A manometer factory founded by Kurt Stein in Hamburg in 1878 soon gained a reputation for reliable pressure measurement, temperature and water level measurement technology.  Such measurements were naturally of interest to the Imperial German Navy as it expanded its submarine building programme in the years up to and during World War I. After the economic troubles of the 1920s and early 1930s, the company known as C. Wilh. Stein Sohn naturally profited from Germany’s rearmament from 1933 onwards and in particular from the increasing demand for precision measuring instruments. Bombed out of Hamburg in 1943, the company set up improvised production facilities on the outskirts of Hamburg and Kiel and continued delivering precision instruments right up to Germany’s capitulation in May 1945. In the post-war years, C. Wilh. Stein Sohn was gradually able to rebuild and its reputation for reliable measurement technology enabled the business to be revived as West Germany’s shipping industry took off in the 1950s. By the early 1960s, C. Wilh. Stein Sohn was pioneering unmanned ship’s operational engine monitoring systems and ultimately became one of the leading manufacturers of these systems. By now, more than 10,000 of these automation systems have been installed worldwide. In 2007, the company’s automation division was taken over by Interschalt maritime systems AG before maresystems acquired Interschalt's automation business in 2014.