Stories of Brno’s engineering works

Thanks to the textile industry in the 19th and 20th centuries, Brno became known as the Moravian Manchester, but during those decades the city had claims to global fame in other industries, too – above all in engineering. Over the following pages we will tell you the stories of Brno’s important engineering (and one chemical!) works, from their foundation right up until today. 

Mechanisation 

The industrial revolution, the mechanisation of textile factories, and the early connection of Brno to the railway network gave rise to an urgent need to manufacture engineering equipment and components within the city itself. The labour force required for this burgeoning branch of industry was recruited both from among the city’s native population and among the new arrivals from the surrounding villages. 

First engineering works 

The first significant engineering works within the city, at its name implies, was the First Brno Engineering Company (known in Czech as ‘PBS’), although the company – manufacturing steam engines, hydraulic presses, lathes, and drills – still had a different name during its relocation to Brno in 1838. A preserved steam engine made by PBS can be appreciated in Olomoucká Street, where it is modestly tucked away in an extension to the former PBS administration building. Much more physical evidence of the technical sophistication of this one-time legendary company’s products can be found at the Technical Museum in Brno, in the steam engine exhibition (currently temporarily closed for technical reasons). 

Still manufacturing today 

Over the ensuing decades other important companies joined PBS, among them the engineering and steel works Ignác Storek (better known under its later name of Šmeral), the foundry Friedrich Wannieck & Co, the Uxa foundry, and the Královopolská Engineering Works. Several of these legendary factories survived the turbulence of the 20th century – two world wars, a wave of nationalisation, and the economic upheavals after 1989 – and are continuing to manufacture products even today (although far below previous volumes). 

Factory complexes 

We devote a separate, extensive chapter to Zbrojovka, and although these former works no longer produce the armaments, cars, tractors, or typewriters that once made it so famous, the old premises are currently being transformed into a brand-new municipal quarter called Nová Zbrojovka. This development can be regarded as an interesting parallel to those enterprises, especially in the socialist period, that also mediated for their employees accommodation, medical care, recreational amenities, and education (e.g. PBS had its own vocational school). 

Traces of industry 

Traces of Brno’s engineering past have not vanished entirely from the city, and reminders of this important aspect of the Moravian metropolis can be discovered not only in the names of streets, quarters, and buildings, but also in the remains of factory sites or even exhibition events – the perfect example being Brno’s annual International Engineering Fair. 

First Brno Engineering Company 

The predecessor of this important Brno engineering firm was founded in 1814 in Šlapanice u Brna by the Germans Johann Reiff, August and Friedrich Scholl, and Kristian Memmert as a woollen enterprise intended to process raw materials in a former mill using machinery they had built themselves. 

Under the leadership of Reiff, the business surmounted initial difficulties and the economic nadir of 1816, which badly shook Brno’s woollen industry after the cessation of the Napoleonic Wars. A fellow German, Heinrich Alexander Luz, was invited to the Šlapanice mill, first becoming Reiff’s deputy, then taking over as manager after Reiff died. Luz built up and refashioned the business as an engineering plant, specialising in the manufacture of steam engines. Other machinery produced by the plant included hydraulic presses, lathes, drills, fire brigade engines, and other machinery built to order, with textile production now playing second fiddle. 

Near bankruptcy and a merger with Vaňkovka 

In 1838 the Luz Engineering Works moved closer to Brno, to a location on the Imperial Road to Olomouc (today Křenová Street). A new English partner, one Samuel Dobbs, was brought in, but later absconded with a sum of 60,000 gulden, which almost ruined the business. In 1872 Karl Friedrich Luz (son of H. A. Luz) decided to merge the business with the engineering works of Englishman Thomas Bracegirdle and to transform the business into a joint stock company under the name First Brno Engineering Company (‘PBS’). In 1901 a further merger occurred between the Friedrich Wannieck & Co. foundry and the Franz Paukert factory in Vienna, ultimately making PBS the biggest engineering works in Austria-Hungary. 

