MAN Roland History

Ludwig Sander, a prominent businessman, founded an engineering company in Augsburg in 1840. Only five years later, renamed C. Reichenbachsche Maschinenfabrik, the company delivered the first automatic cylinder press.

One year later Johann Forst and Johann Klein built the first Johannisberger letterpress machine in the Rheingau area. In 1873, one name change and one amalgamation later, the first web-fed rotary press for newspaper printing was delivered by MAN in Augsburg. In 1871, the engineers Louis Faber and Adolf Schleicher founded an "Association for the manufacture of lithographic presses" in Offenbach.

The first letterpress machine for printing newspapers was built in Plauen (Vogtland) in 1899 and the first rotary offset press using the blanket-to-blanket principle was built in Plauen in 1907. The first sheetfed offset press to bear the name Roland was built in Offenbach in 1911.

MAN Roland Druckmaschinen AG was formed on 1 July 1979, resulting from the merger of Offsetmaschinenfabrik Faber & Schleicher AG in Offenbach and the printing press division of Maschinenfabrik Augsburg Nürnberg (M.A.N.). Today Augsburg, Offenbach, Geisenheim, Mainhausen and Plauen are modern factories belonging to the second oldest printing press manufacturer in the world.