Karl Friedrich Schall

Karl Friedrich Schall (16 March 1859 – 19 September 1925) was a German precision engineer and co-founder of the company Reiniger, Gebbert & Schall (RGS) in Erlangen. RGS was a manufacturer and supplier of durable medical equipment and a pioneer in the supply of x-ray equipment worldwide with offices in Berlin, Wien, London, Paris, Rome, Chicago and Sydney.

Life and times Schall was born in 1859 at Öhringen in the Kingdom of Württemberg as the son of the lawyer William Schall. From 1877 to 1879, he was in Tübingen as a university mechanic and apprenticed as a precision mechanic. During 1880–1881, Schall completed the mandatory one-year volunteer service in the military, and travelled to Paris, London and Switzerland. On 24 January 1887, at Dresden he married Johanna Schmidlin (born 18 October 1859 in Giessbach – died June 1934 in Oberhofen). The couple had three children: Wilhelm, later called William (21 April 1888 – 2 December 1965), Mary Jane (27 May 1889 – October 1927) and Margarete (25 December 1890 – 21 March 1937). In 1893, Schall became a British citizen.

Reiniger, Gebbert and Schall In 1883, Schall returned to Stuttgart, and opened his own workshop for forehead, mouth and laryngeal lamps. In 1885, he joined with the mechanic Max Gebbert, whom he had met in Paris, as an equal partner in a new company, Gebbert and Schall. He was so successful that he was able to achieve 50% of total sales for the RGS company. The RGS agency in London existed until 1910. In 1900, the text Electricity in Gynaecology refers to a Leclanché cell made by Mr. K. Schall, of Wigmore Street.

On 1 July 1905, the Journal of the Röntgen Society listed as members: K. Schall, 35, Great Marylebone Street, W. and Frank K. Schmidlin, 83, Elizabeth Street, Sydney, NSW. In 1905, K. Schall offered an assortment of medical apparatus.

In July 1911, Dr. E. S. Worrall refers to the utilisation of apparatus to produce radiograms in very short exposure times, a half or a quarter of a second. Worrall stated that in 1896, a typical exposure was 15 minutes. Worrall employed equipment supplied by Messrs. K. Schall and Son and hoped to achieve exposure times of 1/100 or 1/250 of a second or even less. In 1912, Karl Schall handed over the management of the London firm to his son William E. Schall and moved to Oberhofen, Switzerland. He died in 1925 at Oberhofen am Thunersee, Switzerland.