A brief insight into the world of device fuses: Significance and Development of Fuses in Electrical Devices

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Chapter 4.1., The first specialist companies for safety fuses:
It can be assumed that the company "Pudenz KG", which was established in Wuppertal back in 1909, was one of the first German companies that specialized in safety fuses and others. In the first years of their presence on the market, the focus of their activities was on the repair and maintenance of safety fuses. The growing knowledge about the functionality of safety fuses might have been an incentive for them to take on development tasks, as well. The way of how they developed and established their business is similar to the company Wickmann, which was founded in Dortmund in 1918. While the company Schurter KG in Luzern (Switzerland) entered the market of "safety fuses" through the repair and maintenance of the latter, the companies Bussmann (St. Louis, Missouri, USA, 1914) and Littelfuse (Chicago, USA, 1927) started to implement their development plans for safety fuses (see overview attached to this document).
The use of electrotechnical devices increased at a rapid pace in the USA, Europe, and hence Germany. One of the primary reasons for the high demand of fuses can be ascribed to the developments in the fields of telecommunication and radio industry, as the protection of single devices was attached with increasing importance. The commercial use of this technology got into its stride.
Back in 1903, the "Gesellschaft für drahtlose Telegraphie m. b. H" (Association for wireless telecommunications) which was based in Berlin, were the founders of the two German electricity companies Siemens & Halske A.G. and the "Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft, Berlin". According to their principles and goals with respect to technology, that new association represented the fusion of the systems by Braun-Siemens and Slaby-Arco dar. The new
System was called 'Telefunken'. Count Arco was appointed to be the technical executive and principal engineer of the newly established company. (...)."17
Back in 1915 Guglielmo Marconi succeeded in establishing a telephone line to a ship that was about 50 km away. In the early 1920s, several radio stations signed on (1919 Nauen, 1924 Leipzig ...). Despite the fact that merely about 20 percent of the German population were able to use electrical power in 1928, the popularity and demand for radio sets was considerably high: "On the 1st of April 1924, the number of listeners in Germany amounted to 9895, one year later, the number had increased to a whopping 872.600, 1.246.000 at the beginning of the year 1926, and eventually a whopping 2.334.000 of listeners in October 1926."The repairable safety fuses applied in the early stages of the century were - at least in Germany - open fuses with voltages19 varying from 10 A to 600 A. In order to comply with the principle of "selectivity", the installation of safety fuses for single device or antenna systems of houses with voltages varying from less than 10 A down to 0.01 A became necessary. This came along with specific developments and designs, which had to be adopted by the then existing manufacturers of safety fuses manufacturers. This separation in the development of safety fuses is assumed to be the reason, why the fuse was no longer recognized as a component part by the engineers of devices. An example for this is a wiring diagram: Published in the magazine "Funkschau" on 30th of April 1939 and set up for the radio set "Rekordbrecher-Sonderklasse" the safety fuse was not referred to as a component part as incidentals.20
In the late 1920s the Witten-based company Wickmann-Werke AG started to develop and manufacture safety fuses. The company Wickmann wasn t the first one that developed safety fuses, yet it became the most important supplier of fuses in Europe. As is described in the following section, the most significant impulses for innovation in the field of research and development, as well as those related to the standardization originate in the works of Wickmann in Witt