In 1731, Count Leopold Anton of Firmian, in one of history's many documented attempts at what is now succinctly called "ethnic cleansing",  succeeded in invoking an "Emigration Patent" which allowed him to expel 15,508 Protestants from the predominantly Catholic region of southern Germany. Depending upon their status, these Protestants were allowed between just seven and ten days to leave - and that is why a family with the typically southern name of "Pittler" found itself in East Prussia. Julius Wilhelm von Pittler was born there on the 21st of June 1854, to a family that was almost destitute - his father found work as Chief Forrester to Baron von Tettau, on his Tolks estate, but he died when Wilhelm was only seven years old.
Of his six siblings, only two were to survive the neglect of childhood. Wilhelm was a weak child and, when the baron entered him into apprenticeship with a gardener, his fate appeared sealed. However, as a result of his physical condition - which made him dislike fatiguing gardening jobs - he discovered a love of drawing. His subsequent art training entailed a lengthy stay at Hamburg-Harburg and, during this time, he learned how to produce and interpret engineering drawings.
Thus, in 1876, at the age of twenty two, he settled in Leipzig, turned his back on gardening, and gained employment with a flagmaker as a designer of badges, club standards and tablecloths. It wasn't long before he became familiar with embroidering machinery and, within two years, had set up his first business after acquiring several machines. Soon he was employing several operators, but it wasn't long before he became content to let other people draw his flowers and garlands, and started a workshop in Schutzenstrasse, where he designed and built a machine for automatically folding and gluing paper bags. This machine was exhibited at the Altona Trade and Industry show of 1879 - the same year in which he married Martha Albrecht.
He now had a stable income from his embroidery business and the time and money to became fascinated by the new machine of the day, the automobile. His first experiments with a "gunpowder engine", fitted to a bus, were largely unsuccessful - the noise it produced while it was being tested on the streets of Leipzig attracted the attentions of the local police, who halted any thoughts of further trials..

He next turned his attention to a steam powered bus, but the heavy steel tyres tore the flagstones from the road and he sold it, despite having applied for a patent, as well as ensuring its inclusion in the catalogue at the Halle Industrial Exhibition. He was not discouraged by these failures however and he quickly started another company - this time a full-scale engine production plant. His business was a partnership with the brothers Elze; "W. von Pittler, Elze & Co." producing a small, self-contained engine and boiler unit, which due to its compact design, was ideally suited for installation to confined working areas. He secured the patent - Deutsches Reichspatent number 12931, but found himself in competition with the new "Otto" engine - which did not need the complicated priming of his own engine. The brothers Elze resigned and in 1884 the firm ceased to exist.
Pittler then turned his attentions to such obscure inventions as interchangeable filaments for the new Edison light bulb then, immediately afterwards, invented a new printing method for large posters, using zinc plates in place of the customary stone plates. When making notes he found the breaking of his pencil a continual cause of irritation so he designed a telescopic pencil holder - which he subsequently patented; the modern Pittler enthusiast must surely look out this patent, and make a pencil to the design - using, of course, a Pittler lathe and preferably employing a piece of well-seasoned wood from Pittler's home area.
For his daily indulgence of cigars, he invented an automatic lighter, for bookbinding he constructed an improved book-binding machine. The patent register holds several (Pittler) improvements for sewing and embroidery machines, devices which gave his own company a distinct advantage - and himself an ever-growing income.
During his lifetime he took out over two hundred patents with some designs incorporated into the sewing machines of "Le Progres Industriel" based in Belgium, taking sales all over France and abroad to England - here a sales office was established in 1894, later to trade under the name Messrs. George Adams - a name later inexorably linked to the Pittler story. At the age of 35, Pittler had secured both wealth and status.
Great changes took place in Pittler's time. He thrived at a time of a great depression, when agriculture lost its leading role to industry, and the foundation of a new engineering firm rendered the owner liable to being swallowed by one of the large conglomerates such as Krupps, the brothers Kidorf or Strumm, "King of the Saar". The successful rise from inventor or workman to major industrialist was no longer commonplace - the Industrial Revolution was settling down and early corporate giants were ruling the land and regulating the market place.