Wars and nationalisation 

During the years of WWI, a workshop was set up in PBS to process grenades delivered by the Vitkovice foundries; it also made minomet mortars, kits for drying potatoes, and ice-making machines, etc. Post-war debts forced PBS to borrow 4 million US dollars from a US bank, a sum not amortised until 1943. In April 1945, PBS buildings were devasted by bombing, even sabotaged by the German army, and subsequent production was not relaunched until the enterprise was nationalised after the war. In 1960 there were over 7,400 employees at the Brno works (now part of the Škoda Plzeň concern). In this period, highlights of the manufacturing programme included steam turbines, turbojets, turboexpanders, turbochargers, steam boilers, burners, and coal mills, as well as assorted casts and forgings, and other products. Most of these products were exported to the Soviet Union. 

Development after the Velvet Revolution 

In 1990 PBS was transformed into a public limited company and in 1993 it established a joint enterprise with the concern ABB under the name ABB První brněnská strojírna, s.r.o. Later, it followed the typical post-socialist development pattern, i.e. undergoing many changes in ownership and name. And so today, when we visit the manufacturing site of this once famous brand, we find a hive of different company names: Alstom, Siemens, AE&E, UNIS Power, PBS Group, PBS Velká Bíteš, and PBS Třebíč. 

Ondřej Merta, Technical Museum in Brno 

Uxa foundry 

The Uxa foundry in the neighbourhood of Brno-Komárov was founded in 1886 in the city’s once green outskirts by the Uxa bothers as a supplier for Brno’s fast-growing textile industry. 

The Uxa foundry was barely half a kilometre distant from some of the smaller textile mills that had sprung up after 1849 at the confluence of the Svratka and Svitava millraces, and where later would rise the mammoth Vlněna complex. Construction of the foundry therefore significantly contributed to the transformation of Komarov – from marshy ground below the city gates and intersected by rivers, channels, and millraces (called ‘Brno Venice’) into a manufacturing quarter. 

Juran Works 

The Uxa foundry originally produced various casts from grey and tempered cast iron for the textile industry, including chains (besides roller chains with steel pins, the foundry also produced special Ewart detachable chains). It continued to manufacture this assortment of goods, without significant change, right up until the end of the 1940s, by which time the company was employing 700 people. Thanks to its size, it was nationalised in 1949 under Act No. 114/1948, passed on 28 April 1948, and later rechristened the ‘Juran Works’ in honour of the foundryman, first communist MP, and trade unionist Josef Juran (later renamed ZTS). During socialism, production focus switched to hydraulic components (distributors, valves, etc.), liquid fuel burners, and components for the arms industry. 

Privatisation 

In 1993 the foundry was privatised under the name UXA spol. s r.o., and in 2008 a 60% share was sold to the Italian company IUMEX S.p.A, which continued production and exports – primarily to Western European countries. The foundry is situated in Komárov between the streets of Kovářská, Dornych, Široká, and Plotní, in a single block occupying approx. 1 ha, which it also shares with several tenement buildings that used to house local workers. The complex of factory buildings has generally been preserved in its original scope. 

The complex is dominated by a pair of chimneys, built in 1905 by the Josef Leinker company, which can be seen from practically anywhere in Komarov. 

Listen to an oral history of the works 

Besides the guided tours arranged by TIC BRNO, you can learn something about the history of this publicly inaccessible foundry thanks to the stories told by Richard Večeřa. He started work at UXA in 1994 as a serial engineer. Gradually, up until his departure from the company in 2008, he alternated between senior positions in production, before going on to work in the foundry as production director and conducting his own amateur research into the company’s history. Audio-recordings of his story can be accessed at the website www.poslouchejtebrno.cz (in Czech).  

Martin Koplík 

Zbrojovka 

In the mid-19th century, the land behind the Zábrdovice monastery, adjacent to the then meandering Svitava River, was still open fields. Following the Joseph II reforms and the dissolution of the monastery, one of its farm buildings on the riverbank had been rebuilt as an administrative building at the end of the 18th century and was locally dubbed the ‘Zábrdovice Chateau’. In the 1840s, the space along its eastern margin was demarcated by the railway embankment of the line to Česká Třebová (the line was opened in 1849). 

