Kern & Son
| Kern & Sohn GmbH | |
|---|---|
| legal form | GmbH |
| founding | 1844 |
| Seat | Balingen , Germany |
| management | Albert Sauter |
| Number of employees | 115 |
| Branch | measuring technology |
| Website | www.kern-sohn.com |
| As of December 31, 2018 | |
The Kern & Sohn GmbH (proper spelling: KERN & SOHN GmbH ) with seat in Balingen district Frommern in Baden-Württemberg , produces and sells scales and weighing equipment. According to the Württemberg State Museum , the company is the oldest precision balance factory in Germany.
The family company was founded by Gottlieb Kern in today's Albstadt in 1844 and is now in the eighth generation. As early as the 19th century, the company's products were repeatedly referred to in scientific publications. Many scales from the production of Kern & Sohn are exhibited today in the Museum for Scales and Weights in Balingen.
history
Around 1830, Gottlieb Kern married the heiress of the Sauter scale workshop, which had been involved in the manufacture of precision scales in Onstmettingen since around 1770, and in 1844 re-established the workshop as a company. In 1867 the company produced and sold about 2000 scales to scientists, pharmacists, chemists and goldsmiths. Kern's stepson, Albert Sauter, joined the company in 1870. In the following years, Kern & Sohn became one of the largest manufacturers of precision scales in Germany. Just a few years later, production was 10,000 scales a year.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Kern & Sohn introduced a large number of innovations and changes to its constructions to increase accuracy. Gottlieb Kern died in 1886. Albert Sauter took over the management of the company. In the mid-1880s, Albert Sauter built a large manufacturing facility in neighboring Ebingen with an adjoining house, as was customary at the time. At the turn of the century, Kern & Sohn occupied a dominant market position in several areas of weight measurement. In 1903 Albert Sauter's son Gustav took over the company. A short time later, he expanded the scale factory to include additional parts of the building and also rebuilt the house in a representative manner in accordance with the spirit of the times.
The First World War brought about a turning point. Production fell by 70% and people only worked three days a week. In the severe inflation that followed after the end of the war, company owner Gustav Sauter was allowed to print and distribute the money for the wages of his employees - quite legally - on newspaper in order to be at least a small step ahead of the galloping inflation. At the time, the companies in the southern German scale industry tried to counteract the slacking demand for scales in their own special way by increasing the variety of models to previously unimagined heights. For example, the Kern & Sohn product range at that time comprised up to 500 models.
After the prosperous 1930s, the Second World War, in which the factory was destroyed and the owners perished, was another serious turning point. The sister of the two company owners at the time, Paul and Walter Sauter, continued the company together with the remaining employees after the war. Due to the lack of funds, the first few years were kept afloat with the production of plastering tools, before the production of scales returned to the center in the late 1940s.
When Martin Sauter joined the company, the product range was again geared towards analytical and laboratory balances. The emergence of electrification in weighing technology led to an enormous change in the industry in the 1970s, which even Kern & Sohn, which up until then owed its strength to the production of mechanical precision scales, could not ignore the first semi-electronic precision scales in the company's history manufactured.
The product range was expanded in the following years to include industrial scales, calibration and verification services, medical personal scales, microscopes and refractometers.
Today's activities
Today Kern & Sohn produces and sells a variety of measuring devices, in addition to scales, also moisture meters, test weights, measuring instruments for force measurement, torque measurement, hardness testing, for layer thickness, material thickness, light intensity measurement, sound level measurement, as well as microscopes, refractometers, software and accessories.
Web links
- kern-sohn.com - Company website
- kern-lab.com - Company website
- sauter.eu - the company's website
Individual evidence
- ↑ Annual financial statements as of December 31, 2018 in the electronic Federal Gazette
- ^ Philipp Matthäus Hahn: Philipp Matthäus Hahn, 1739-1790. Württembergisches Landesmuseum Stuttgart, 1989 limited preview in the Google book search
- ↑ Historic Section ( Memento from March 26, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF file) In: kern-sohn.com
- ^ The American Annual of Photography. American Photography Book Department, 1888 Google Book Search limited preview
- ^ The School of Mines Quarterly. Columbia University, 1891 limited preview in Google Book search
- ^ Wilhelm Pfeffer: The Physiology of Plants. Clarendon Press, 1900 limited preview in Google Book search
- ↑ Joseph Frick: Dr. J. Fricks Physical Technique. F. Vieweg and Son, 1905 limited preview in Google Book search
- ↑ Museum of Scales and Weight Balingen - Germany's most important scale city ( Memento from August 9, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ About us - Tradition and Innovation ( Memento from May 15, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Industrial Weighing. ( Memento from September 1, 2011 in the Internet Archive )