If Steve Jobs, who died last year, changed the face of publishing, it can fairly be said that John Crosfield, who died late last month, had a comparable effect on printing (writes Peter Coleman).

And the pioneer of a post-war revolution wrought by electronics in the graphic arts would have hated that, in dying four years short of his centenary, he had been pipped again by arch-rival Rudolf Hell.

Former colleagues have paid tribute to Crosfield’s leadership, and to his role in furthering an environment in which so much which has changed printing was created: His company’s name was associated with the colour scanners, registration systems he invented, but also stood for a pinnacle of quality as competitors emerged.

Crosfield died on March 25, aged 96. A grandson of George Cadbury (of chocolate fame), he is said to have inherited the ethos, Quaker principles and family spirit. His father Bertram, had been managing director of London evening daily ‘The Star’ and the ‘News Chronicle’.

Development of both the Scanatron – developed to retouch glass-plate separations used at the time – and Autotron register control had been driven by demand from printers in the UK, and with their support. The introduction of stable graphics arts films provided the means to take scanners to new levels – led by the enlarging Magnascan – and Crosfield equipment established a reputation as the world’s best.

Crosfield Electronics was sold to banknote printer De La Rue in 1974, and onward to a consortium involving Du Pont and Fujifilm, the latter taking full ownership in the 1990s, but the name remained part of the pedigree of the products which followed. Part of that heritage is retained in QuadTech – which bought the colour registration business – and the now-private FFEI.

Crosfield’s vision began it all: World War II had barely ended when he formed his own company, focussed originally on registration in colour printing. His technology was used in early web-offset presses and also to inset preprinted webs into letterpress newspaper machines.

The company moved on to colour scanning, phototypesetting and later automated page composition with John Crosfield at its helm. The Scanatron (1959) analysed pictures and exposed separations on glass photographic plates.

Ten years later, the Magnascan 450 could do all of this, and resize colour prints and transparencies, still using analogue valve-based electronics. The world’s first digital scanner, the Magnascan 550 did not arrive until 1975, but brought computer control and heralded electronic page composition.

Four UK Queen’s Awards – for exports and technology – honoured the company, while Crosfield himself was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1971, received the gold medal of the Institute of Printing in 1973, and was named among the ‘champions of print’ (with digital printing pioneer Benny Landa) at Ipex in 2010.