Imperial and Royal Artillery Workshops 

At the end of the 19th century, the Brno entrepreneur Moritz Beran built a modern textile mill along the bank of the Svitava River, and although it burnt down in 1911, it was reopened in no time. Soon after the commencement of WWI, in the stretch of land between the Třebová line and Beran’s factory, was built the Imperial and Royal Artillery Workshops, as a branch of the Viennese state arsenal. In 1916, most of the buildings of the new factory were already built, and the equipment of the former workshops of the 4th Field Artillery Regiment was transported to Zábrdovice from the then Nová Street. Sidings were also built connecting to the neighbouring Česká Třebová line. The workshops made spare parts for field guns, sights for minomet mortars, and repaired arms withdrawn from the front. The new enterprise also worked heavily with wood: building carts for transporting artillery munition, covered munition wagons, and crates for rifle ammunition were manufactured in their hundreds of thousands. 

Rifle factory on Šumavská Street 

At the end of 1918 the repair shops were already employing 560 workers. In November that year they were taken over by the new Czechoslovak state, whereupon the workshops continued to operate under the new name Artillery Workshops of the Ministry of National Defence in Zábrdovice. On 20 January 1919 the state established a new enterprise in Zábrdovice – Czechoslovak State Armaments Factory (Československá státní zbrojovka). As this enterprise’s Czech name in brackets suggests, the brand Zbrojovka simply means ‘armaments factory’. This factory’s task was to carry out all repairs to military material at cost. The factory also assembled Mannlicher repeating rifles from supplied parts and completed the manufacture of hand grenades. It intensiveIy worked on generating solutions to the problem of dimensional tolerances directly affecting the interchangeability of machine parts, a pre-requisite for effective series production. At the outset, the business also processed timber supplies and continued to assemble horse-drawn carts. During the years immediately following the war, Zbrojovka also became, for a brief while, an important repair shop for railway carriages – these operations were performed both in existing buildings and in purposely built halls (facing towards the Třebová line). The works in Zábrdovice were not equipped for the serial manufacture of armaments, and so in 1920 the site of a former textile factory at today’s Šumavská Street, no. 15, was offered for the needs of the Czechoslovak State Armaments Factory (at the time it was referred to as the Nová Street plant, in accordance with the cadastral territory). This was the site of the rifle factory. Official documentation and a manufacturing licence was acquired from the German company Mauser to manufacture its 1898 model repeater rifle, and serial production was subsequently launched in Brno. From this model was derived a series of versions of the famous Czechoslovak army vz. 24 rifle. Meanwhile, the Zábrdovice works had a firing range and a workshop for making rifle butts. 

Modern armaments factory 

In the years 1923–1924 Zbrojovka was transformed into a joint stock company (Československá Zbrojovka a. s., Brno) with a three-quarter share owned by the state, and the enterprise rapidly became a renowned manufacturer of firearms. By 1926 it had already left the Šumavská Street site and started to build the machine gun factory (whose façade bore the legendary symbol ‘Z’ in the gable); over the coming years, more and more buildings were added to the area beside the Třebová sidings, among them an automobile plant, firing range, and the still-standing boiler house with its chimney (1927). Later, Zbrojovka was connected to the combined heat and power distribution system (1935–1936). In 1928 a new administration building (directorate building) with its iconic tower and factory sign was built on the corner of Lazaretní Street. 

Production at Zbrojovka centred primarily on hand-held firearms – especially rifles and light machine guns – which gained a strong reputation abroad for their excellent parameters. In the period 1923–1925 the factory agreed with Prague’s Zbrojovka Praga to take over production of light machine guns, which included hiring the soon-to-be-famous head of workshop Václav Holek. The machine gun design was constantly being tweaked and upgraded, and during the interwar period the Czechoslovak army took receipt of 45,000 legendary ZB vz. 26 machine guns, and a further 100,000 were exported. The licence to manufacture the light machine gun was even offered to the British, so that ultimately within the Commonwealth over half a million British BREN machine guns (adapted from the vz. 26) were produced (BREN is derived from the factory sites BRno+ENfield). 

