The history of the Walther company

The German family company Walther is established in 1886 by Carl Walther and started with the manufacturing of muskets and after that she became known for manufacturing sports and hunting weapons.
In 1926 the company started to produce calculators based on the Mercedes / Melitta licence in Zella-Mehlis. The quality of the products made them very successful and gave the competitor Brunsviga in Braunschweig a hard time. In 1929 they made machines already with automatic division. They where very fast while they where electro motor driven.
After WW-II Walther-Buromaschinen moved from Zella-Mehlis to Niederstotzingen / Württenberg, West-Germany and continued their production.
Their successful products:

• the pinwheel machines: the Walter WSR 160, RMKZ and the masterpieces and unique design was the EMKD. Automatic was unique for pin wheel machines, they where able to set the number of cycles. It was the most expressive model off the Walther-line, 700DM. She was 15 years in production in low quantities due to the much higher price than simpler models and the competition.
• The adding (and listing) and automatic multiplication machine the Multa 32 series. Started in 1959. In 1963 the Walther automat 640 came to the market. This machines was abel to auto divide with the right comma location in the result. The price was 4850DM (excl.tax) was again the reason for the low market response.

By the time the japanese and US electronic calculators came on the market, it was more and more difficult to make profit with their high quality mechanical parts. They made a series of electronic calculators and listing machines. In 1978 the Walther company closed the office machine production. They continued to make mechanical parts as semi-finished product for the printing machines manufacturers. It is not a surprise that the printing units where used to continue the business. They where advanced in design printing heads, very light weight, circular, small in size and therefore much vaster than the printing units of the competition at those times.

Technical note
Professional mechanical and electrical design! You will find it throughout the whole Walther SMxx series. It is of course in conjunction with the years they are developed, but they had already nice designs. A few examples:
The motor is of a modern electrical design, with a big capacitor and no brushes. The unit to suppress radio interference is much smaller, and has modern components in it, which are still ok). The motor on off switch is a micro switch. The motor has two fans, one on both sizes of the axes, for cooling (first calculator machine I have with this feature). Motor speed is reduced by light weight constructed aluminum and nylon gears and a nylon belt. All to reduced mass moment of inertia, rotational inertia. For the same reason the circular shaped printing heads are super light weight and made of hard steel. Which result in a very fast printing / calculation time.