Even today, at the Hendrichs drop forge, you can witness how red-hot billets are forged into shear blanks amid a loud clanging.
Solingen was once the “workshop of the world.” In the 19th century, cutlery of every kind was shipped from this city in the Bergisches Land to every corner of the globe. Among the largest drop forges was the Hendrichs company, founded in 1886, which is still fully preserved as the LVR Industrial Museum.
There are loud bangs and hisses. The drive belts whir, and the hammer strikes the red-hot iron with a loud clang. When the hammering operation begins at the LVR Industrial Museum’s Hendrichs Drop Forge, visitors are right in the thick of it. That’s because the Hendrichs Drop Forge is one of the few museums that also serves as a production facility for the museum’s scissors.
For 100 years, from 1886 to 1986, blank scissors were forged in the red-brick buildings with their characteristic sloping shed roofs and tall chimneys. With 33 drop hammers, the drop-forging shop—founded by the two scissors grinders Peter and Friedrich Wilhelm Hendrichs—soon became one of the largest and most successful in Solingen. That is, until it closed in the mid-1980s, when the Rhineland Regional Council converted the entire factory complex—including the entrepreneur’s villa built next door—into a museum.
MACHINES FROM THE EARLY YEARS
Everything was left exactly as it was. Most of the machines—drop hammers and presses—used in demonstrations still date back to the founding years. Visitors can also take a look inside the changing room with its old lockers and into the washroom, where the long row of rotating washbasins is still in place. And in the office, you can still hear the clatter of the old typewriters.
The stately villa, built on the factory grounds in 1896 and since restored to exemplary condition, bears witness to the success of the Hendrichs brothers’ enterprise. Here, museum visitors gain insight into the middle-class lifestyle of the factory-owning family; they can stroll through the beautiful gardens with their mature trees, just as the owners once did.
