David Gestetner
1854 David Gestetner was born in Csorna, Hungary. He was the inventor of the Gestetner stencil duplicator, the first piece of office equipment that allowed businessmen to make numerous copies of office documents quickly and inexpensively.
1867 He left school at the age of thirteen.
1871 He moved to Vienna, to work in the office of a stockbroker. One of his tasks was to make copies of the stock market activity at the end of the day, by copying the results over and over for each copy. He decided that there must be a better method, and his experiments eventually led him to invent the first reproduction of documents by use of a stencil.
1873 He emigrated to the USA, where he struggled to make ends meet in a variety of occupations in both New York and Chicago.
He returned to Vienna and entered into a partnership making equipment for hectographs (apparatus for copying documents using a gelatin plate).
1879 This partnership was dissolved and he moved to London, where he became an assistant at Fairholme and Co, stationers, in the City.
Gestetner was very inventive and was preoccupied with the problems associated with copying from his original days in Vienna.
1879 he filed the first of his many patents in connection with copying.
1881 He established the Gestetner Cyclograph Company. His most fundamental patent, filed in 1881, was concerned with the invention of the Cyclostyle, a pen with a small, sharp-toothed, rotating wheel at its tip which could be used to write and draw by perforating a new kind of stencil; the latter was based on a Japanese tissue with which he was familiar from a period during which he sold kites in Chicago. The pen and the stencil used in conjunction enabled office duplicating to be done for the first time in quantity, at speed, and with good quality results, and Gestetner can, with justification, be called the founder of the worldwide office copying and duplicating industry. His company was incorporated in the US.
His invention became an overnight success, and he soon established an international chain of branches that sold and serviced his products.
During the ensuing years he further developed his invention, with the stencil eventually being placed on a revolving drum, into which ink was placed. The drum was revolved and ink, spread by centrifugal force, was forced out of the cuts made in the stencil and placed on a sheet of paper which was fed through the duplicator and pressed by pressure rollers against the drum. Each rotation of the drum fed and printed one sheet. After the first typewriter was invented, a stencil was created which could be typed on, thus creating copies similar to printed newspapers and books, instead of handwritten material.
1885 Gestetner married Sophie Lazarus (1862–1933), daughter of Ralph Lazarus, a government store contractor. They had one son and six daughters. His main interests were his business and his family.
1897 - 1905 A series of his patents relate to the inventions Gestetner developed in rotary duplicating machines.
At different stages he employed his brother, his brother-in-law, various cousins, nephews, and nieces, as well as his son, three sons-in-law, and several grandchildren. He was a devout Jew who devoted any spare time to communal activities, especially connected with a congregation of like-minded believers he had been instrumental in founding.
He never retired and continued to be involved in the firm until his death, going daily to his laboratory in the main factory.
1939 The only exception to this routine was an annual two-month winter break in the south of France, from whence he communicated on a regular basis with his assistants in London. He died in the Hotel Ruhl, Nice, on 8 March 1939, during one of these breaks, and was buried in Nice.