An engineering workshop was established in Dessau, Saxony in 1859 by Andreas Ernst Gottfried Polysius, and the G. Polysius iron foundry and engineering works was set up in 1870, specializing in materials processing equipment. They built their first rotary kiln for the cement industry in 1898, and supplied their first to Britain at Stoneferry in 1904. Substantial numbers of kilns were sold in Britain in the first decade of the twentieth century, but sales were subsequently curtailed in the lead-up to WWI.
Polysius remained active in Germany and developed the Lepol kiln, which became dominant in Germany in the 1930s. With the partition of Germany after WWII, the Dessau site in the East was excluded from western European trade, but a new company was established at Beckum, becoming Polysius GmbH. Under this name, Lepol and Dopol kiln systems were sold to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and more recently several precalciner kilns have been supplied. The company, now part of the ThyssenKrupp group, continues to supply kilns world-wide
See Polysius website.