80 YEARS OF HABIA CABLE:
FROM SUBMARINES TO ROVS Habia Cable are celebrating their 80th birthday this year. This is a special birthday for a special company that was started back in 1941 by Carl “Charlie” Herbert Jacobson, as Hammarby Bakelit Industries (Habia for short), based in the Hammarby dockyard in Stockholm, Sweden. The company originally manufactured components from Bakelite, the polymer of the day. Thanks to the foresight of its founder, Habia went on to become the first company in Europe to manufacture components and cables in PTFE, a material more known as Teflon®. Carl-Herbert Jacobson, founder of Habia Cable (Courtesy of Habia Cable)
Today, Habia Cable is a custom design and production partner for specialised cable and connectivity needs all over the world. The company has four production facilities including R&D; in Sweden, China, Germany and a specialized harness site in Poland. Headquarter is located in Upplands Väsby, nearby Stockholm, and the company employ just above 500 people globally. ROV Planet talked to Elisabeth Oesterlund, Senior Design Engineer with more than 30 years of experience working with cable solutions development at Habia, to find out more about this iconic Swedish company.
RICHIE ENZMANN: Hi Elisabeth, we'd like to wish Habia Cable a happy 80th birthday! Please tell us a bit about the history of the company. How did it all start? ELISABETH OESTERLUND: Thank you, Richie! It all started with Carl “Charlie”, the founder of our company, who was a chemical engineer coming from an entrepreneurial family and very interested in the material Bakelite. He had an exceptionally good relationship with DuPont, the major US chemical company that was very innovative already in those days. DuPont encouraged companies to develop different types of components and applications with these materials that they provided, and Habia manufactured various Bakelite components for many industries. After WWII, DuPont introduced a new material called polytetrafluorethylene, PTFE, a polymer with remarkable properties, resistant to anything; like corrosive acids and solvents, and with very low friction. You probably know it by its commercial brand name, Teflon®, used in many products today. At the time, Charlie had the foresight that this
material could be used even more widespread, so he set up a different type of factory at the family farm Brantshammar, north of Stockholm, in the middle of the 50s. Here he started making different components out of PTFE. One of the main products were the high-pressure braided PTFE hoses. This was the first step to start manufacturing electrical cables in 1957, when the first prototypes were made. Then in the 60s, this business was commercialised by Charlie’s son, Carl-Bertil ‘Obi’, and new cable factories were set up in Europe. In short, the beginning of cables and cable manufacturing Elisabeth Oesterlund, Senior Design Engineer (Courtesy of Habia Cable) at Habia.
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