Founded in 1895 in Schweinfurt, by Ernst Sachs, a talented engineer, and Karl Fichtel an equally talented salesman, Fichtel & Sachs (F&S) was one of the great European bicycle component companies.

Their most famous products are the Torpedo series of hub gears. The first Torpedo 2 speed hub was produced in 1904, and its direct descendant, the SRAM T3 (T is widely understood to stand for Torpedo) 3 speed hub remains in production (possibly in Schweinfurt) to this day. F&S produced many, many, millions of Torpedo hubs and a huge number of them are still in use all over the world. The canals of Amsterdam are also full of them - as they were a mainstay of the traditional ‘Dutch’ bicycle.

In addition to their hub gears, the F&S group of companies produced a myriad of other engineered products including bicycles, motorcycles and motorcycle engines.

F&S’s interest in derailleurs was always a trifle strange. They really believed that derailleurs were a way of broadening the appeal of their hub gears. The idea was to mount multiple cogs onto the hub gear to widen the range of available ratios. When this was combined with F&S’s love of back-pedal brakes (which was both a German/Dutch tradition and a way of F&S capturing more of the value of the bicycle in their product), you get a very strange and clumsy arrangement.

To this day SRAM keep this tradition alive by producing the DualDrive II, a system combining a rear derailleur and a three speed hub gear to give 24 or 27 speeds. I suspect the DualDrive II is also still produced in Schweinfurt.

F&S started manufacturing pull-chain, single pulley derailleurs in 1935. In 1940 they produced a model called the Aigle that used a helical slot much like a Cyclo Standard, but was hobbled by having a single pulley. After the Second World War F&S seem to have reverted to the pull-chain design - which was understandable given that it was the fashion of the moment. In the late 1950’s F&S belatedly produced a derivative of the Huret Competition, a two pulley pull-chain design.

After the end of the Second World War the F&S factory in Reichenbach found itself in the newly formed DDR and became a separate company producing deraileurs first under the FuS brand (which was a touch cheeky) and then under the Renak brand name. Arguably these derailleurs were more advanced than those produced by F&S at the time.

In the 1970’s F&S decided to use the ‘Sachs’ brand for their derailleurs. In 1980 F&S bought a controlling interest in Huret, and gradually changed the ‘Huret’ brand into ‘Sachs-Huret’. Then in 1987 Mannesmann, a giant German engineering conglomerate, bought the F&S group and restructured it. Mannesmann was very unimpressed by the quality of marketing in the European bicycle industry, and, for clarity, decided to change the brand back to plain ‘Sachs’, with the Huret name (and the F&S group’s other French brand names) disappearing from about 1991. Finally in 1997, after hugely improving the product and its presentation - but not having any real sales success, Mannesmann sold the Sachs Bicycle Components unit of the old F&S to SRAM. SRAM dropped the ‘Sachs’ brand from 1999, but continued with some of Sach’s designs under the ‘SRAM’ brand name.

There is a good history of F&S on the SRAM website.