Alfa Laval AB - Early History

Early History

In 1877, the Swedish engineer Gustaf de Laval began to develop the first Swedish milk separator. A year later, he secured a patent for his design. After graduating from Uppsala University, de Laval entered the Technological Institute and passed the final examination in 1866. Times were hard, and de Laval was forced to take a position as clerk in the general store at the Falun mines; an engineer with a first-class diploma, he weighed out nails, herring, and salt to miners. In 1867, however, de Laval received a grant from the Swedish House of Lords and pursued advanced studies at Uppsala University in 1872, receiving the degree of doctor of philosophy.

The process of mechanically separating cream and milk through the physical application of centrifugal force was first exploited in 1876 by Wilhelm Lefeldt in Germany and two years later in Denmark by L.C. Nielsen. The latter technology was acquired by Burmeister & Wain of Copenhagen in 1882. Lefeldt and Nielsen's separators could not work continuously, unlike Gustaf de Laval's superior system. On February 26, 1878, de Laval entered into partnership with Swedish engineer Oscar Lamm. Together they founded the trading company Oscar Lamm, Jr., of Stockholm. The partnership was successful, with de Laval in charge of the technical side and Lamm the financial and commercial aspects of the business. Lamm tried to interest influential agents in Europe, among these H.C. Petersen & Company, Copenhagen; Bergedorfer Eisenwerk near Hamburg; Th. Pilter, Paris; the trading firm D. Hald & Company, London; and Boeke & Huidekooper of Groningen in the Netherlands. In the company's first year of business, 1879, overseas sales accounted for 50 percent of the company's turnover. Foreign demand for cream separators rose sharply, and in 1883 around 80 percent of sales were from overseas. Almost 97 percent of exports were sold through foreign distributors in the more industrially advanced countries. The product in question was the energy-intensive, power-driven cream separator. Manual cream separators were not introduced until 1887.

The company did not set up a domestic marketing division until four years after it had established its foreign distribution network. Its agents were already specialized in marketing dairy equipment, and cream separators complemented their existing product mix.

Four other European companies also manufactured power-driven cream separators in the late 1870s. They were Nielsen & Petersen—from 1882 owned by Burmeister & Wain—in Denmark, and Lefeldt, Fesca, and Petersen in Germany. The industrial exploitation of this process was protected by patent. The holder of the patent for the separation method secured temporary legal protection against imitation and had the opportunity of gaining an international monopoly. The patent on the application of centrifugal force for separating milk and cream, which had been granted in 1884, expired in the countries in which it had first been granted in 1892—namely, in Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, and the United States—and in countries where these patents had subsequently been registered. The reason no domestic cream separator industry had evolved in more industrially advanced countries like the United Kingdom and France is probably that foreign patent registrations from the late 1870s blocked the establishment of an indigenous industry until the beginning of the 1890s.