Even today in the Hendrichs drop forge, you can still see how red-hot splintered pieces are forged into scissor blanks with a loud roar.
Solingen was once the "workshop for the world". In the 19th century, cutlery of all kinds was supplied all over the world from the town in the Bergisches Land region. One of the largest drop forges was the Hendrichs company, founded in 1886, which is still completely preserved as an LVR industrial museum.
It bangs and hisses. The drive belts whirr and the hammer strikes loudly on the red-hot iron. When the hammer starts up at the LVR Industrial Museum Gesenkschmiede Hendrichs, visitors can experience it live. The Hendrichs drop forge is one of the few museums that also produces the museum shears.
For 100 years, from 1886 to 1986, scissor blanks were forged in the red brick buildings with the typical sloping shed roofs and high chimneys. With 33 drop hammers, the drop forge founded by the two scissor grinders Peter and Friedrich Wilhelm Hendrichs soon became one of the largest and most successful in Solingen. Until it closed in the mid-1980s, when the Rhineland Regional Association converted the entire factory complex into a museum, including the entrepreneur's villa built next door.
MACHINES FROM THE FOUNDING YEARS
Everything was left as it was. Most of the machines, drop hammers and presses used in the demonstrations date back to the founding years. Visitors can also take a look at the changing room with the old lockers and the washroom, where the long row of rotating wash basins is still in place. And in the office you can still hear the clattering of the old typewriters.
Just how successful the Hendrich brothers were with their company is evidenced by the stately villa, which was built on the factory site in 1896 and has since been restored in exemplary fashion. Here, museum visitors can gain an insight into the bourgeois lifestyle of the manufacturing family and stroll through the beautiful gardens with their old trees, just as the gentlemen once did.
