The Deckel FP1 and the toolroom

Milling machines appeared in American armouries around 1818, and Eli Whitney and Simeon North both used plain milling by 1820. Who built the first is disputed: a machine long credited to Eli Whitney may date from after his death, and Simeon North and Robert Johnson of Middletown have been proposed instead.

Robbins & Lawrence of Windsor, Vermont, built a plain milling machine that became the basis of the "Lincoln miller". F. A. Pratt replaced its rack feed with a screw and nut, and George S. Lincoln & Co. built the type for Colt's new armoury at Hartford in 1854–55.

Frederick W. Howe of the Providence Tool Company asked Joseph R. Brown for a way to cut the spiral flutes of twist drills, which were then filed by hand. Brown's answer was the universal milling machine, with an index head geared to the table feed and a knee that raised the table on the column. The first was delivered to Providence Tool on 14 March 1862.

Friedrich Deckel was born on 11 December 1871 in Jungingen in Hohenzollern, the son of a smallholder and trader. After a three-year apprenticeship as a precision mechanic he worked at Zeiss in Jena, as Ernst Abbe's preferred laboratory mechanic, then in Holland and England at Siemens Brothers in Woolwich. From 1897 he was development mechanic for photographic optics at C. A. Steinheil in Munich.

At the end of 1898 he opened a small mechanical workshop of his own in Munich, at first supplying parts, for example to a telephone factory, and taking any repair that came.

Frederick Holz built a milling machine for fluting taps because he could not afford to buy one. Orders followed, and in 1889 the business became the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company, with Frederick A. Geier as president.

Henri Hauser founded his firm in Biel in 1898; it later became known for jig grinding. In 1921 the Société genevoise d'instruments de physique (SIP) of Geneva built the machine à pointer, a jig borer that located holes to about a thousandth of a millimetre.

In 1903 Friedrich Deckel went into partnership with Christian Bruns, inventor of an early focusing magazine camera, to make a central shutter that Bruns had conceived and Deckel constructed: the Compound. The shutter reached the market from about 1904.

Bruns left the firm in 1905 and Friedrich Deckel became its sole owner. From then on the business traded as Friedrich Deckel GmbH.

By 1910 Carl Zeiss held a 16.8 per cent share of Friedrich Deckel GmbH. In 1910 Christian Bruns applied for a patent on a shutter with a clockwork retarder; Zeiss bought the patent and placed it at Deckel's disposal, and the shutter took the name Compur, from 'Compound' and the German Uhrwerk. Bruns's United States patent for the shutter was filed on 9 November 1911 and granted on 18 February 1913. Compur production began after the firm moved into its own new factory.

Ordinary machine tools could not reach the precision the Compur shutter needed, so Deckel designed machines of his own. The firm was building precision machine tools from 1910, and engraving, copying, milling, boring and grinding machines from 1911. A 1917 trade journal already names 'Firma Deckel, München' alongside Carl Zeiss in a photographic-trade matter. After the First World War these machines were the first Deckel products offered for sale at the Leipzig Fair.

In 1912 Deckel became the first employer in Munich to introduce the eight-hour working day. By 1914 the firm employed 500 people.

In the 1920s Deckel advertised its milling machine for the trade simply as the 'FP'. It had a slender column with a T-slotted vertical table, and a flat-belt horizontal spindle that a screw moved fore and aft, and it was aimed at punch-die work.

A 1926 journal for engravers records a visit to 'Firma Deckel' to see its newest engraving machines.

Two surviving machines, no. 4453 and a grey machine numbered 3008 (3006 in an earlier owner's account), and a machine of 1919 in the Deutsches Museum in Munich are the evidence for the exhibit's model of the FP.

From 1924 the firm's main products included fuel-injection pumps for diesel and petrol engines. Pumps joined shutters and machine tools as the firm's third product line.

In 1928 the Munich technical university made Friedrich Deckel an honorary doctor of engineering, and the firm marked its twenty-fifth year with a commemorative pamphlet. From 1932 the Munich inventor Kurt Zwick assigned patents for a pantograph engraving and copying machine and for an engraving machine for curved work to Friedrich Deckel, followed by a cutter grinder in 1936.

