Rudolf Hell

Inventor of the Hellschreiber, an early forerunner to the fax machine, Hell was a German engineer born in Eggmühl, Germany, who studied electrical engineering in Munich from 1919 to 1923. While there he worked as assistant to Prof. Max Dieckmann from 1923 to 1929, with whom he operated a television station at the Verkehrsausstellung (lit.: Traffic exhibition) in Munich in 1925. In the same year he invented an apparatus called the Hellschreiber, an early forerunner to the fax machine. Hell received a patent for the Hellschreiber in 1929.

In that same year he founded his own company, Hell Company in Babelsberg, Berlin, and after World War II he re-founded his company in Kiel. He continued working as an engineer and invented machines for electronically controlled engraving of printing plates and an electronic photo typesetting system called Digiset, marketed in the USA as VideoComp by RCA. In 1965 he began typeface development and introduced the Digiset—a typesetting machine that worked with digitally assembled typefaces.

His company was taken over by Siemens AG in 1981 and merged with Linotype in 1990, becoming Linotype-Hell AG. The Hellschreiber is still in use today by Amateur Radio (Ham) operators around the world. The Feld Hell Club holds monthly contests and gives out awards for hams who make contacts using this unique mode of communication.

Hell received numerous awards, including the Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Gutenberg Prize awarded by the City of Mainz, the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring, and the Eduard Rhein Ring of Honor from the German Eduard Rhein Foundation (1992).