Cars and typewriters 

Alongside manufacturing for the military, from the very beginning Zbrojovka was also producing non-military equipment. The focal point here was the manufacture of the ‘Z’ make of automobiles. The first popular passenger car was the DISK (1923), quickly followed by a series of Zetkas – the Z18, Z9, Z4, Z5 Express and the Z6 Hurvínek. In total, there were over seven thousand two-stroke cars manufactured at Zábrdovice. In light of the growing drive towards re-armament, the manufacture of motor vehicles was halted in 1936. Also manufactured at Zbrojovka during the First Republic were ball bearings and (in large numbers) bicycles. In many places you will still find people using Zbrojovka bathroom scales, and there were also electric cutting machines produced for butchers and smokers of meat. Additionally, the company bought the copyright to make Remington typewriters and started their mass production. To create space for its non-military engineering programme, in 1930 the company bought out the neighbouring Beran factory and set about radically expanding it. In Zábrdovice they also manufactured lathes, especially for making firearms (although in 1941 their manufacture was shifted out of town to the new plant in Kuřim). Following the Great Depression, the whole world considered the next big war to be inevitable. In the 1930s, Brno’s Zbrojovka became – for a short time – the biggest exporter of weapons in the world. Facing the threat of attack by Nazi Germany, the young republic began to accelerate the construction of its permanent border fortifications: all the light weapons for the nation’s light and heavy fortifications, including gun carriages, were made at Brno’s Zbrojovka. Non-military production was further reined back, and mass production of heavy machine guns was prepared instead, with all production capacity subsequently shifted to a new plant in Vsetíń. The number of Zbrojovka plants throughout Czechoslovakia witnessed a steep rise. 

WWII and economic renewal 

Once German occupation of the country was in full swing, Zbrojovka became known as Waffenwerke Brunn, part of the concern Reichswerke Hermann Göring A.G. Occupation and the outbreak of war brought an abrupt end to all non-military production and maximum concentration on arms manufacture. The final large buildings of the main complex were completed (a tool shop and machine shop). The complex gradually expanded, absorbing the neighbouring, ‘aryanised’ enterprises – the Briess malt house in Husovice, the Zerkowitz textile mill between Zábrdovice and Lazaretní Street, and another mill, Himmelreich & Zwicker, on Cejl Street (at the intersection with Vranovská), which was adapted as a development workplace for new types of weaponry. In the second half of the war, Zbrojovka was incorporated into the holding Waffen Union Škoda Brunn. Unlike other Brno factories, however, Zbrojovka was almost entirely spared any war damage, and so, days after liberation, it was able to swiftly restart its business. Here were assembled cars (Dodge, Ford Canada, Willys Jeep) that were delivered under a post-war UNRRA programme, and especially Farmall tractors. Also relaunched was the production of scales, cutting machines, typewriters and new kitchen appliances, hand drills, children’s toy cars, scooters, and other toys. Engines for OGAR motorcycles were also briefly built here, as were others for Aero 150 trucks. Arms manufacturing, save for hunting and sports firearms, was discontinued. At the end of the 1940s the individual pre-war and wartime plants gradually went their own ways. 

