(Guy Foam Digital Reprographics Ltd was sold as a company in 2000; the founder‘s CV is still fun though. More information on our history and past projects is here.)

Guy Foam: Curriculum Vitae

Guy Foam was born in 1573 into a family of soapmakers (his grandfather had started the tradition, supplying refills for his newly invented ‘bubble-jet‘ printer).

Foam developed an interest in printing early in life. His first attempt used, predictably enough, soap out of which raised characters were shaped by ‘bathing‘ before being inked. Attracted by the possibilities of this new ‘Soap-Set‘ technology, Guy, then 14, took up an apprenticeship with the famous typographer Wynkyn De-Worde, and the two started work on an apple based printing system. This worked well enough but was rapidly superceded when they realised that the potato was actually the key to successful printing.

By 1605 the apple was entirely disposed of and pure potato printing was born.

At this point in his life, Guy suffered what appeared at the time to be a great set-back when Mr De-Worde moved to London to become Fleet Street‘s first typesetter, and required the now 32 year old Guy to accompany him. This halted the development of potato printing for a time while the two established themselves, but ultimately led to Guy Foam‘s greatest invention - the ‘PostChipped‘ imagesetting bureau.

As soon as he moved to Fleet Street, Guy had wanted a way to retain his existing customer base, and so had developed the world‘s first remote imagesetting service by the use of the then common semaphore stations (slow, at 0.1 baud, no parity). Speed was a problem, but a bigger one was the unreliability - often the customer would get back work which was not to spec, and to this end Guy incorporated potato printing into the system, inviting his distant customers to send him, by post, ready made up pages composed entirely of potatoes; the problem of decay during transit was solved when it was realised that the potatoes could be deep fried by the sender, and the PostChipped system was born.

In a later development, Foam even went on to overcome the half-tone limitations of his system by inventing the PostChipped ‘RIP‘ (Roast Instant Potato), which was capable of rendering image data much more successfully. Being 400 years ahead of his time, Guy Foam eventually died a poor man on April 2nd 1640, in spite of inventing a radical new printing process. However, future generations of the Foam family have kept the faith and continue to create fresh and innovative ideas in imagesetting.