100 Years - And Counting

It was on Nov. 7, 1902, that a young German inventor named Otto Schulze walked out of the German Imperial Patent Office in Berlin and forever changed the course of automotive history.

Schulze was granted a patent for the first speedometer. The ingenious “eddy current” device used a flexible shaft and magnets to convey the rotational speed of the wheel or the transmission through a needle-type gauge. The human-machine interface was born.

Siemens VDO Automotive AG, the world's No.1 producer of speedometers and instrument clusters, celebrates with a media event in Frankfurt, Germany.

Thirty minutes away in the small town of Babenhausen, the supplier has a manufacturing plant where 1,200 employees produce 4.2 million instrument clusters a year on 30 assembly lines. The plant accounts for 40% of Siemens VDO's annual worldwide output of 10 million clusters.

Digital displays have come and gone, but the best way to communicate fluctuating speed to the driver, according to Siemens VDO's research, is with a pointer that responds to each driver input.