Johann Müller

I. The Nameless Inventor

On the cover page of the 1972 patent document, where the inventor's name would normally appear, it reads: "Nichtnennung beantragt." Non-naming requested. The process described in that patent — the generation of arbitrary polygon shapes through the superposition of rotation and elliptical movement — is one of the most brilliant kinematic principles ever conceived for manufacturing technology. But its creator did not want to be named.

The inventor was called Johann Müller and he lived in Much, a town in the Bergisches Land region of Germany. His refusal to appear on the patent had nothing to do with modesty. It had to do with fear. Johann had once been self-employed and gone bankrupt. Ever since, he feared that creditors might seize his assets. So he renounced — on this and every other patent — the right to be named as inventor. A man whose ideas shaped an entire industry erased himself from the very document that recorded his ideas for posterity.

II. The In-House Inventor

Johann Müller was the inventor behind the company Plarad in Much, a long established global specialist in bolting technology, founded in 1962 by Paul-Heinz Wagner. "Behind" is meant literally here: Johann never stood in the foreground. He worked freelance, invented screw tools, designed machines, solved problems. Many of the company's products in the field of bolting technology could be traced back to his inventions. For twenty years he was the engine of a company that without him would very probably never have achieved the global standing it enjoys today.

The patent database Google Patents lists 84 patent publications under the name Paul-Heinz Wagner. Of these, 39 — German and international filings — date from before 1982, the years during which Johann worked for the company. His name does not appear on a single one. How many of these patents actually go back to his ideas can no longer be proven today. Those who knew Johann know the answer.

For his inventions he received a fee that increased with each new idea, but bore no relation to their actual value. Johann was a typical inventor — the ordinary and the everyday held little interest for him. What drove him was the next idea, the next problem waiting to be solved. He left the commercial side to others. That in doing so he was surrendering control over his own life's work, he recognised too late.

Among his many inventions, one stood out: a machine for manufacturing the internal hexagons of tools. What at first glance looks like a special-purpose machine was in truth something fundamental. Johann had not simply built a machine for a particular shape. He had invented a process by which arbitrary polygon forms could be generated through the superposition of rotation and elliptical movement. This was not an incremental advance. It was a new principle. And this machine gave Plarad a significant competitive advantage over all rivals for years.

III. The Trap

Johann often had difficulty paying his health insurance contributions on time. This was not a sign of extravagance — it was the symptom of a man who was not adequately paid for his work, who was occupied with more important things and forgot everything else in the process. Plarad made him an offer: they would formally employ him and transfer the contributions on his behalf. In practice, nothing would change. He would remain freelance, work as before; only the payment to the health insurer would now run through the company.

What looked like a friendly gesture towards a scatterbrained inventor later turned out to be a trap. Whether it was planned from the start — I naturally cannot say. Johann, in his disinterest for such trivial matters, did not recognise the trap.

In 1981, a campaign of intrigue began. A foreman responsible for implementing Johann's ideas attempted to appropriate his inventions. Documents disappeared from the company safe. The employee claimed ideas as his own that were not his. The bullying grew worse. Johann complained, but mediation by the company's owner, Paul-Heinz Wagner, never came.

Eventually Johann had had enough. He wrote Wagner a letter — I typed it for him — that ended with the old North Frisian rallying cry: "Lewwer duad üs Slaav." Better dead than a slave. The words from Detlev von Liliencron's 1892 ballad "Pidder Lüng", in which a farmer chooses execution over submission to the bailiff. It was a cry of defiance. And it was the beginning of the end.

Johann threw in the towel. This was probably precisely what had been intended. For when he subsequently wanted to discuss the continued payment of his inventor's compensation, Wagner informed him coldly: he had been an employee of the company. The fees for his inventions had been fully covered by his employee's salary. He would not receive another penny in the future.

The pro forma employment — presented as a favour to help Johann with his health insurance — became the instrument of his dispossession. I went with Johann to our patent attorney. His verdict was devastating: "They've cheated you terribly, but legally there's nothing to be done."

