Hoe

HOE, ROBERT (Oct. 29,1784-Jan. 4,1833),
manufacturer, was born in the hamlet of Hoes,
Leicestershire, England, the son of Thomas and
Elizabeth Hoe. The family was of Saxon origin,
their residence in the county of Leicester dating
from the year 1581. Hoe's father was a farmer.
After obtaining a rather meager education in the
village school, Robert was apprenticed to a local
carpenter. At the age of nineteen, before com-
pleting his apprenticeship, he was attracted by
reports of the conditions of the working man in
America, and, purchasing the remainder of his
apprenticeship, he emigrated to the United
States, landing in New York in September 1803.
At that time the yellow fever was raging in New
York, and after walking penniless through the
plague-stricken city looking for work he applied
in desperation to a seedsman. He was given a
job, but in a week contracted the fever and would
have died except for the kind attentions of the
seedsman and his wife. Upon his recovery he
obtained through his employer work in building
a bridge in Westchester County, N. Y. There
he met Matthew Smith, Jr., and his brother
Peter, who were manufacturing printer's type
cases and wooden frame hand printing presses
after Peter's patented design. Upon the com-
pletion of the bridge in 1805, the Smith brothers,
appreciating Hoe's ability and desiring his help,
established a carpenter shop in New York City
tinder the firm name of Smith, Hoe & Company.
They specialized in wooden hand presses and
printer's equipment and in the succeeding fifteen
years built up a profitable business, their great-
est contribution to the printing art being, prob-
ably, the change from the wooden to cast-iron
frame for presses and the adoption of the toggle-
joint principle instead of the screw for pressure.
After the death of Matthew Smith in 1820 and
Peter in 1823, Hoe continued the business under
the name of R. Hoe & Company. In 1827 he
purchased Samuel Rust's patent for increasing
the strength of presses by using wrought iron in
the upright frame and incorporated it with his
own improvement in a new press called the
"Washington." This proved very popular and
continued to be made in great numbers long after
Hoe's death. As early as 1819 Smith, Hoe &
Company began experimentation with steam-
power presses, which Hoe continued with rather
indifferent success. Around 1830, however, he
acquired the rights to Isaac Adams' patented
power press and began its manufacture. In 1829
there was imported into the United States from
England one of Napier's cylinder presses, It
was held at the port of New York because of the
inability of its purchaser to pay for it The sur-

Hoe
veyor of the port called in Hoe to assemble it and
permitted him to make models and drawings of
its parts. Hoe quickly appreciated that this, the
first cylinder press, was far better than anything
then known in America, and began building
presses like it. He sent one of his employees,
Sereno Newton, to England to study the Napier
Press and upon his return Hoe and his son made
so many improvements on the original Napier,
that their cylinder press soon displaced all of the
English machines used in the United States.
About 1830 Hoe's health began to fail as a result
of overwork, and the business passed into the
hands of his eldest son, Richard March Hoe
[#.#.], and his nephew, Matthew Smith. Hoe's
wife was Rachel Smith, daughter of Matthew
and Rachel (Mead) Smith and sister of his busi-
ness partners, Matthew and Peter Smith. She
with three sons survived him.
[J. L. Ringwalt, Am. Encyc. of Printing (1871); "W".
W. Pasko, Am. Diet, of Printing and Bookmaking
(1894) ; Walter Gillis, "Robert Hoe," in N. Y. GeneaL
and Biog. Record, Apr. 1910; Robert Hoe, third, A
Short Hist, of the Printing Press (1902); Waldemar
Kaempffert, A Popular Hist, of Am. Invention (1924),
vol. I; S. P. Mead, Hist, and GeneaL of the Mead
Family (1901); N. Y. Standard, Jan. 7, 1833.]
C.W.M.
HOE, ROBERT (Mar. 10, i839-Sept. 22,
1909), manufacturer, bibliophile, was born in
New York City, the son of Robert Hoe, second,
and Thirza (Mead) Hoe. He was a grandson
of Robert Hoe [#.#.], founder of the firm of R.
Hoe & Company, and a nephew of Richard
March Hoe [#.z>.], the foremost inventor of the
family. After attending the city schools, young
Robert entered the firm of R. Hoe & Company
when he was about seventeen, while the Hoe
company was busily engaged in manufacturing
its type-revolving press and stop cylinder press.
In the succeeding twenty-eight years he learned
the business thoroughly, working in all depart-
ments. Each succeeding year, as his uncles grew
older, he assumed greater responsibility, and fol-
lowing the retirement of Peter Smith Hoe and
the death of Richard March Hoe in 1886, he be-
came the head of the firm, continuing in that ca-
pacity until his death. His many years of ex-
perience had developed in him not only a keen
business sense but an unusual ability to select
persons with the right kind of genius to carry
into execution the improvements which he him-
self believed valuable. Accordingly, he never
received patents in his own name for improve-
ments in the printing-press. He bent his en-
ergies first toward meeting the demand of news-
paper publishers for greater speed of production.
After many efforts, and the failure and destruc-
tion of several machines, the Hoe double supple-