1885: Johann Georg Schlumpf, great grandfather of Florian Schlumpf, starts his own business. He is a renaissance man: carpenter, mechanic, hydraulic and electric expert, talented artist and inventor. He builds his own house and workshop - and the hydraulic ram, an ingenious water pump, that needs no energy source other than the water flowing through it. This pump is still produced in the Schlumpf factory.

The Schlumpf factory itself was powered by a turbine installed in the little stream that flows beneath the workshop. A transmission belt transported the energy to the machines. In his leisure time he developed fantastic projection devices that showed some of the first moving pictures on a wall. The pictures were hand-painted on glass panels.

Two generations later: Hans Schlumpf, grandson of the founder, expands the companies activities into the field of special machines for the paper industry.

Picture: a 30m long paper-rubberize machine is buing built for a customer in Finland.

1983 in Paris, on the way to a two-years trip with a self-made motorcycle "Optibrumm" through South America.

1985 to 1988 studying and graduating in Mechanical Engineering

1988: Florian Schlumpf founds his company "schlumpf innovations" as a one-man-business, offering R&D and manufacturing of special machines, mostly for the paper industry.

Exhibition of Inventions, Geneva 1991: schlumpf shows a prototype of a gearing system at the bottom bracket.

The interest from the public is starting signal for launching a small production in 1992. The mountain-drive makes climbing with a bicycle much easier and more comfortable. The initial version uses a step-down gear, while the later speed-drive and high-speed-drive use step-up gears.

Short time later, "speed-drive" is born.

Even a version with belt drive is being tested, but at that time, the available belts required high pretension.

A few years later, "high-speed-drive" is the completion of the trylogy of bicycle gearing systems.

A very small and compact chainring has a big impact on speed! It becomes very popular on folding bikes, recumbents...

Based on more than 100 years of family tradition, in the early Nineties, schlumpf innovations develops a new generation of Hydraulic Rams, a pump, that is able to pump up water without any other energy than just water.

High performance rams are made with delivery heights up to 500 meters (vertically).

A third product are unicycle hubs. When riding long trips in the late Seventies, Florian Schlumpf always wondered why nobody offered a gearing system for unicycles. On a unicycle you have to pedal like a fool just to keep up a moderate speed!

At beginning of this century, the first prototype was made. Since then, unicycling with a geared uni for long distance travels as well as races (marathon, 10km...) has become very popular.

2011: The bicycle gearing division is sold to German company Haberstock-Mobility.

2012: Newly freed capacity allows for development of a completely new product: the Time Machine. The TM1 is an approximately two meter high “longcase clock”, but with no hands nor other means of indicating minutes and hours. The purpose is a more philosophic one: showing how time passes without the stress of measuring it. This gives the viewer the freedom to enjoy the flow of time by listening to the calming sound of the Time Machine and watching its motion as a kinetic sculpture, rather than marking the relentless steps of minutes and hours marching by.

2014: In cooperation with the Russian Pedrodvorets Watch Factory, Schlumpf develops and builds a monumental clock--with a 12-meter pendulum and gears as large as 4 meters in diameter--in less than six month’s time. Situated in the Detski Mir shopping center in the heart of Moscow, it is one of the biggest clocks ever made.

2015: With the TM3, Schlumpf shakes up the market for wall clocks and longcase clocks with an avant-garde kinetic sculpture to take the place of staid grandfather clocks. The new TM3 stands 1.3 meters tall and can discretely show the time - unlike its predecessors - either by delicate hands of wire coated in gold or silver, or by two small magnetic pins that indicate minutes and hours.