Offset
plate (part 1)
Paper
Offset Plates:
Mr.
Halpern even in the late 1940’s realized that offset would take
over the stencil market. He hired Bob Teichner, who had worked for
Remington Rand, the typewriter company that had made stencils and
paper offset plates. He brought the Remington Rand stencil formula
which was based on cellulose acetate, not nitrocellulose. We set up
a pilot coater to evaluate it. They were not as good as ours. He
gave us a formula for stencil duplicating inks base on derivatives of
castor oil made by Hercules, which we manufactured.
He
also had a formula for paper offset plates. Addressograph-Multigraph
had patented casein coated direct image offset plates. The plate Bob
Teichner developed was based on starch carbonate. We installed two
coating machines with gas heated drying tunnels, which were built by
Pot Devin in the space where the stencil finishing operation had
been. The first tunnel was used for applying a ureaformaldehyde base
coat on paper bought from Crocker Burbank, a paper mill in Fitchburg,
Massachusetts, which I visited several times. The second coater
applied the pigmented starch carbonate coating. The time between the
two coats was critical. It had to be between two and seven days for
the urea formaldehyde resin to cure, but before it became
hydrophobic. We started to sell the direct image offset plates in
1950. Our largest customer for these plates was a company in
Massachusetts that printed telephone directories. They set type in a
proof press and printed it on our plates, which were then run on an
offset press.