The history of the smartphone could have been very different. Then it would not be the former Apple boss Steve Jobs or the former Nokia boss Jorma Ollila who would be celebrated in history books and YouTube videos for the iPhone or the Nokia Communicator, but possibly the now 70-year-old Andreas Peiker from Bad Homburg. In 1990 the entrepreneur traveled to the Hanover Fair with a prototype for a completely new radio telephone in his luggage. The size of a paperback book, it had an antenna, a 5.6-inch flip-up display, a small keypad, and a telephone receiver. DOS was intended as the operating system. But the German industrial representatives apparently couldn't do anything with the idea. “I was laughed at at the time,” Peiker remembers today.

He must have been used to the sober reaction of buyers back then.

Because it was not the first attempt at a new beginning for the entrepreneur, and it was not to be the last.

It all started with a condom from a corner shop.

It was 1946, the year after the end of the Second World War, in which many Germans wanted to start a new life, including Heinrich Peiker from Bad Homburg.

He bought the rubber to use it as a membrane for a new dynamic microphone that he and his father-in-law Paul Beerwald were working on at the time.

“An almost unbelievable story,” laughs his descendant Andreas Peiker, but that was the start of the company that would soon become known under the name Peiker Acustic.

Sennheiser, Assmann, Peiker, Braun

The time was obviously very fruitful for audio technology: Peiker's Bad Homburg neighbor Wolfgang Assmann founded a company for dictation machines at that time, production of Braun radios started again in Frankfurt, and Fritz Sennheiser brought his first microphone onto the market in Lower Saxony.

In any case, Heinrich Peiker focuses on small microphones that fit into the pickups of turntables or on musical instruments; his biggest customer is the instrument maker Hohner. In 1957 the American balloonist David Simons climbed to a height of more than 30,000 meters with a Peiker microphone in his helmet. In the sixties, the Bad Homburg resident expanded into industry, building special microphones for trains that were insensitive to iron dust, such as that caused by rail abrasion. “That was a very decisive step,” says son Andreas, and the company continues to benefit from his father's patent to this day. Peiker has become the world market leader for this type of microphone.

The next upheaval came a few years later when the company launched a small speaker that was built into cars.

It is the entry into the business as an auto supplier.

Generation change

Then, in 1983, Heinrich Peiker suddenly dies and his son Andreas has to take over the management of the company. Under his leadership, the company becomes arguably the most important supplier for the new mobile radio technology in the eighties. “Almost every car phone receiver in Europe came from us,” reports Peiker. Even if this might not always have been recognizable for car owners, because brand names such as AEG, Siemens or Philips were on the devices themselves. The need for the new technology grows so much that the company has to give up its small headquarters in Bad Homburg and move to a new plant in Friedrichsdorf. The world's first Bluetooth hands-free system and the world's first docking station to integrate an Apple iPod music player into the sound system of a Mercedes are also built there. “Here, too, we were world market leaders.“Such technology has little in common with the condom microphone from 1946.