The Langreuter project: the reconstruction of the rise and fall of a milking machine

In the collection of big and small objects that are present in the basement of the Utrecht University Museum is a milking machine. It had been standing there for years, collecting dust only and doing nothing, a dead object.

On my proposal to try to revive the machine again the response was more than favourable: Babke Aarts, assistant-curator of the veterinary collection of the museum, and deciede to start a project immediately,  with the aim of finding out whether the milking machine could be brought to life and of reconstructing its history.

Hardly any data were available in the archives of the museum with regard to this machine. It had a number painted on it, corresponding to a card, telling us that it was obtained some 60 years ago. This was in agreement with a publication in the Tijdschrift voor Diergeneeskunde (Journal of Veterinary Medicine) of 1963, in which Jan Grommers, than having the function of wetenschappelijk ambtenaar 1^e  klasse (to be compared to an assistant professor nowadays) at the Institute voor Zoötechniek (Animal Husbandry) of the Veterinary Faculty of Utrecht University. The publication dealt with the role of the milking machine in the etiology of mastitis. Grommers wrote:

“Although in the development of the milking machine it has been attempted to imitate the milking by hand (a machine of this type has been handed over to the veterinary department of the university museum) all milking machines that are now in use operate by suction power”. (p. 1553)¹

This was all the knowledge we had when we started: the milking machine had been a property of the Zootechnical Institute and it worked by imitating the hand of the milk-maid or milkman; in addition it had lost the competition for the market.

However, the machine delivered some information too. It had an identity label attached to it with the following text:

Melkmaschine “Langreuter”

(Patent Jens Nielsen)

Fabrikat der Maihak A.G.

HAMBURG

The name Langreuter is apparently the type of the machine and we took this name for the name of our project.

The machine has two parts, which we call the driver and the milking unit.The driver is shown in figure 1.

Fig. 1

   It contains two camshafts (which I hope is a proper translation of what it is called in Dutch) connected to two drawing cables that transfer the operation of the driver to the milking unit. The driver is operated by hand but the handle is missing.

Fig. 2

The milking unit is given in figure 2. It is shown upside down: the milk flows out of the tube’ that is now on top, into the milk-pail.

The progress of the project will be presented in a series of blog messages, in Dutch; for those who understand Dutch, see Langreuterproject.wordpress.com. We will try to translate and/or summarize our findings and I will post them on this blogsite. So keep following PHOAS.

In studying the the Langreuter milking machine and trying to bring it to work again, we hope to obtain more insight in the history of milking machines in general and why the Langreuter, together with other machines of the same type, lost the competition.

1. 1. F.J.Grommers. Een overzicht van de betekenis van het machinaal melken in de aetiologie van mastitis. Tijdschrift voor Diergeneeskunde, 88, 1553-1558, 1963