Revolution of Britain’s flour milling industry

The first roller plants appeared in Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, brought by German and Austrian immigrants like G. A. Buchholz, Oscar Oexele, and Henry Simon.

Henry Simon was born in 1835 in Brieg, Germany, in the Prussian province of Silesia. He studied engineering at Zurich, practiced in Europe and went to Manchester, England in 1860.

Moving to the milling process proper, it was in 1878 that Henry Simon took 19 British millers, to Hungary to view the all steel roller-mill invention.

He then founded Henry Simon Ltd, built first roller-mill and introduced gradual roller-mill reduction ‘Simon System’ for McDougal Brothers. Simon’s system in the McDougall Brothers mills in Manchester, completed in 1878, was the first complete roller milliner system to make no use do stones at all.

Simon went on to become the most successful of milling engineers in Britain, supplying the bulk of new roller milling systems by the turn of the century. In 1881 he built the world’s first automatic Simon System mill in Chester.
Revolution of Britain’s flour milling industry