Bryan Donkin, (born March 22, 1768, Sandree, Northumberland, Eng.—died Feb. 27, 1855, London), developer of a commercial application of the so-called Fourdrinier machine for making paper and inventor of the composition roller used in printing.
While serving as an apprentice to a papermaker, John Hall, in Dartford, Kent, Donkin was engaged to perfect a papermaking machine that had been devised in 1798 by Nicolas-Louis Robert of France and later patented in England by Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier. He completed the first practical Fourdrinier machine at Frogmore Mill, Hertfordshire, about 1803 and in subsequent years constructed 191 more.
In 1812, using the ideas of the French inventor Nicolas-François Appert, who had devised a method for preserving food in stoppered bottles, he established a factory to produce and can vegetable soups and preserved meats for the Royal Navy. A year later Donkin and a printer developed a forerunner of the rotary press and a composition printing roller. Because the old flatbed press that moved back and forth could not print fast enough to produce large numbers of newspapers, the inventors arranged four trays, each containing a page of type, on the four sides of a revolving spindle. An important feature of the new machine was the use of inking rollers made of glue and treacle (composition). Although this machine eventually failed, composition rollers were widely adopted. After 1815 Donkin became a civil engineer in London, received two gold medals from the Society of Arts, and was a founder (1818) of the Institution of Civil Engineers.