There were times when people wrote Boesch with an "ö". This changed at the end of the 1950s: Bosch in Stuttgart believed that the export success of the Swiss boat builders was largely due to the similarity in name. The company sues - and loses. You just can't sue against a family name.
The solution to the problem: Robert Bosch's descendants assume all the costs incurred by the name change and add a few francs on top. For Walter Bösch, head of the company at the time, this was no reason to do without the "ö" in the family name. He only agreed when the electricians from Baden-Württemberg granted him the right to return from Boesch to Bösch at any time in the event of failure. They remain successful to this day and therefore keep the "oe" in their name.
The father of this success is Jacob Boesch, who takes over the Teichler & Co shipyard in Kilchberg on Lake Zurich in 1920 and founds the Boesch family business. Just five years later, his son Walter starts an apprenticeship as a boat builder in his father's company. Another five years later, the triumphant advance of the combustion engine as a boat propulsion system was unstoppable.
Where once the production and repair of sailing and rowing boats was the main focus, the construction of fast motorboats now took centre stage. Thanks to Walter Boesch, who took over the business from his father after passing his exams and designed and built the boats, which were already travelling at speeds of up to 45 km/h at the end of the 1940s. For a long time, Walter's wife Rösly, whom he married in 1938 and made "finance minister", was the soul of the business.
Walter Boesch did not give up building sailing boats until 1952. With the Boesch 500, a 5 metre long motorboat powered by a 60 hp four-cylinder engine, he achieved his final breakthrough. In the 1950s, many orders came from Geneva, the Mecca of water-skiing. Boesch boats are at the top of the wish lists of water-skiing artists due to their manoeuvrability, course stability and flat stern wave. It is only logical that world and European championships are held with Boesch boats.
At the end of the 1950s, the boat builders on Lake Zurich had reached the limits of their capacity and rationalisation and series production were urgently needed. Walter Boesch learnt how to do this in America. The new production facility in Sihlbrugg was not inaugurated until 1973. Klaus and Urs, Walter's sons, join the company as the third generation and accelerate the expansion.
Klaus, a qualified shipbuilder and the older of the two Boesch brothers, takes on the role of boat designer and, as "Foreign Minister", takes care of production and sales from then on. "Minister of the Interior" Urs calculates propellers and designs electronic petrol injection systems for the Boesch V-8 petrol engines made in the USA.
The bulbous rudder blade developed by Urs and an innovative bow rudder are legendary. A mechanical engineer can do (almost) anything. Crisis manager too? When the oil and dollar crisis and cheap competition from overseas made life difficult for more than just Swiss boat builders in the 1970s, Klaus and Urs made an important decision: They sought out a niche and have been building even larger and more luxurious boats ever since. With success, of course.
In 2010, the company once again recognised the signs of the times and focused not only on luxury and size, but also increasingly on ecology. The flagship, the 970 St. Tropez, is now 9.70 metres long and equipping the runabouts with electric drives is part of everyday production.
The management team at Boesch, where Markus Boesch, Klaus' son, has been the fourth generation for several years now, is convinced that the future belongs to electric propulsion, which is significantly more efficient than a combustion engine. By switching from lead-acid batteries to lithium-ion polymer batteries, the speed and range of the boats could be doubled. "Thanks to nanotechnology, a tenfold increase should even be possible in the short term," predicts Urs Boesch. We will report back by the time Boesch celebrates its 100th anniversary ...
