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And the following year, he was
granted a patent for a box dupli
cator he called the Cyclostyle,
which consisted of the Cyclostyle
Pen and Stencil Paper with hand
roller apparatus.
His staff at the small work
shop he had opened on Sun Street,
London, consisted of himself and
one female employee.
By 1865, he had perfected and
patented “a wheel pen for ruling
upon the stencil at one time the
required number of parallel lines
to form a music stave.”
New ideas flowed from his head
for improving the duplicating
technique. He developed a “Sten
cil-producing Pen,” patented in
1888, permitting anyone to write
as easily as with an ordinary pen.
Another great office invention—
the typewriter—was having its
effect on business techniques and
David lost no time in creating a
“Stencil Paper for the Typewrit
ing Process.”
By now, his shop occupied
5,600 square feet and was grow
ing rapidly.
By 1902, he had perfected his
machine into a unique two-cylind
er “Rotary Cyclostyle” . . . “an en
tirely new principle of printing
from typewritten or handwritten
stencils.” This advance was the
form the basis for the direction
the machines have taken during
intervening decades.
Self-feeding and electric models
followed in 1906. Now the small
workshop had grown into a fac
tory at Tottenham, with 52,000
square feet.
By 1950, the Tottenham factory
encompassed 301,000 square feet,
covering seven acres of buildings
alone with a factory staff of 1,800.
square feet of space.
He and his wife had settled in
Highbury New Park, where in due
time David entered Jewish comun-
al life and helped to found the
synagogue in Green Lanes. The
couple became the parents of five
daughters and a son.
The ensuing years were to wit
ness a continuation of the growth
of the Gestetner enterprises—aid
ed greatly by the organizational
ability of his son Sigmund.
Sigmund’s contribution was to go
beyond the bounds of the factory,
beyond the question of sales and
service and economic advance and
development. In this sphere he
had rare genius, as astute and
proven as had been the practicali
ty of the ideas his father fostered
so admirably.
Sigmund traveled from one side
of the globe to another, literally,
as he sat in on the expansion of
Gestetner outlets into first one
country after another.
But over and beyond the ex
panding Gestetner economic hori
zons, Sigmund began to assay his
family fortunes in terms of re
sponsibility to mankind and speci
fically to his own faith. He had a
profound faith in the spiritual
The Southern Israelite
message of Judaism, engendered
by the religiousity of his father.
No band-wagon Jew, friends as
serted that Sigmund “decided on
his causes in the privacy of his
home. He did not enquire into the
social standing of the aid he was
asked to give. He was not one who
was anxious for showy honours.
He was inclined to judge the
causes he had decided to support
on their merit, even on their un
popularity.
His position brought him in con
tact with a scientist named Chaim
Weizmann and it is no wonder
that he became an early advocate
of the Zionist cause.
So manifold and varied were the
scope of his efforts and interests
that it is difficult to distill the se
quence and involvement while
these were ongoing.
They became clearer however
upon his death in 1956 at the age
of 58 when the Jewish Observer
and Middle East Review, published
in London, devoted a sepcial sec-
SIGMUND GESTETNER
. . . the son who helped expand
the business and became a top
Jewish leader.
tion to an evaluation of his contri
butions to Jewish life.
Quotations from this section will
best illustrate the measure of the
man.
Jon Kimce, telling of Sigmund’s
passing in Nice and his burial at
the Jewish cemetery there, wrote:
“I first came across traces of
Sigmund Gestetner when I was
gathering material for the history
cf the illegal immigration into
Palestine. There was a time dur
ing the war when not only the
odds were so heavily loaded
against those who were trapped in
Nazi-occupied Europe, but also
when it was almost impossible to
get any kind of help from the
traditional Jewish sources of assis
tance.
"For these early efforts there
was none of the excitement and
publicity which surrounded the
later and larger operations to res
cue small boatloads of Jews from
there. Who cared in a world at
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