The development of the welded tube

There was no need to invent the tube: nature had been using it to great advantage in his perfect architectural balance of function and form long before mankind came on the scene with his "imitations" in wood, pottery and metal. Eventually, from these primitive beginnings, followed by more sophisticated artfacts, came industrial production.

The first one to weld strips of steel lengthwise into tubes was Cornelius Whitehouse in England, in 1825.

Another Englishman, James Russell, was granted a patent as early as 1842 for lap-welding steel tubes. Arc-welding appeared between 1905 and 1920, enabling steel tubes to be gas-welded. The German Fritz Hager built the first gas-welding machine for tubes in 1910. By 1917, gas-welded steel armoured conduits for electric installations were being manufactured in Oberriet/SG. Josef Jansen acquired this business in 1923.

In 1928 the first machine for manufacturing electrically welded steel tubes was built in Germany. From 1930, electric resistance welding was developed. This gave the impetus to electric welding in tube manufacture, and for welded steel tubes in particular. Jansen, too, gradually abandonend arc welding and, as time went by, the perfectly welded steel tube replaced the expensive seamless tube.

Jansen first produced cold-drawn profiled steel tubes with asymmetric cross-sections - known as flanged profiled sections - for door and window construction, in 1930. From 1954 high frequency induction welding gained ascendancy in steel tube manufacture.