Company history

How the firm grew

Four handovers in a hundred years

Kauermann KG has remained in family hands since it was founded. The business has been handed on four times, each time within the family – and each time to someone who knew the firm's engineering. That is why we can still supply spare parts today for couplings built decades ago.

The founder

Dr.-Ing. E. h. August Kauermann

20 February 1867 – 26 October 1939

August Kauermann was born on 20 February 1867 in Barop. After attending the technical college in Hagen he took up his first post as a young engineer in 1887 at Maschinenfabrik Ludwig Stuckenholz in Wetter an der Ruhr, where Rudolf Bredt introduced him to crane building.

From Duisburg – at Duisburger Maschinenbau-A.G. vorm. Bechem und Keetman – he shaped the development of hoisting gear for years: floating cranes of great lifting capacity, heavy-duty cranes for the fitting-out basins of the shipyards, and the single- and multi-bay slipway installations that were regarded as masterpieces of engineering.

In 1907 he was appointed to the board and entrusted with the technical management of both divisions of the company. When the three crane-building firms in Wetter, Duisburg and Benrath merged to form Deutsche Maschinenfabrik A.G. – today's Demag – he was one of the two board members of the new company.

In 1913 he left the board to represent the works' interests in Berlin as general agent. In the spring of 1915 he accepted an appointment as general manager of Maschinenfabrik Schieß A.G. in Düsseldorf.

On 7 July 1923 the Technische Hochschule Aachen conferred on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Engineering – in recognition of his services to the design and construction of hoisting gear and machine tools.

From 1912 Düsseldorf had its Industrie-Club. Its rooms were where the leaders of Rhenish-Westphalian industry met – the names of heavy industry, from Thyssen through Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach to Poensgen. Admission was reserved for members and their guests, and what was discussed there appeared in no newspaper.

August Kauermann was a member of the club, and after him his son Ulrich. For two generations the firm thus had its seat at the table where Rhenish industry settled its affairs.

Kauermann took that route for a cause that was not his own. In the early nineteen-twenties the Hamburg ship model basin was so short of work that closing it temporarily was being discussed. As a general manager in a leading industrial position, Kauermann arranged for its situation to become the subject of a lecture at the Düsseldorf Industrie-Club on the national importance of experimental research.

The lecture worked. Substantial endowments came from Rhenish heavy industry, and in early 1922 the society of friends and supporters was founded, with Kauermann joining its board; he was later made an honorary member. He also personally led the delegation that persuaded Dr. Ott, general manager of Rhein- und Seeschiffahrt in Cologne, to take the chair, and he advised on the nomination of the honorary chairmen – first August Thyssen, after his death Paul Reusch.

In 1926 he laid down his office at Schieß and was elected to the supervisory board. He then set up his own engineering office in Düsseldorf and turned to a new task: making practical use of a machine element that had become known as the Bibby coupling. As a shock-absorbing intermediate member it filled a gap, particularly in heavy drives.

That work gave rise to the company which today builds flexible couplings as Kauermann KG. The obituary of 1939 already recorded that the firm continued and was being carried on by the son of the deceased.

Both obituaries describe him as a reserved man who cared about the work and not about his own standing – someone who passed on his view of a task without many words.

The information about the founder comes from two obituaries of 1939: the obituary by Heinrich Bilger and the notice of the Gesellschaft der Freunde und Förderer der Hamburgischen Schiffbau-Versuchsanstalt. We hold both in the original. What the Industrie-Club was rests on two articles in the Rheinische Post about its history.