MAN Roland

Manroland AG manufactures newspaper web offset presses, commercial web offset presses, and sheetfed offset presses for commercial, publications and packaging printing.

The company has production facilities in Offenbach am Main and Augsburg. manroland Mechatronic Systems in Plauen offers third-party customers the opportunity to expand their production capacity. Together with subsidiary companies, manroland AG employs around 7,000 people worldwide (as at 2010).

In 1844, Carl August Reichenbach, nephew of the founder of KBA, Friedrich Koenig, and Carl Buz established the “Reichenbach’sche Maschinenfabrik” (Reichenbach's machine factory) in Augsburg. Six month later the two printing press pioneers supplied their first “Schnellpresse” (automatic cylinder press) to Nikolaus Hartmann’s printing plant in Augsburg.

Besides the automatic cylinder press, the 19th century saw another innovation in printing press construction and a newspaper publisher was behind this as well. Around 1850 the question was being asked whether the rotary press principle was suitable for letterpress printing. John Walter III, publisher of "The Times" in London, commissioned the two engineers J.C. MacDonald and John Calverly to develop and build the world's first rotary press for newspaper printing. This became known as the “Walter press”. In June 1872, Maschinenfabrik Augsburg sent its development head Gustav Bissinger to England. Fact-finding visits by German engineers to factories and workshops in England, the leading industrial nation of that era, were not uncommon in those days. After that the first rotary press from Maschinenfabrik Augsburg was quickly designed. Although it also worked on the Walter principle, it was smaller and lighter and easier to operate. In May 1873 it was presented at the World Fair in Vienna.

Two years earlier, in 1871, the two engineers Louis Faber and Adolf Schleicher founded the company Faber & Schleicher as an “Association for Production of Automatic Lithographic Presses” in Offenbach am Main. This city has played a very important part in the history of lithography because it was here that Alois Senefelder built his first lithographic stone presses for the André music publishing company. Faber & Schleicher built their first automatic litho stone press in 1879, the “Albatros”, which had an output of 600 to 700 sheets per hour. Along with the experience and know-how gained from lithography as well as printing on zinc and other metal plates, the real breakthrough came with the emergence of offset printing at the beginning of the 20th century. The inventors Ira Washington Rubel and Caspar Herrmann took over the indirect printing principle known from printing on metal plate and developed this new process between 1904 and 1907. Faber & Schleicher’s specialization in offset printing began in 1911 with the model “Roland”, the world’s first sheetfed rotary offset press, which was awarded a gold medal at the World Fair in Turin. The name Roland was chosen because "Faber & Schleicher" can hardly be pronounced in English-speaking regions.