It is 1905 and Ammann – a company that to date has produced mainly farming and forestry machines – has successfully expanded its range with crushers, and has just begun to construct road building machines. The engineers and other employees in the production department (and they were then already highly innovative) meet the challenge of incorporating the Ammann standards into the new products. The photograph shows «Crusher No. 6» with workman Bär. The colossal machine was able to process more than 40 cubic metres of rock per day. This unusual dinosaur will remain in use until around 1950.

Photographic records were first introduced at Ammann a little more than 100 years ago. Construction and planning engineers captured the machines before they left the factory on glass photographic plates and later on celluloid. Over the years a very special photo archive has thus been created: it now covers some 60,000 negatives and thousands of prints. A selection of photographs will be presented on the Ammann website in the near future.