Czech inventors

Koh-i-noor snap

(1902)

In July 1902 Hynek Puc and Jindřich Waldes founded a public business enterprise. The company manufactured small metal objects. One worker and one apprentice worked with them in the workshop. At the end of the same year the partners moved the manufacturing enterprise to a rented building located in a former candle factory in the Karlín section of Prague. At that time a third business partner joined the company, Eduard Merzinger, who contributed to the company 20 thousand Austrian Crowns that he won in a lottery.

KOH-I-NOOR factory in Vršovice, photo: Khalil BaalbakiKOH-I-NOOR factory in Vršovice, photo: Khalil Baalbaki The main article manufactured in this little shop was a very fashionable snap and Waldes a spol. has precisely these snaps to thank for its almost dizzying ascent. The competition manufactured the snap using a complicated process, which was primarily manual. Thanks to the automatic machinery built by Hynek Puc in 1903, manual mounting of the snap using tweezers was replaced by a mechanical insetting of the spring into the stud's springing part, which enabled an unprecedented increase in production. This grew to such a degree that just three years after initiating production of snaps the factory outgrew its space and therefore in April 1907 manufacturing was transferred to a new factory built in the Vršovice section of Prague. KOH-I-NOOR factory in Vršovice, photo: www.kin.czKOH-I-NOOR factory in Vršovice, photo: www.kin.cz This was a state-of-the-art solution in its time: high and airy rooms, changing rooms for men and women, spa, library, gymnasium and around the factory a little park with benches and various exercise equipment. With the modernization of the factory the pace of manufacturing was also increased, primarily thanks to the constantly improving special machinery and tools, which the enterprise designed and built itself and which on the technical side placed it in the forefront of manufacturers of light metal goods. How state of the art the design of such machines was is shown by, among others, just this automatic setting tool. This machine, after a few small alterations none changing its basic character, still meets the needs of today's very demanding manufacturing requirements, and the same holds true for a number of sequence tools, whose design has not been surpassed by the developments of many decades.

Jindřich Waldes dubbed the snap KOH-I-NOOR – after the reputedly largest diamond in the world, which weighed 186 karats. Legend has it that a gem of the same name was placed in the eye of an ancient Indian god. When Persian conquerors of India first saw the stone shining in the sun they called out "KOH-I-NOOR" (which means "mountain of light"). Naming the snap was one of Waldes' great managerial and strategic moves. A picture of the snaps with the stamped letters K-I-N was used as a business logo, with whose help the company expanded onto foreign markets (branch offices were founded in Dresden – 1904, Warsaw, 1908, Paris, 1911, New York, 1912). It was for the advertising campaign in the United States that the world-famous "MISS KIN" company logo – a picture of a girl with a KOH-I-NOOR snap instead of her eye – was developed. It is said that the logo was thought up on board the boat on the way to the America, when it one of the travelers placed as a joke an enlarged snap used for advertising to her eye instead of a monocle. For Waldes this joke was a spark of inspiration, he photographed the girl and his friends the painter František Kupka and Vojtěch Preissig created a new logo from MISS KIN.

The flourishing of the Waldes a spol. company was disrupted by the German occupation in 1939, at that time the factory was renamed after its main product, KOH-I-NOOR.

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