Coloritype Company
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Product Details
CompanyColoritype Company
Certificate Type
Capital Stock
Date Issued
March 11, 1897
Canceled
No
Printer
Albert B. King
Signatures
Hand signed
Approximate Size
10" (w) by 8" (h)
Images
Show the exact certificate you will receive
Guaranteed Authentic
Yes
Additional Details
NA
Historical Context
Learning of Georg Meisenbach’s success with halftone printing in England, William Kurtz set out to reproduce the process and in doing so, became one of the United States’ first commercial practitioners of reproducing photographic plates in halftone prints. Likewise, when Hermann Wilhelm Vogel’s advances in color photography became known, Kurtz arranged to purchase the American rights to the ‘three-color process’ from Vogel and was able to devise a way to apply it to halftone printing.
William Kurtz’s first three-color photoengraving, called a Coloritype, was published in the January 1, 1893, issue of Photographische Mittheilungen, Vogel’s Berlin photography journal. Two months later, the same image was used as a frontispiece of the Engraver & Printer, a small trade publication, which had attempted three-color printing several years earlier. After these two relatively limited uses of the process, Edward Wilson financed the printing of over 6,000 Coloritypes for the May 1893 issue of Wilson’s Photographic Magazine. “This illustration,” wrote Horgan, “proved to the whole printing world that reproductions of colors by photography into three half-tone blocks to be printed in colored inks had arrived.”
In 1893, Kurtz formed the Coloritype Company - the same year in which his patent was applied for and granted - to grow his three-color engraving business. Kurtz, serving as the Coloritype Company’s President, likely assigned the rights to the patent to the Coloritype Company. The company operated out of a building in Lafayette Place in Manhattan, “erected to supply its especial needs, with a full equipment of the best mechanical appliances to be obtained, and with ample capital to carry out its plans.”
Kurtz gained considerable wealth through his photography business and engraving partnership with Frederick A. Ringler. In 1895, the Coloritype Company was “filled with orders for ten months to come”, though an order backlog did not necessarily indicate the company was cash rich. Kurtz invested much of his fortune into his three-color engraving research but he was not able to earn back the investment. Sources cite his investment as somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 dollars ($3M-$6M today).
Stephen Horgan wrote 28 years after Kurtz’s patent was published, that “Kurtz took all the three color theories that had appeared before his time and put them into practice, though he lost his fortune in the doing of it, and died poor.” According to Sipley, Kurtz had not patented his results and “engravers and printers all over the United States rushed to get into the production of three-color plates and prints.” The famous photograph of the fruit still-life that resulted from Kurtz’s work with E. Vogel was published in March 1893. Considering the many weeks of lead time required to publish color plates for magazines, it might have been that Kurtz rushed to get the patent filed before publication of his three-color engraving in the United States to protect against the threat of competition.
Ringler also likely lost money in the Coloritype Company as competition flooded the market. Ringler was known as “a hustler,” who would “place the Coloritype Company’s business where it should be as the pioneer concern in putting into practical working shape the three-color process.”
The Coloritype Company’s best asset was Kurtz’s patent. With Kurtz in financial distress, Ringler secured a controlling interest in the Coloritype Company in 1896 and became the company’s President (he has signed this piece as the company President) and Treasurer. He then began a campaign to stifle the Coloritype Company’s competition by threatening action against anyone infringing on the Kurtz patent. One might even wonder whether Ringler pushed Kurtz to patent his technique, knowing full well that it would be a valuable tool to extract licensing fees or simply ward off the competition.
Ringler stepped down as President of the Coloritype Company in 1898 and was replaced by Mr. Alfred M. Hesser, a former employee of the Electro-Light Engraving Company (the Ringler-Kurtz joint engraving venture formed before the Coloritype Company). Between 1888 and 1899, the Coloritype Company became the New York Colortype Company - with the "i" from the spelling dropped. In 1899, attorneys for the New York Colortype Company began threatening American engravers with patent infringement suits. A. C. Austin wrote in June 1899 of the letters distributed to photoengravers nationwide by the firm Banning and Banning, of Chicago, “causing in some cases a little trepidation, and in nearly all cases considerable discussion concerning the matter at interest, the Kurtz patent.” The letter, dated April 12, 1899, from Banning and Banning is quoted below from a reprint of the original:
“GENTLEMEN,—As attorneys for the New York Colortype Company, we hereby notify you that in its photo-mechanical printing your company is infringing the William Kurtz patent, No. 498,396, dated May 30, 1893, owned by our client; and we hereby request you and your company to immediately desist from further infringement thereof. Unless you are willing to do this, we will have to begin suite for an injunction and damages. Requesting an immediate answer. Yours very respectfully, BANNING & BANNING.”
The New York Colortype Company was formed around 1899 “upon the ashes of the old Coloritype Company” and “secured all the right, title and interest in the Kurtz patents with the avowed purpose of persecuting all infringers, and with the expectation of making more by the granting of licenses than they can by making of the colour plates.” One would assume it was Hesser who initiated the name change. Austin thought that, given the use of a Chicago-based firm, the New York Colortype Company might be allied with the Chicago Colortype Company, though they were only on record as being a licensee. This era in photoengraving was ripe for consolidation, with engraving firms joining forces in both Chicago and New York City to stifle competition and bully the smaller engraving companies with a join-or-die mentality. The conglomeration of color engravers in America was known as the “Color Printing Trust.”
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