Polytec celebrates the 100th birthday of the company founder
24.01.2023 - In 1967 Heinz G. Lossau founded the company Polytec together with his wife Liselotte Lossau. He would have been a hundred years old these days.
Throughout his life, Heinz G. Lossau not only made a name for himself as an agile and courageous entrepreneur and company founder, but also as a pioneer of laser measurement technology. As a young physicist he gets to know the new laser technology in the USA and he is immediately fascinated.
He recognizes its potential for research and industry and sets himself a major goal: to bring laser technology to Germany, to make it known there and to develop it further. In 1967, together with his wife Liselotte Lossau, he founded the Polytec company for analysis, measurement and control technology in Grünwettersbach near Karlsruhe, which in the early days quickly made a name for itself among the physical and chemical faculties of universities and among research managers in industry.
The development of laser measurement technology
While they were selling the first lasers from the USA in Germany, Polytec began developing and producing its own laser measurement technology in 1971, initially the first FIR spectrometer. With his decision, Heinz G. Lossau hit the nerve and the needs of his time. For many years, the FIR 30 was the only FIR spectrometer on the world market. It was a success and soon Polytec was delivering devices to all continents.
In the decades that followed, numerous other in-house developments followed and Heinz G. Lossau built up the areas of length and speed measurement in production plants with Polytec, NIR spectroscopy for process analysis, industrial image processing and optical systems as a commercial agency and industrial adhesives with the subsidiary PT .
-
Heinz G. and Liselotte Lossau. Image: Polytec -
Heinz G. Lossau during a celebration. Image: Polytec -
Meeting at Polytec during the early days of the company. Bild: Polytec
The entrepreneur is always on the lookout for innovative metrological solutions and business areas, for new challenges and goals. In the 1990s, he once again showed a flair for technological trends. Enthusiastic about the technology of fiber optic sensors, he decides to manufacture the appropriate devices for the optical non-contact measurement of mechanical movements, especially for vibrations: laser vibrometers.
With this he sets another decisive milestone for Polytec. Vibrometry is gradually becoming the largest division of the Waldbronn-based company - today Polytec is the world market leader in optical vibration measurement technology.
Heinz G. Lossau's legacy
Heinz G. Lossau died in 2005 at the age of 82. "Heinz Lossau is well remembered as an extremely energetic and courageous entrepreneur who drove many ideas at Polytec, which still form the basis of our activities today," explains Dr. Dietmar Gnaß, Managing Director at Polytec since 2014.
Today the company looks back on more than 50 years, employs almost 500 people worldwide and has branches in the USA, England, France, Japan, Singapore and China as well as a worldwide network of sales partners.
