Theodor Bergmann

Bergmann was born on 21 May 1850 in Sailauf, Kingdom of Bavaria. As a young man Bergmann worked for a local stovemaker, subsequently developing an interest in the metalworking trade. In 1879, he and his wife and family moved to Gaggenau, where he became a business partner of an ironworks company, the Eisenwerke Gaggenau GmbH and took full control over the firm after his senior partner Michael Flürscheim left the company in 1888. Due to disagreements with his financial backers over the company future direction, Bergmann set up a car factory in the Ottenau district of Gaggenau in the same year before leaving Eisenwerke Gaggenau in 1893 to start his own company, the Bergmann Industriewerke on 1 March 1894.

Before it became widely known as a firearms manufacturer, the Bergmann company produced a wide variety of products including stoves, fencing, regulators for gas heaters and stoves, enameled signs and air guns. With the help of Joseph Vollmer the firm also produced automobiles under the Orient Express brand until Bergmann's automobile division was taken over by Georg Wiss in 1905, who founded the Süddeutsche Automobilfabrik GmbH which produced trucks and buses until the company was bought by Carl Benz in 1910.

Theodor Bergmann's military pistol sales were less successful than he expected to be, and in 1910 he retired from the business, dying on 22 March 1931, at the age of 80 at Gaggenau, while his partner Louis Schmeisser left the Bergmann firm in 1921; in that same year the company was sold to the Aktiengesellschaft Lignose, an industrial combine that manufactured pocket pistols. After World War II, the Bergmann firm was best known for its chemical products.