100 voltageciting TRAMAG Years – From 1923 to Today

The story of TRAMAG begins at the end of the 19th century in Berlin. Hans Magnus was born there in 1881 into a family of Jewish faith. He grows up in middle-class circumstances, but decides against a career in the banking house Gottschalk & Magnus, of which his father Julius Magnus is a partner, and instead gets qualified as an engineer.

The First World War interrupted Hans Magnus’ technical career in 1914. After the end of the war, there was nothing to keep him in the capital and in 1920 he moved with his family to Nuremberg, already the centre of the German toy industry. In the middle of the crisis year 1923, with un-imaginable hyperinflation and a lot of political unrest, he founded the “Transformatoren- und Apparatefabrik Nürnberg” in the Reichelsdorf district of Nuremberg on 7 July.

Hans Magnus: The Berlin engineer and his pioneering transformers

In his small workshop he manufactures transformers of various kinds, but mainly small devices for model railways. For safety reasons, their electrical operation was changed from 220V household voltage to 14/20V safety extra-low voltage in the 1920s. Transformers were needed for this, which promoted the upswing of the young company. Even in these early years, the Berlin engineer made a name for himself as a clever problem solver.

When the space in the workshop became too small, the company moved to Galgenhof 5, south of Nuremberg’s main railway station, in 1925. In its new location, the company is able to expand further and hire its first employees. At the beginning of the 1930s, the company changed its name from TRAnsformatorenfabrik MAGnus to its current name TRAMAG.

Next week you can find out what happens next in episode 2 of our exciting web-news series on the history of TRAMAG.