Karl Storz Brand Guidelines: Tuttlingen’s Cold-Light Endoscope Maker, Family-Owned Since 1945

A two-person firm in the founder’s home town.

Karl Storz began in Tuttlingen, in Baden-Württemberg, in 1945. The Neue Deutsche Biographie, in a 2013 entry whose authors include the founder’s daughter Sybill Storz, says Karl Storz (1911–1996) trained as an instrument maker in his father’s Tuttlingen workshop, itself founded in 1911 to make medical instruments, and from 1928 worked in Leipzig selling medical instruments for a medical-supply house, where he came to know both the products on the market and what doctors needed from them. After war service from 1939, he returned to Tuttlingen in March 1945 and founded his company the same year. The entry describes it as a business of two people; the company’s own history page says Storz set it up at the age of 34.

The first products were instruments, headlamps and binocular loupes for ear, nose and throat medicine, both sources say, and Storz worked out his range with doctors. Endoscopy followed in the early 1950s. The company dates its first endoscopes with a traditional lens system to that period and a modernised bronchoscopy set to 1952, while the Neue Deutsche Biographie says Storz built his own first endoscope, with an achromatic lens system, in 1953. In 1955 the CLAR 55 forehead lamp, with a 55-millimetre concave reflector, was first shown at an ENT congress in Constance, the company says.

Light was the technical thread. In 1956 Storz patented an electronic flash device for endoscopic photography that guided light into the body through quartz rods, and in 1960 he began using thin, flexible glass-fibre bundles in a plastic sheath — “light cables,” as he called them — to carry light from a source outside the body to the endoscope, the Neue Deutsche Biographie says, citing his 1960 patent. This cold light principle replaced the small bulb that had been carried into the body at the tip of the instrument. The second problem was the image. Storz adapted the rod-lens system that the English physicist Harold Hopkins had filed for a patent in 1959, with lenses calculated for his own endoscopes, and the company dates the introduction of the HOPKINS rod lens system to 1965.

Cold light, rod lenses and the video tower.

From those two ideas the range spread across medicine. The company’s timeline lists a lithotripter for bladder stones and its first resectoscopes in 1969, an ultrasonic lithotripter in 1970, the beginnings of diagnostic arthroscopy in 1974, a high-frequency surgery unit with automatic control in 1977 and fibrescopes for flexible bronchoscopy in 1982. English Wikipedia, citing the medical literature, dates the first rod-lens arthroscope, made with Hopkins, to 1969. The Neue Deutsche Biographie notes that Storz products were among those used in two early laparoscopic operations often cited in the literature: an appendectomy by Kurt Semm in Kiel in 1980 and a video-assisted gallbladder removal by Philippe Mouret in Lyon in 1987.

Video moved the picture from the eyepiece to the screen. The company dates its own small endocamera to 1976, its first single-chip video camera, the Endovision 534, to 1988, and its first analogue three-chip camera to 1991. In 1998 it showed the OR1 integrated operating room at the Medica trade fair, and in 1999 it opened a logistics and training centre in Tuttlingen. English Wikipedia adds the Image1 full-HD camera of 2007 and the C-MAC video laryngoscope, and says veterinary medicine has been part of the range since 1989; the company now lists around 7,000 products for human and veterinary medicine.

Recognition came from the profession. In 1980 the medical faculty of the University of Geneva gave Storz its Prix mondial Nessim Habif de chirurgie, and in 1995 the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons gave him its Pioneer in Endoscopy Award, according to both the Neue Deutsche Biographie and the company. More than 400 patents and utility models were filed in his name alone, the biography says. English Wikipedia lists a Red Dot design award in 2019 for the HyDome duodenoscopy system.

Light, image and the operating theatre.

Endoscopy and minimally invasive surgery are sold to a small, expert audience: surgeons, gastroenterologists, theatre nurses and the hospital teams who buy and reprocess equipment. The makers’ public image follows from that. A familiar picture in this field is the instrument itself, a slim scope coiled on a white ground or a rigid telescope laid out at full length, shown with little else around it, so that the length, the bend and the tip carry the image.

The second familiar picture is the operating theatre. Here the product is the system rather than the single instrument: a video tower of camera units and light sources beside the table, and a team of surgeons looking up at a screen rather than down at the patient. Some makers go a step further and present the whole room; Karl Storz, for example, showed its OR1 integrated operating room at the Medica trade fair in 1998, the company says. Close by sit macro shots of instrument tips, clips and jaws, where the detail is the subject.

Much of the communication happens face to face. Makers run training and visitor centres where clinicians handle equipment and practise techniques; Karl Storz says it opened a logistics and training centre in Tuttlingen in 1999. Congresses matter as much: Digestive Disease Week (DDW) in the United States, UEG Week in Europe and the annual meeting of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) are where new scopes, generators and accessories are shown to the people who will use them.

The makers in this guide range from long-established German firms to younger companies elsewhere, and from full endoscope systems to single devices. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made, and it marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Three generations, one family name.

The company has stayed with the family. Karl Storz ran it until 1996, when his daughter Sybill Storz, who had worked beside him in the management since the late 1950s, took over, the Neue Deutsche Biographie says. In 2017 it changed its legal form from a GmbH to a European company, becoming Karl Storz SE & Co. KG, according to a company press release of August 2017. In 2019 her son Karl-Christian Storz took over the running of the business and she moved to the supervisory board, English Wikipedia says, citing the Schwäbische Zeitung. The company calls itself “an independent family-owned company” that thinks “in generations instead of quarters.”

Expansion abroad began in 1971, with a sales company in the United States, Karl Storz Endoscopy-America in Los Angeles, and a manufacturing company in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Karl Storz Endovision at Charlton, Massachusetts, followed in 1989, Karl Storz Imaging at Goleta, California, in 1990, and a first Asian sales subsidiary in Singapore the same year, the company says. English Wikipedia lists production in Tuttlingen and Stutensee in Germany, in Tallinn in Estonia, in Schaffhausen and Widnau in Switzerland and in Charlton and Goleta in the United States, and says the company is represented in more than 40 countries; the company puts its workforce at 9,900 people.

Recent moves lean towards software and robotics. English Wikipedia says the company set up Karl Storz VentureOne, a robotic-surgery business based in Singapore with a site in Munich, in February 2023; bought the Irish company AventaMed the same month; announced the purchase of the London software firm Innersight Labs in January 2024; and acquired Asensus Surgical of Raleigh, North Carolina, in August 2024. In Tuttlingen it opened Tutorama, a hands-on museum for children, in July 2023.

For a design guide, Karl Storz shows how a founder’s name can stretch from a headlamp to a whole operating room while the company stays in one family. Compare Stryker, another surgical-equipment maker named after its founder, and Olympus, the Japanese endoscope maker. For this guide we use navy, a cold-light blue and steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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