Bell & Howell

We are a leading information services and solutions provider to a select range of industries around the world. In each of our businesses, we transform information through software and services, helping our customers operate more effectively and efficiently. We concentrate on market niches where our leadership, experience, and customer focus enable us to anticipate customer needs and develop practical, cost-effective solutions that bring value to the marketplace. We continually look for opportunities with strong recurring revenues and high customer retention and renewal rates. This strengthens our leadership position, makes us more predictable, and allows us to make prudent use of financial leverage. During the early 1900s, when Chicago was the center of the motion picture industry, Donald J. Bell worked as a projectionist in theaters around northern Illinois, where he became well acquainted with the equipment used for showing movies. As his interest in films and equipment grew, a friend helped secure him permission to use the machinist tools in the powerhouse of Chicago's Northwestern Railway, where Bell remodeled an Optoscope projector and later modified a Kinodrome projector. Bell met Albert S. Howell at the Crary Machine Works, where many of the parts for projectors were manufactured. Howell was born in Michigan and traveled to Chicago to work in a machine shop that built and repaired motion picture projectors. In 1906 he applied for his first patent, a device that improved framing for 35mm Kinodrome motion picture projectors. With Bell's experience as a movie projectionist, contacts in the movie industry, and ready cash, and Howell's inventive genius and mechanical aptitude, the two men decided to start their own business. Incorporated with a capitalization of $5,000 in February 1907, Bell and Howell Company entered the business of manufacturing, jobbing, leasing, and repairing machines. During its first year of business, over 50 percent of the new company's business involved repairing movie equipment made by other manufacturers. What made the company famous, however, was its development of equipment that addressed the two most important problems plaguing the movie industry at the time: flickering and standardization. Flickering in the early movies was due to the effects of hand-cranked film, which made the speed erratic. Standardization was needed as divergences in film width during these years made it nearly impossible to show the same film in any two cities within the United States. By 1908, Bell and Howell refined the Kinodrome projector, the film perforator, and the camera and continuous printer, all for the 35mm film width. With the development of this complete system, and the company's refusal to either manufacture or service products of any other size than the 35mm width, Bell and Howell forced film standardization within the motion picture industry. In 1910, the company made a cinematograph camera entirely of wood and leather. When the two men learned that their camera had been damaged by termites and mildew during an exploration trip in Africa, they designed the first all metal camera. Introduced in 1912, the design 2709 soon garnered the reputation as "the most precision film mechanism ever made" and was produced for 46 continuous years. Following the relocation of the motion picture industry from Chicago to Hollywood, Bell and Howell's first movie camera was used in Southern California in 1912. By 1919, nearly 100 percent of the equipment used to make movies in Hollywood was manufactured by Bell and Howell. With business expanding rapidly, the number of employees at Bell and Howell increased from 18 to 85 over a few years. In 1914, Bell and Howell decided to permanently locate its offices on Larchmont Avenue in Chicago. In the midst of the company's success, however, internal problems began to emerge. While Howell supervised production, Bell acted as a company salesperson, a job that required many long tri