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Ivan I. Orlov

Ivan I. Orlov was hired by the Forwarding Agency in 1886. Prior to that he worked as a designer at a textile mill. At that time the Forwarding Agency was experimenting with printing banknyotes on silk fabric and Ivan Orlov was hired to participate in that experiment. However, the silk fabric banknote idea was given up and the new designer had to switch over to paper printing production that was a new job for him. And it was then that Ivan Orlov began his experiments with multicolor printing. One of the unsolved problems of multicolor printing in those days was the alignment of the borders of various colors because an individual printing plate had to be used for each individual color and paper had to be run through the printing press several times tocreate an image. That was the technique that did not allow superimposing colors accurately (by the way this problem does not exist in fabric dyeing).

Ivan Orlov proposed a new coloring technique, using a flexible roller and intermediate section chablons that transferred the final image onto thezammel plate. That design solution yielded excellent results and one of the principal printing industry problems was solved fairly simply and elegantly. The invented method was immediately implemented by the Forwarding Agency. The Forwarding Agency Manager R. Lenz and the Minister of Finance forwarded a report to Emperor Alexander III proposing to award Ivan Orlov a bonus of 5,000 roubles. Having considered the report, Emperor Alexander III ordered to give Ivan Orlov 7,000 roubles and "expressed his satisfaction with the fact that the invention was achieved by Russian masters". The newly invented printing method was called the Orlov method and since then has been used worldwide for performing high quality printing jobs.