The Deckel FP1 universal milling machine appeared in the early 1930s. An early operating manual describes a box column standing on a coolant-tank base, with the spindle head moving along the horizontal spindle axis at the top and a knee-slide carrying the vertical table up and down the column. The first hundred machines had change-wheel feeds and small levers instead of the later "stickshift".

Herbert Lindner showed his first Lehrenbohrwerk — a jig borer that combined the machine with an optical measuring system — at the 1933 Leipzig Fair. By 1968, 1,200 had been built. His patents cover jig borers of 1933 and 1934 and coordinate boring machines of 1936 and 1937.

An advertisement of 1935 announces the first "stickshift" model of the FP1, with lever-selected spindle speeds, change-wheel feeds and a ball-handled lever for the feed directions. This Mk 1 form continued from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s.

Rudolph Bannow conceived the Bridgeport turret milling machine in 1936, and the first machine was shipped in 1938. Serial no. 1 survives at the American Precision Museum, and more than a quarter of a million have been built.

About 4,100 FP1s had been built by the end of the war in 1945, and in the late 1930s the firm also offered other special machine tools for general sale as German rearmament grew. A study of forced labour in Munich's war economy labels Deckel as armament production, and a Swiss commission's research describes the firm's machine-tool business abroad through a Zurich company. No source read describes where FP1s were used in the war, and none names a part made on one.

By the start of the war the workforce had risen to 2,200. From 1 September 1939 shutter production was cut back and the firm changed over to goods important for the war, including fuel pumps for BMW aircraft engines; a 1942 article on the BMW 801 aero engine names Friedrich Deckel of Munich as the maker of its direct-injection pump.

From July 1942 Deckel ran a camp in the Zielstattstraße for about 1,400 forced labourers from the occupied Soviet Union, most of whom worked at Deckel. The armaments inspectorate had appointed the firm as camp administrator by decree, against its resistance, and it formally acted only as the arm of the German Labour Front. A prisoner-of-war camp in the Waakirchner Straße was also run by the firm.

The air raids on Munich scored direct hits on Deckel's administration building and on its pump and machine-building plants. The works were badly damaged, so that new buildings were needed after the war.

During the air raid of the night of 6–7 September 1943, about 300 people escaped from the Zielstattstraße camp alone. Police and Waffen-SS cordoned off the city and the stations.

Immediately after the war, reconstruction began on the occupying power's orders under provisional management. Shutter production restarted with pre-war models, and the new Zeiss-Opton in Oberkochen took over the old business relations.

By the 1948 currency reform production was running at full speed, now mainly shutters. The bizonal dismantling list of October 1947 named thirteen Munich works, but Deckel was not on it.

Friedrich Deckel died in Munich on 10 July 1948, when the firm employed 1,926 people. His sons Hans and Friedrich Wilhelm Deckel were managing partners.

In 1953 Friedrich Deckel GmbH employed 3,000 people and marked its fiftieth year with a jubilee book. Machine-tool output had begun to grow significantly from the late 1940s, but the jubilee brochure was still almost entirely about the camera products.

Carl Zeiss bought the Compur shutter works, and the shutter company was renamed Compur-Werk GmbH & Co. in 1961. From the late 1950s the firm concentrated on machine tools, building a new works on the bomb-damaged site from 1956/57, with a seven-storey administration building following in 1962. The FP1 changed with it: the all-lever Mk 2 appeared in the mid-1950s and the dial-controlled Mk 3 in the early 1960s.

By the mid-1960s about 50,000 FP1s had been built. No primary production count is known.

In 1972 the Friedrich Deckel Präzisionsmechanik und Maschinenbau KG, by then the fourth-largest machine-tool maker in West Germany, became the Friedrich Deckel Aktiengesellschaft. Shutter making ended in Munich in 1976 and moved to Prontor in Calmbach.

In 1993 Deckel merged with Maho AG of Pfronten and Kempten to form Deckel Maho AG. The merged firm filed for bankruptcy in 1994 and was taken over by Gildemeister, whose machine-tool business later became DMG. Cooperation with Mori Seiki began in 2009, and the joint brand DMG MORI dates from 2013.