In 1881, Carl Schenck left the Mannheim company and founded his own weighing machine factory in Darmstadt. His prudence, international orientation, and presence at world exhibitions ensured early success and a healthy order book for the young Darmstadt-based company. Thanks to this dynamic development, the company began developing and producing balancing machines in 1907.

Carl Schenck, who had been working intensively on the subject of “balancing,” signed a license agreement in 1908 with Lawaczeck, who was the first to develop a usable solution for a “balancing machine.” In 1915, Schenck acquired the exclusive license for the entire world. The “Lawaczeck principle” remained in use until the 1940s.

During this phase, a number of other optical and mechanical measuring methods were developed that offered astonishingly high measuring accuracy. The “Lawaczeck design” achieved a balancing accuracy of 0.001 mm center of gravity displacement. This would still be sufficient for many applications today.

In 1935, a change was on the horizon – thanks to a machine patented in the USA with electrodynamic vibration sensors and stroboscopic imbalance angle determination.

In 1942, Schenck filed a patent for a “method and device for dynamic balancing by determining the angular position of the imbalance using a curve recorded periodically on an oscilloscope screen.” This first production-ready solution was successfully used to balance ship gyroscopes during World War II due to its measuring accuracy.

The wattmeter method, the next step in the development, suppressed undesirable parasitic vibrations. With the basic components known at this time, i.e. wattmeter, vibration sensor and angle reference generator, it was possible to determine the position and magnitude of the unbalance in one measuring run. Unbalance values were displayed on two pointer instruments.

In 1953, the light spot vector meter brought further improvement. The combination of both values in one display and the “storage” of the measured values by a light spot on the screen simplified balancing. The imbalance was now visible. Even today, the vector meter is still a proven method for displaying the position and size of the imbalance in modern screen measuring devices.

Parallel to the development of “workshop machines” – today referred to as universal machines – the automation of balancing continued to advance. “Balancing machines” for crankshafts determined the imbalance and specified the drilling depth for the drill machines to compensate for it. The measurement run, compensation, and control run took about 2 minutes for a crankshaft.

The mechanical foundations for balancing were laid in the 1970s. Electronics slowly conquered balancing and diagnostic technology. In 1971, the electronic, wattmetric measurement method was introduced. The first computer-controlled balancing systems were introduced in 1974.

The next major change came with the advent of digital technology: from the early 1980s onwards, computers with microprocessors also conquered measurement technology and continue to dominate it to this day. Starting with the CAB 690 and CAB 720, today the CAB 820 and CAB 920 represent the fourth generation of measurement technology in service.

In 1995, as part of the restructuring of Carl Schenck AG, the balancing and diagnostic technology divisions were merged to form an independent company – Schenck RoTec GmbH.

From a technical perspective, one of the most impressive highlights of this period was the creation of the world's largest geotechnical centrifuge for soil physics research. The CRYO centrifuge, which is used to further develop components of the Ariane 5 rocket engine at temperatures close to absolute zero, broke new technological ground.

In 2000, the globally active technology group DÜRR AG, based in Stuttgart, acquired a majority stake in Carl Schenck AG.

Energy saving, noise reduction, and efficiency improvement were the predominant themes of the first decade of the new century. In 2009, the testing laboratory for balancing technology received official accreditation from the German Accreditation Body for Technology (DATech). For the first time, users and service providers can have their testing equipment and measurement technology certified in a manufacturer-neutral manner – documentable and traceable to international SI units.