The engineer Bernhard Schäffer and entrepreneur Christian Friedrich Budenberg founded this firm in 1850, to exploit Schäffer’s 1849 patent for a plate spring manometer. In subsequent years the firm became renowned for the design and manufacture of precision pressure gauges, control valves, and other equipment for the operation of boilers (injectors, speedometers, dynamometers, water level indicators, lubrication equipment, etc.). Before the Great War the firm operated branch factories and agencies in London, Glasgow, Manchester, Paris, Lille, Liege, Zürich, Milan, Stockholm, Saint Petersburg and New York. The firm’s assets in Britain, France, Belgium and Italy were sequestered in during the Great War and subsequently expropriated. The American subsidiary, which had been founded in 1892 as the American Steam Gauge and Valve Manufacturing Company, was reorganised in 1922 as American Shaeffer and Budenburg Corporation, with its headquarters in Brooklyn, New York.
The firm’s present product line includes all manner of precision measurement equipment for boilers, turbines and industrial processes, valves – including steam pressure reducing valves and safety valves, boiler fittings, boiler feed pumps, gear pumps, hydraulic press pumps and stream turbo-pumps. The principal works of the firm are located in Magdeburg-Buckau.