Iran Bearing Network

FAG

Schaeffler has been moving the world for over seven decades. It all began 75 years ago, when two brothers, Wilhelm and Georg Schaeffler, set up the company Industrie GmbH in Herzogenaurach. This was the “big bang” moment that would ultimately give rise to a leading global automotive and industrial supplier with over 83,900 employees. In time, three independently successful companies – INA, LuK, and FAG – would come together to create a global technology leader with the DNA of a family business.

FAG–Kugelfischer Georg Schäfer AG is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of bearings. FAG bearings are used in cars, railway cars, airplanes, and industrial machinery. The company’s bearings division operates production facilities in Western Europe, Asia, Brazil, the United States, and Canada. FAG’s other divisions make industrial sewing machines and automated handling systems for the upholstery and apparel industries. The company is owned by German industrial bearings manufacturer INA-Holding Schaeffler KG.

FAG Company founder Friedrich Fischer was born in 1849 in the German town of Schweinfurt in Franconia, between Frankfurt and Nuremberg. His father, a musical instrument maker, had built himself a new kind of bicycle that he used to visit his clients. At a time when bicycles were propelled by the rider’s feet pushing against the ground, the new device, which used foot pedals attached to a rotating rod to turn the wheels, caused a sensation in Schweinfurt. The young Friedrich Fischer, who inherited his father’s technical talent and creative abilities, became an apprentice mechanic and, after some years of gaining experience elsewhere in Germany, returned to his hometown. In 1872, Fischer opened a repair shop for sewing machines and bicycles. Soon he also started a retail business that sold new bicycles and sewing machines, a combination that was common at the time, since many sewing machine manufacturers had started making bicycles when they became popular in the later decades of the 19th century. Finally, Fischer took on the manufacture of his own bicycles.

In July 1890, Fischer received a German patent for an improved version of his machine. In the following year, he founded his own company, which he named Automatische Kugelfabrik Friedrich Fischer–Automatic Ball Factory Friedrich Fischer. In 1892, Fischer moved his enterprise to a large building, a former cotton-spinning plant. However, it soon outgrew the new location. By 1896, Germany’s bicycle industry was putting out 200,000 bicycles a year, and its future looked bright. In that year, Fischer sold his retail business and purchased a large property near the city’s train station, where a brand-new factory with a capacity of more than five million steel balls a week was built. To raise the capital for his undertaking, Fischer transformed his enterprise into a public stock corporation in 1897 and renamed it Erste Automatische Gussstahlkugel-Fabrik, vorm. Friedrich Fischer AG (FAG). A banker from nearby Bamberg became the company’s majority shareholder and Fischer its technical director. However, the company founder died only two years later at age 50 and left the enterprise with no capable successor.

Beginning in the 20th century, the automobile gradually replaced the bicycle as the most popular form of personal transportation and further increased the demand for high quality ball bearings. Ball and roller bearings became major components for rotating parts in motors as well as in many other kinds of machinery. This growing demand in turn attracted more manufacturers to enter the market. The town of Schweinfurt evolved as the center of the German bearings industry, with a number of major manufacturers locating there.

One of them was Georg Schäfer & Cie., a Schweinfurt-based company that started making ball bearings in 1904 and two years later moved into the same former cotton-spinning plant that Fischer’s company had leased before building the new factory near the train station. In 1909, the company’s ball bearings department, which employed more than 200 workers, needed more space for its operations. The owner, Georg Schäfer, acquired FAG and moved his operation to the Fischer factory. He merged his ball bearings division with FAG but kept the name of the oldest ball bearings manufacturer in the town.