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Agathon was founded as an owner-managed company. After three generations of the founding Pfluger family, the keys of the company were handed over to the current owners Michael Merkle and Dr. Stephan Scholze in 2015.
FOUNDATION AND MANAGEMENT OF THE COMPANY FROM 1918 TO 1954
LEO PFLUGER
The founder of the company Agathon was born in January 1882 in the Swiss community of Neuendorf at the foot of the Jura Mountains. Leo Pfluger, however, was denied a carefree youth. He lost his mother already in his early childhood and a few years later also his father. His father ran a watch shell workshop in the town of Solothurn. The boy spent the following years in the orphanage.
Although the starting conditions were difficult, Leo Pfluger was able to complete an apprenticeship as a mechanic in the years 1899 to 1902 at the then up-and-coming Eduard Kummer watch factory in Bettlach, only a few kilometers away from today’s Agathon headquarters. After this apprenticeship, he gained further professional experience in the French part of Switzerland, in La Chaux-de-Fonds and Geneva. Then he returned to the company Kummer. There he was promoted to a managing position in the years that followed.
In the first weeks of 1918, Leo Pfluger fulfilled one of his heart’s desires and dared to take the leap into business independence. Together with his cousin Ernst Flury, he founded Agathon AG. The joint-stock company was entered in the commercial register on 31 January of that year and acquired the building and the equipment of the Kully machine factory in Heidenhubelstrasse in Solothurn. This building was to remain the home of Agathon until it moved to Bellach in 1965, but had been expanded three times by then. Leo Pfluger took over the management of Agathon AG, while his cousin did not play an active role in the company, but served exclusively as a consultant.
In the following 36 years Leo Pfluger led his company with iron discipline, business acumen and great ingenuity through the world economic crisis, the Second World War and the following years of economic growth. Already in the first year of its existence the first patents were registered on Agathon AG. The continuous stream of innovations is still one of the company’s identity characteristics today. In the early years of Agathon AG, production was primarily for the then prospering watch industry in the Swiss Jura and Jura region as well as for the bar turning industry. The product range at that time included precision tool grinding and lapping machines, tapping machines, thread cutting machines, support grinding machines and polishing drums.
Leo Pfluger died in September 1959, leaving three daughters and two sons behind.
