50-year anniversary of the Würzburg Brick and Tile Training Course

As one of the oldest natural-origin building materials made by human hand, the clay brick has a thousands-years-old tradition. The crucial development of the once “rudimentary” clay brick and tile products to today’s high-tech products has been accompanied by the Brick and Tile Course, which has kept clay brick and tile professionals up to speed with the latest technology. The Würzburg Brick and Tile Training Course has also accompanied me for 15 years now. In our day-to-day business we hardly take any time to think about what an outstanding and modern building material we work with every day and what development our innovative products and their production have undergone in recent years. To mark the anniversary of the Würzburg Brick and Tile Training Course, I have consciously taken the time to review these tremendous developments in the clay brick and tile industry. An outstanding account of this development has been composed by Willi Bender for the publication commemorating the 50-year anniversary of the course.

When the Würzburg Brick and Tile Training Course was established back in 1962, I was just three years old, clay bricks and tiles were still fired in annular or zigzag kilns. Today we use modern tunnel kilns. What was then only a small number of different clay brick and tile products contrasts with a huge range of widely diverse high-tech products optimally tailored to the different applications. Most production processes, which used to be purely manual work, have now been automated and optimized and guarantee the production of clay brick and tile products with optimum quality. In the handling of raw materials, energy consumption in general, health and safety in the workplace and environmental protection, there have also been some quantum leaps in respect of improved processes. And I am sure that we have not reached the end of the line by a long way.

It is important that we do not stand still, but continue to develop further. Modern building culture needs our ever better clay bricks and roofing tiles with their outstanding structural-physical properties, with which value and structures can be built sustainably, not only in an energy-conscious but also ecologically oriented way.

All of us who in some way contribute to the brick and tile industry and its development can be proud of what we have achieved overall. The huge development potential that still exists for our clay brick and tile products encourages me to look confidently into the future. In view of this, I am also certain that we shall hold many more Würzburg Brick and Tile Training courses together with you, our professional audience.

And as readers of Zi Brick and Tile Industry International, we shall all get many, many more of “our” trade journal to read and keep up to date with technology. Who knows where the journey in the clay brick and tile industry will lead for our products! It is up to us. Let’s get on with it!

Yours

Joachim Deppisch

Director of the Würzburg Brick and Tile Training Course