Schottel Brand Guidelines: The Rhine Boatyard Behind the 1950 RudderPropeller

A barn workshop, an iron rowing boat and a stretch of river.

Schottel began on 21 November 1921, when the locksmith Josef Becker opened a small engineering workshop in an old barn in his home village of Niederspay, on the Rhine south of Koblenz, German Wikipedia says. It was called J. Becker Maschinenbau-Werkstätte and repaired and made machine parts.

Boats came early. In 1925 Becker built an all-iron rowing boat for a local baker; with a transom stern, a raised bow and a light hull, it became known as the Schottel sloop. A first motor boat followed in 1927, and in the same year the five-person workshop built its first large passenger boat for a shipping company in Braubach, across the river. From 1931 Becker welded his hulls instead of riveting them, according to the company’s centenary history, Einhundert Jahre SCHOTTEL (2021). Between 1936 and the early war years the workshop also built about twenty tractors to order, that history says.

The name came from the river. Short of space in the barn, Becker built a new yard on the bank in 1934, at the stretch of the Rhine known as “Auf der Schottel,” and renamed the business Schottel-Werft so that Rhine skippers could place it at once, the company history explains.

The war years are covered in that history and in German Wikipedia. Many of the mostly young staff were called up, and with materials also short, production gradually came to a standstill; by the end, older men, apprentices and three women from Spay assigned to the yard made simple spare parts. Becker was briefly called up himself in October 1944 and then allowed back to the yard. The company history states that, despite the shortage of workers, he did not use forced labourers, citing historical records and witnesses. With no petrol available, Becker designed a firebox for wood-gas vehicle generators and filed a patent for it in July 1944. After the war the yard lay in the French occupation zone; it was seized under French reparation demands but not dismantled, and the seizure was lifted in 1948, German Wikipedia says.

A propeller that steers through a full circle.

Schottel’s defining product came in 1950. Becker, who had trained as a metalworker rather than as an engineer, wanted to combine propulsion and steering, and built the RudderPropeller: a Z-drive with no separate rudder blade, whose propeller can be turned endlessly through 360 degrees. The first unit went into the company’s own boat, the Magdalena, according to a milestone list published by MarineLink in June 2025 for the drive’s 75th anniversary. Police boats from Rhineland-Palatinate fitted with it were working in the Netherlands in 1952, and a German patent was granted on 23 November 1955, the same list says.

The drive led Schottel offshore and into harbours. In 1963 two RudderPropellers went into the French drilling vessel Terebel, which carried dynamic positioning; in 1967 Schottel worked with a Hamburg shipping company on a harbour tug with rudder propellers, which MarineLink’s list describes as the first of its kind. More than 17,000 RudderPropellers had been sold by 2025, for over 120 vessel types, the company said in that anniversary material.

Recognition came from outside the industry. Becker received the Elmer A. Sperry Award, a transport-engineering prize, for the development of the RudderPropeller; English Wikipedia’s list of winners gives the 2004 award, and German Wikipedia dates its presentation to 2005.

Other drives followed, German Wikipedia records: transverse thrusters from the mid-1960s; the Schottel-Jet of 1972, forerunner of the flush-mounted PumpJet for shallow water; the TwinPropeller, with two propellers turning the same way, in the mid-1990s; and, from 1997, the Siemens-Schottel-Propulsor, a pod drive developed with Siemens and fitted to the ferries Peter Pan and Nils Holgersson. The boatbuilding that started it all ended in 1973, when the sloop business was sold to a yard on the Mosel after some 16,000 sloops had been made, the company history says.

Design and documentation.

Marine equipment makers sell to shipyards, shipowners and operators rather than to the public, and their identities reflect that. Their marks have long histories of their own: Schottel’s square S has been in use since the 1980s, its centenary history says, and Becker Marine Systems introduced its present logo with its new name in 2001, by the company’s account. The palettes in this guide are our own interpretation, in sea-going blues with warm accents, and none is taken from a company’s files.

The products themselves carry much of the visual weight. Thrusters, rudder propellers, rudders, deck machinery and bridge systems appear in this guide only as the companies publish and describe them, and their scale is part of the story: a regional magazine described one Schottel drive in Wismar in 2021 as twelve metres long once assembled.

Products are presented by vessel type as well as by name. Schottel says its RudderPropeller is used in more than 120 vessel types, from harbour tugs to ferries and offshore ships, and Becker presents rudders, nozzles and steering gear as parts of a single manoeuvring system for a given ship. Service matters as much as sale: both companies describe networks of subsidiaries and offices across Europe, Asia and the Americas, and German Wikipedia lists fourteen Schottel sales and service companies, from Brazil to South Korea.

Newer pages cover data. Schottel lists condition monitoring and data platforms among its products, and Becker sells monitoring systems for steering and rudder bearings. Trade fairs remain a fixed point in the calendar: Becker’s own history records a meeting at Nor-Shipping in Oslo that changed its management in 2001, and in 2022 Schottel’s holding company announced an agreement there, a trade paper reported.

Made on the Rhine and the Baltic.

Schottel grew through two production sites. In 1998 it took over WPM Wismarer Propeller- und Maschinenbau on the Baltic coast and added controllable pitch propellers to its range. In July 2021 the regional business magazine aktiv im Norden reported that the Wismar plant, with about 120 staff, made Schottel’s largest RudderPropellers, around 40 a year, and about as many controllable pitch propellers, and that some of its drives carried up to 20 sensors for remote diagnosis. On the Rhine side, the company bought land in Dörth, in the Hunsrück hills, in December 2012 and moved all production there in 2015, keeping its service and repair centre in Spay, the company history says. German Wikipedia states that Schottel produces only in Germany, at Dörth and Wismar.

Ownership has stayed close to the founding family. In 2007 the Norwegian group Frydenbø Industri AS, whose subsidiary had distributed Schottel products since 1954, took a stake in Schottel GmbH, the company history records. Since 2013 the propulsion business has sat under a holding company, Schottel Industries GmbH, which German Wikipedia says is owned by the founder’s descendants and Frydenbø Industri. Recent products in German Wikipedia include the EcoPeller of 2015, the SYDRIVE hybrid drive options of 2019 and, in 2020, the ProCMS condition-monitoring system with the MariHub and MariNet data platforms.

The mark has a short documented history. Logo development began about ten years after the founding, with a W for Werft, or yard; a period of many different logos followed during the company’s international growth, until the square Schottel S was introduced in the 1980s, the centenary history says, and it has since had only slight updates.

For a design guide, Schottel shows how a place name and one engineering idea can carry a brand for a century. Compare Brunvoll, the Norwegian thruster maker, and Wärtsilä, another propulsion name. For this guide we use river slate, Rhine blue and a buoy amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Schottel’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.