The invention of the hose goes hand in hand with the historical development of the fire department. At that time, the use of fire buckets was still common. The first historical mention of a hose dates back to 1558, when sewn and riveted hoses were used for the first time to extinguish flames in Augsburg. It was the Dutchman Jan van der Heyde who made a significant contribution to the invention of the hose as we know it today. By using canvas, which was laid out in strips and then sewn together, the hose quickly became widespread.
Although the weaver Johann Christoph Beck invented the first flat and tubular hose in 1700 by using hemp that could swell, he did not achieve a breakthrough with this innovation. This was because the hoses produced leaked due to uneven weaving - an exclusion criterion for a functional hose. In order to bring his invention to market after all, Beck tried to compress the hoses using an oil bath. Although the plan worked in principle, the oil caused the fibers of the hoses to lose their swelling capacity.
Building on Beck's progress, Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar managed to produce hoses that could be woven seamlessly and thus kept tight. Of course, they were still hand-woven at the time. Inspired by the canvas hoses, leather hoses were soon also produced. In 1809, a court coppersmith from Jena attracted attention with his riveted leather hoses.
Although these leather hoses were still in use by the Berlin fire department until around 1870, the forerunner of the hose as we know it today was invented as early as 1836. H. F. Benzinger, a court chimney sweep from Hanover, introduced the so-called “rubberization” of the hoses. This made them independent of the fiber's ability to swell. In order to compress the hose, it was first turned after weaving and then coated with several layers of gum. The first rubberized hose was officially presented in 1865 and in the following years replaced the leather hoses that had been in use until then.
In 2019, Vibraplast AG sold more than 6,000 items of technical hoses and hose systems via its online store, such as highly abrasion-resistant polyurethane hoses made of Pre-PUR®, suction and transport hoses made of PVC, TPE, PE, EVA, silicone, etc., high-temperature hoses up to 1,100° C, electrically conductive and antistatic hoses, connecting elements and accessories as well as customer-specific solutions. Vibraplast hose products are used, for example, as suction and conveying hoses and for transporting bulk materials in the food and pharmaceutical industries, in agriculture, on mobile and stationary suction systems, on machines in the wood and plastics industries, on municipal vehicles, as cable protection hose systems in the electrical engineering sector and as energy-saving and durable membrane diffusers in sewage treatment plants.
