Rudolf Hell

Rudolf Hell (1901 to 2002) was a German inventor and engineer, born in Eggmühl, who studied electrical engineering in Munich from 1919 to 1923 and then worked there as an assistant to Max Dieckmann, with whom he ran a television station at a Munich exhibition in 1925. In that year he invented the Hellschreiber, an early forerunner of dot matrix printers and fax machines, patented in 1929. He founded his own company in Babelsberg in 1929 and refounded it in Kiel after the Second World War, where it produced machines for electronically controlled engraving of printing plates and the Digiset electronic photo typesetting system. His firm was taken over by Siemens in 1981 and merged with Linotype in 1990.