In 1880, after completing his apprenticeship at a steel company that also dealt in machine tools, Alfred Heinrich Schütte founded a trading company together with the merchant Bernhardt Schuchhard under the company name Schuchardt & Schütte in Berlin. Starting in 1893, Heinrich expanded the import of modern American lathes, milling machines, grinders and gear-cutting machines to Germany and throughout Europe.
Starting in 1902, he manufactured equipment and tools himself in Cologne-Ehrenfeld and also sold machines from well-known German manufacturers. Schuchardt & Schütte established branches in Stockholm, St. Petersburg and New York. In 1905, Heinrich parted ways with Schuchardt and founded the family-owned company “Alfred H. Schütte” in Cologne.
The company’s ever-expanding production program required a dedicated factory. The cornerstone for this new factory was laid in 1910 on a suitable site along the Rhine meadows in Cologne-Poll.
In 1912, Schütte began manufacturing grinding and drilling machines here. In Berlin-Treptow, he built single- and multi-spindle high-speed drilling machines, universal milling machines, turret lathes and automatic profile-grinding machines. In 1915, he introduced the Schütte four-spindle automatic lathe and in 1919, he built the first tool and universal grinding machine. After World War I, the business was rebuilt around machine imports. The Great Depression forced the sale of subsidiaries and in-house manufacturing resumed in 1932.
Heinrich's son, Alfred Hugo, took over the company in 1936 following his father's death. In 1940, he introduced tools with independent, flexible longitudinal movements ("Schütte-Block"). The reconstruction of the factory which had been destroyed during the war in 1944–45 took place with the help of his brother-in-law, Paul Frhr. v. Pechmann.
From 1964 to 1993, Claus Henning Welcker, Heinrich’s grandson, served as the sole managing director. Among other innovations, he introduced a grinding machine for artificial hip and knee joints and a fully automatic tool grinding machine. Since 1993, his son Carl Martin Welcker has been the managing director of the company which remains one of Europe’s leading manufacturers of machine tools.
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