The rise of the tractor 

Immediately after liberation came the idea to manufacture the nation’s own tractors at Zábrdovice. A prototype Z25 tractor had already been built by November 1945, and this was quickly followed by its series production alongside the introduction of the small Z15 tractor. The enterprise registered the trademark ZETOR (ZET + tractOR) and by the end of 1947 3,406 tractors had been built, which was 60% of all tractors in Czechoslovakia. In February 1949 the company were already celebrating the ten thousandth tractor leaving the production line. At the beginning of the 1950s the manufacture of small firearms for the army again returned to the city for a few years, but shortly thereafter Brno’s Zbrojovka was steered back to a fully civil programme of mechanical engineering – tractors, office machines, tools, instruments, and hunting and sporting weapons. Large diesel motors were also being temporarily manufactured in Zábrdovice, and for this purpose an existing hall on the banks of the Svitava River was developed (the so-called New Hall). In the 1950s and 60s the factory was renamed the Jan Šverma Works. The manufacture of Zetor 25 tractors was shifted in the 1950s to the plant in Líšeň, under the cliffs of Stránská skála, which was simultaneously hived off as a separate company. All engines for Líšeň’s Zetor plant continued to be made in Zábrdovice, where production of the Zetor 35 and 50 Super tractors was meanwhile being initiated. These models continued to be manufactured until 1968, when the series were completed, having manufactured a total of 130,000 models. The Zábrdovice plant carried on producing engines for the Líšeň tractor plant, and at the end of the 1980s there was even an imposing, brand-new engine hall built along the banks of the Svitava River on a former sports and recreation area. Zbrojovka had had its own foundry from the pre-war era at the Vaňkovka factory. 

Betting on the future – communication and computing technology 

And what else did the production programme consist of? A lot of work went into developing typewriters. The plant was already designing its own models under their Consul brand, both in electronic and portable versions. Typewriters were assembled in workshops on Šumavská Street, which was once more under Zbrojovka’s wing. In collaboration with other companies, they were also developing teleprinters (Dalibor teleprinter in 1960; Czechoslovakia becomes the fifth ever nation to manufacture such a device), electronic calculators, the first Czechoslovak automatic computer, and embryonic NC machines, etc. In 1960 Zbrojovka had 12,617 employees, with an average monthly wage of 1,460 CZK. The plant’s manufacture of tools and instruments was boosted in the early 1970s by the construction of a new multi-storey tool shop that ran along Baarovo Embankment. In the 1980s, the previous vocational school on the Zerkowitz site was replaced with an alternative training facility, newly built on Olomoucká Street. The final big structure built at Zbrojovka was the energy centre (still extant) on Baarovo Embankment. Even after yielding the production programme for computational technology to the ZPA concern in the late 1960s, Zbrojovka still saw its future in developing computer technology, and the result was an office system for the preparation, pre-processing, operative processing, and transfer of data – the Consul 271x, in particular the micro-computer Consul 2717 Zbrojováček, of which approx. 10,000 units were delivered to schools in the years 1988–1990, costing them a cool 12–13 thousand CZK a piece. Also manufactured at Zbrojovka were keyboards, diskette drives, and dot matrix printers. The Siemens T100 teleprinter was likewise being produced under licence. 

Abrupt demise and Nová Zbrojovka 

Post-Velvet Revolution changes had fatal results for Zbrojovka. Due to the massive imports and a general boom in computing and communication technology, the works production programme became uncompetitive. In the years 1990–2006, Zetina/Pfaff sewing machines were assembled at Zbrojovka, later an already separate company made mandles. A trend formed according to which parts of the business separated themselves off from Zbrojovka to form new companies manufacturing discrete commodities, such as hunting and sporting firearms or automobiles. Years spent vainly fumbling after economic success culminated (after declaring bankruptcy) in complete collapse in 2003 and the definitive end of manufacturing in 2006. The complex of failed factories was acquired in 2007 by the J & T investment group. Buildings were subsequently leased to individual tenants with manifold business objects, and – with one or two exceptions – the area fell into ruin. Even the manufacture of motors at the new motor shop in Husovice ended in 2006. In 2016 the complete Zbrojovka site was bought lock, stock, and barrel by the property and investment company CPI Property Group, who put forward a project to have the entire area reconstructed as a new municipal quarter called Nová Zbrojovka. Demolition and reconstruction work began in October 2017. By 2022 more or less the whole area of factories had been cleared and decontaminated, with the only structures preserved being the directorate building on the corner of Lazaretní Street, the former boiler house and chimney, the so-called New Hall on the banks of the Svitava River, and the nearby torso of the Beran factory’s chimney. The building of the so-called New Tool Shop was rebuilt as a new office building called ZET Office. 

Jiří Mrkos 

Lathe operator working at Zbrojovka Brno 

Do you want to know more? Look at For Download and read our newspaper Brno INdustrial!