Westerham’s mayor and town council were very open to the plans. In 1966, the first hall was completed and able to accommodate part of the company’s production activities. The new facility grew rapidly after that, doubling in size by 1969.

The teaching workshop also moved to Westerham to make sure that a sufficient number of well-trained young specialists were available to uphold SPINNER’s high standard of product quality. Over the years since then, more than 700 trainees have qualified as industrial mechanics in Westerham alone.

By 1979 there were 570 people working there, making it necessary to expand the facility further. Just a year later, in 1980, another 5,000 square meters of production space were inaugurated. The product catalog, encompassing a full range of RF product types and versions, continued to grow steadily. SPINNER’s connectors, which have always been the company’s staple products, almost took a back seat as a result of these developments. 

Two more sections were subsequently added, and as a result this development, production and administrative site now boasts five hall units with total floorspace of more than 20,000 m².

The young company grew by leaps and bounds, and soon its first base in Linprunstrasse in Munich, with administration and production under one roof, was bursting at the seams. A search began for a suitable plot of land, applying the time-honored motto of “we’ll only buy what we can afford, and our money also has to be enough to build there.”

A site at Erzgiessereistrasse 33, finally, met all of their criteria, with an added benefit: it contained a couple of shacks that had previously been used to store beer but could be quickly converted into a “new” machine shop.

The company moved there in December 1959 and began operating with a makeshift power supply and a single water tap. The old rooms in Linprunstrasse were retained for a while, since they were needed for production. Georg Spinner and his wife Erika spent the next two years living and working in the middle of a construction project that provided 6000 m² of production and office space, initially enough to meet requirements while taking advantage of every last square inch of the property.

Production and parts of administration were later gradually shifted to a new site that was acquired in Westerham (about 50 km south of Munich) in 1966, but Erzgiessereistrasse 33 is still the company’s headquarters today.

These slotted lines were available in manual and motor-driven coaxial and waveguide versions and naturally accompanied by a wide range of accessories such as detector test heads, selective screen amplifiers, test absorbers, adjustable attenuators, directional couplers, phase shifters, resonant stubs, and tap lines. These products remained available until about two decades later, when slotted lines were superseded by network analyzers.

It’s common knowledge that SPINNER has ranked among the world’s leading makers of passive RF equipment for several decades. But not everyone is aware that the company’s founder, Dr. Georg Spinner, also developed a groundbreaking dual-beam oscillograph at the start of his career, thus paving the way for us to supply test equipment.

Although this product category hasn’t always been the main focus of the company’s sales efforts, it has played a major role. We originally developed many products to meet our own needs, according to the maxim that “only those who accurately test can also ensure optimal product performance.”

Many young people have to pay their own way if they want to go to college, and this was especially true in postwar Germany. Back then, tuition was still charged and no student loans were available yet – quite different from today’s public universities. Georg dealt with this situation by doing what he loved most throughout his life: working with technology. At first he only advised clients, establishing a “radio frequency office” for this purpose. The parallels to the situation in Germany today are also conspicuous here; it’s possible to earn money by providing services, but many bureaucratic hurdles have to be overcome. Back then, these took the form of laws that greatly restricted the manual trades. They initially prevented him from setting up a business.

Georg earned his first income on May 15, 1946, a date that figures more prominently in the company’s history than when it was granted an official license to operate in August 1946; it has therefore been regarded as the date of its founding ever since. He continued studying and advising clients, and in 1947 also began developing his own electronic devices. His inventions included a dual-beam oscilloscope pressure transducer and an experimental transmitter.

In 1948, finally, the company of “Georg Spinner – Elektrophysikalische Geräte” (Electronic Equipment) was officially registered. By that time, his wife Erika had begun keeping the cash book. The business was based in his parents’ house in Dachauer Strasse – a couple of makeshift rooms in the backyard were used for lab work and designing and assembling products. The first employees arrived in 1949.

But the young company soon outgrew the cramped and fairly primitive conditions in Dachauer Strasse, which also lacked the three-phase current that was urgently needed to power the machines.

Georg and Erika then found 200-square-meter lot in Linprunstrasse less than a kilometer away that met all of their needs, and it was their official base for the next 10 years.

Are you curious to find out how the story continues? Read more here.