12 things you didn't know about Drager

"We don't intend to become starving inventors," said the company founder Johann Heinrich Dräger. Much has happened since then. This year the Lübeck-based technology enterprise is even celebrating its 125th anniversary—a year later than expected.

Johann Heinrich Dräger and his business partner Carl Adolf Gerling founded the company Dräger & Gerling on December 20, 1888. However, its mandatory entry into the commercial register did not get done until January 1, 1889. In keeping with their correct and law-abiding traditions, they are celebrating the 125th anniversary in 2014.
Stability alone cannot explain why employees identify with the company more than just an average amount and often remain with it for a long time, as regular staff surveys testify. Around half of the approximately 6,200 employees in Germany (there are more than 13,000 internationally) have been working at the company for at least ten years.
The power of small: the company's product range consists of several hundred key products, none of which contributes more than just a few percent to turnover.
An extreme athlete with the Dräger Panorama Nova diving mask achieved what seemed impossible just three years ago: in 24 hours the 38-year-old covered 16.34 kilometers underwater—gaining a place in the Guinness Book of Records. The record to beat was a mere 1,000 meters.
A good image as an employer has always been essential to Dräger. This has ranged from pay commensurate with performance all the way to greater independence and responsibility for staff. In a survey of 14,000 students at 130 universities, the company recently rose to rank 28 among the top 100 employers for engineers ("Graduate Barometer Engineering 2014"; trendence). In 2013, Dräger received more than 14,000 applications in Germany alone—and employed more than 400 people.
It was more of a coincidence that the company founder, a clockmaker by trade, settled in the small Hanseatic city of Lübeck when seeking a larger realm of action: "I am doing very well, but I have an appetite for more than just food." It became necessary to move away from Vierlanden in the southeast part of Hamburg. But Johann Heinrich Dräger was worried: "I am afraid I will not be a match for circumstances here." His wife was from Lübeck. So what did they do? The couple reached a tactical agreement: when they agreed, he would be right. If not, she would be. "Where's the justice if a woman can't get her way now and then?" he asked himself as they entered Lübeck.
Hanseatic: Stefan Dräger, the great-great-grandson of the company founder and Chairman of the Board Drägerwerk Verwaltungs AG, says, "We are not a long-established Lübeck family at all." But the statement is made primarily out of respect for the city's over 870-year history. Compared to this, the company still seems to be in its infancy. Dräger's origins were guided by a principle formulated by the founder's mother in Plattdeutsch: "Lever Schaden as Schimp." Since Forum was built in 1974, this saying has embellished the family coat of arms on the building's gables as a creed and a commitment. It means it's better to accept the loss of some money than to risk your good name and the trust of your customers and workforce.
In the 1920s, a company mailman would cover around twelve kilometers each day on the expansive premises of the firm—and quickly too. Letters and parcels were instructed to be delivered "with the least possible loss of time". Not much has changed in that respect. Incoming post is now inspected using a scanner. On December 7, 2005, something strange appeared on the screen: wires, a fuse, and powder. It was actually a smoke detector intended as a Christmas gift for the Executive Board. Even in the digital age, company mail handlers cannot complain of a work-shortage: they send well over 400,000 letters around the world each year.
Dräger products can be similarly multifaceted: the Dräger Chemical Protective Suit (CPS) 7900, for example, offers more than a million different configurations—in theory. The production department is reluctant to reveal who ordered one in size 'S' with a shoe size of 50.
Growing and flourishing: the Dräger Group generated around 50 million deutschmarks (around 26 million euros) of turnover at the end of the 1950s. More than half a century later, in 2013 to be precise, the company's products and services were given a value of 2.37 billion euros.
Such growth would have been unthinkable at the end of the Second World War. The Allies had forbidden the company's traditional production. What could be done to ensure the firm's survival? Necessity is the mother of invention: small cooking stoves, barometers, seed-sowing machines, cough syrup, ladies' handbags, electrolyte condensers (for radios), paper, and lactose were all produced by the factory. It was still 'Technology for Life'—and sometimes for survival: the protein albumin, which was a byproduct of powdered milk production, was processed so that it could be used to combat the malnutrition rampant at the time.
By that time, Dräger Review was already several decades old. As one of the first customer magazines in Germany, it has been published regularly since 1912. Today it appears in four languages (German, English, Spanish, and French) with a circulation of several tens of thousands of copies.