses. Pride of the Hoe line is the Super-Production Press (1928) which can turn out 56,000 48-pagers hourly. Incidental to its main business, Hoe makes circular saws and during the War made guns for the Navy.

For years Hoe was practically free from competition. In 1901 certain patent expirations opened the way for an invasion of the field. At present the stiffest competition comes from the Duplex Printing Press Co., Walter Scott & Co., the Goss Printing Press Co. and the Wood Newspaper Machinery Corp. headed by Henry Alexander Wise Wood, who was financed by James Gordon Bennett and others. High-speed color printing for newspapers is Mr. Wood's chief interest and in it he will recognize only one rival, the Claybourn Press (used by the Pittsburgh Press). Another big developer of color presses has been C. B. Cottrell & Sons. Its founder, Calvert Byron Cottrell, was an inventor of many devices used in modern printing and his son, Charles P. Cottrell, who died last week at the age of 74, developed the magazine rotary press and also the multi-colored rotary perfecting press which prints four colors on one side of the paper, two on the other. For some years Cottrell & Sons have made no newspaper presses.

Wood presses have been sold to the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer-Press, Cincinnati Times-Star, Philadelphia Bulletin, London Mail and Daily Mirror and L'Intransigeant of Paris. Mr. Wood has a great gift of tongue; publishers like to hear his Woodisms. Memorable are such as these:

"There is color everywhere, especially in the lives of American women. The only drab things in the American woman's life are her husband and her newspaper."

"I am going to leave the newspaper press running at three times the speed at which I found it running."

"Newsprint is the feminine element in the pressroom. It is never alike twice. . . . There must be a kindly discipline exerted over it. ... When a sheet of newsprint breaks in the press it raises hell, just like a woman getting hysterical."

"My press is my orchestra. I can hear my orchestra and know which instrument is doing well and which is not."

"It hurts me to hear a machine cry out in agony as much as it hurts some people to hear a dog or a horse cry out. When I think of women stripping gears. . . ."

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