Pittler, however, who had converted the gardener's lodge in his grounds to a workshop both for his textile business and for his own experimentation, found that the milling machines and lathes at his disposal had notable deficiencies and his active mind started to give thought to how he might possibly improve and modify them. He had already been manufacturing a small mechanic's lathe, powered by a treadle and cord, since 1888. This was a machine of only twenty kilograms in weight, but already with the distinctive prismatic bed and revolving carriage. His garden workshop was becoming too small and so, realising the fading importance of the textile industry, he decided to concentrate solely on a more viable product, the machine tool. If his garden shed was too limiting, he would build himself a proper workshop - a full-sized industrial machine-tool factory..

The registration document shows the date of the "Maschinenfabrik 'Invention' Wilhelm von Pittler" to have been the 11th of July 1889. The name chosen, "Invention", was an Anglo-French word, and probably reflected where Pittler wanted the firm products to go. The "Invention Works" were built on a plot of land within half a mile of his house. He started with thirty workers (and a steam engine left by a previous occupier) and began by producing the C1 pattern lathe, mainly using machines bought from "Le Progress Industriel" with whom Pittler still had links, via his patents. This first lathe had the classic features of the prismatic bar bed, worms and wheels for screwcutting as well as the revolving carriage, but mounted the first ever six station indexing turret to appear on a machine tool.
By 1890, there were 50 employees, and the first universal metal-working machine was developed. The catalogue for that year listed an impressive range of special equipment: for automatic spherical turning, copying of contours, thread cutting, automatic milling of screws and gears, milling and dividing of worm gears and for the milling and dividing of several gears simultaneously. Another fourteen items of special equipment were added to these during the next busy twelve months. By restricting production to one model of lathe only, but in different sizes, Pittler managed to increase production to satisfy export demand from Belgium and France - but most of these machines, now including the B2, found their way to England, and George Adams.
Pittler himself would demonstrate his machines when called upon to do so, and showed their capabilities to the full in 1894, before the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure (Association of German Engineers). The B2 series universal metal working machine was successfully shown at Spa, Belgium in 1891, and again in Lubeck at the Deutsch-Nordische Exhibition of 1895, and in Hohenelbe in 1896. The next model, C3, built in 1894 featured a further innovation, a geared transmission for the generation of threads with higher pitch and at an industrial exhibition at Leipzig Albertpark, using a C3, Pittler demonstrated the making of seventy six different components, from a turned shaft to a milled rack. The C3 lathe was so well designed, adaptable and versatile that it was to remain in production, unchanged, for thirty years.
Pittler continued to develop and refine the turret lathe and eventually produced a rotative design of turret, the basic function of which has been adopted for use in every modern C.N.C. lathe. The original model took sixteen tools in the head - which was so large in diameter that it encircled the lathe bed itself. This engineering masterpiece earned his machine a place in Munich's torturously named "Deutsches Museum von Meisterwerken der Naturwissenschaften und Technik" (German Museum for Masterpieces of Science and Technology). Later still, he machined the periphery of the turret as a wormwheel, and so allowed it to be moved independently of any detent, enabling parting and grooving operations via a worm and handwheel.
Pittler had now reached the zenith of his profession, supplying so many machines to various industries that for fifty years German machine shops were referred to a "Pittleries". The "Invention Works" were unassailable because of their patents - and bursting at the seams with business. In 1895 the time had come for the firm to expand and become public, and the new Company title became "Leipziger Werkzeugmaschinenfabrik Aktiengesellschaft vorm. W. von Pittler". The firm moved from Gohlis to a purpose-built factory at Wahren in 1899, taking with it two hundred and fifty workers, fifty salaried staff as well as ten apprentices. The company had to change though, and Wilhelm von Pittler was no longer in charge of his own creation; in 1902 he left the firm that he had created to concentrated on his other business interests.  The firm then decided to produce a multi spindle lathe to an American design by The National Acme Company, (another fascinating firm, whose story is researchable on the Web) as well as a single-spindle auto to a design by Potter & Johnston. These were quite different to Pittler's designs, with its all encircling turret, which was subsequently abandoned.
It was experience and improvements regarding these machines, as well as their subsequent development after Pittler's departure, that guided the works to its present day success. Even the manufacture of Pittler's famed universal metal-working lathe was passed on (to Johannes Schulz & Co. in Berlin-Weissensee) in the same year as its inventor's death. Its production - and Pittler's proudest contribution to the evolution of the machine tool - eventually ending in about 1920..