IV. The End

From then on, my partner Manfred Schmidt and I transferred to Johann the same amount he had last received from Plarad. We paid his health insurance contributions. He could fill up his car on our account. It was not much. But it was what we could do.

Johann Müller died in 1982 at the age of sixty, one month after a stroke, without having regained consciousness. His sudden end hit us hard. It was a human loss. Beyond that, we had been looking forward to a long and fruitful collaboration with him — one that would now never take place.

V. What Remained

Johann's fundamental idea was pioneering and brilliant, and I do not wish to diminish it in the slightest. The superposition of rotation and elliptical movement to generate polygon forms — that was the seed of everything that came after. Including my own work.

The practical execution of his machine had, in my view, too many critical points for a full-scale machine tool. Precision and cutting performance sufficed for tools, but not for what I envisioned: a technology that could produce polygon shaft-hub connections as quickly and precisely as round parts. Johann could already manufacture sharp-edged hexagons without the laborious pre-drilling of corners — a feat far beyond what anyone else could achieve. But I could not shake the thought that there was far more potential waiting to be unlocked.

That potential I have spent the four decades since developing — through the expansion from two to three superimposed rotary movements, through electronic gearboxes in CNC controllers, through cycloids of higher order. Celestial mechanics in the machine tool, as I call it, stands on the foundation that Johann laid. Without his fundamental idea — polygons through superimposed rotary movements — I would probably never have found my way to polygon technology. I came to it, as the saying goes, like a virgin to a child, and Johann was the midwife.

VI. The Lesson

Johann's story is not an exception. It is the pattern. A gifted inventor who does not know or cannot enforce the value of his own work. A company that needs the inventor as long as he invents and drops him the moment the law permits. A pro forma arrangement presented to the inventor as a kindness that turns out to be a trap. And at the end: no name on the patent, no money for the inventions, no consciousness left to comprehend one's own death.

In my own inventor's life I have experienced much of what Johann experienced — the vulture tactics, the attempts at expropriation, and at what was then the end — since overcome — the successful expropriation in a concerted, infamous, cinematic operation, much like in the film "Flash of Genius". The similarities are, so to speak, systemic. INDEX, NSH, Horn, DMG MORI, Weisser and others use my invention today without mentioning my name. SKF operates three machines based on my patents and says nothing. But I am alive, I can fight back, I have a voice. Johann no longer had one.

I am writing this essay to give Johann Müller from Much the recognition he never received in his lifetime. He was the pioneer of polygon technology. He invented a fundamental principle that is used in machine tools around the world today. His name appears on no patent, in no company catalogue, in no technical literature. But it stands here now.

And it stands in my book "Celestial Mechanics in the Machine Tool", where he occupies the place he deserves: at the very beginning.

Many may dismiss the story of Johann Müller as a regrettable aberration, an extreme case. But I know by now — and not only from my own experience: it was and is the norm. Sometimes I think the attitude towards inventors might have something to do with the decline of German industry. Perhaps the former president of the DPMA, Prof. Häußer, was right in his analysis — and it increasingly seems that his prognosis will prove right as well.

"They've cheated you terribly, but legally there's nothing to be done." — A patent attorney to Johann Müller, after Plarad informed him that his inventor's fees had been settled by his fictitious employee's salary.

Johann Müller's Patent Documents

The following patent documents record Johann Müller's invention. In both, the inventor's name is missing — at his own request, out of fear of creditors. The patents were filed under the company Plarad.

DE 2205768 C3 — "Vorrichtung zur Herstellung oder Bearbeitung von Werkstücken mit polygonaler Innen- oder Außenkontur" (Device for the production or machining of workpieces with polygonal internal or external contour), filed 8 February 1972, published 16 October 1975.
Full text at Google Patents

DE 2355036 C2 — "Vorrichtung zum Herstellen oder Bearbeiten von Werkstücken mit polygonaler Innen- oder Außenkontur" (Device for producing or machining workpieces with polygonal internal or external contour), filed 3 November 1973, published 15 July 1982.
Full text at Google Patents