Georg Philipp Heberlein’s family company is a world leader today. The art of reorientation runs through Heberlein’s 190-year company history. Georg Philipp Heberlein and his descendants ran an exemplary family business with roots in yarn dyeing. It developed into a corporate group and ultimately became a highly specialised company that is regarded as the world’s leading provider of air interlacing and air texturing jets for synthetic continuous filament yarns.
Today Heberlein’s core competence is the development and production of highly-specialised key components for treatment and finishing of synthetic yarns – especially filaments. The company story over the years is a showcase of unique innovations.
Fantastic elastic
The initial concept involved twisting and heating man-made fibre threads at high speeds of 500,000 twists per minutes in a process known as false-twisting. This caused the fibres to be deformed and set, before being untwisted in the opposite direction. The resulting end-products retained their shape, were easy to care for, and – most importantly – had superb elastic characteristics.
This process of crimping the yarn – known as texturisation – was patented in 1931. The new yarn type was first made from viscose filaments. The brand name Helanca was chosen by combining ‘He’ from Heberlein and ‘Lana’ for wool.
Helanca’s major commercial breakthrough came in the early 1950s, when Heberlein was able to develop and patent special spindles to process polyamide (nylon) filaments. Improving the twisting head made it possible to increase the number of twists so that large-scale industrial production started to gain momentum.
By the early 1960s, Heberlein was producing around the clock. Every day, thread output length was equivalent to twice the distance from earth to the moon! Annual production reached 2.5 million kilos of Helanca yarn. As demand soared, Heberlein responded by authorising more than 100 licensees worldwide, in what was now a highly lucrative business.
Mechanical initiative
Helanca’s success was based on sophisticated mechanical processing. However, the earliest machines had to be developed from scratch. The first system, with horizontally mounted false-twist spindles, was built in the company’s own workshop and put into operation in 1953.
