Development and design

The history of the Tubophon started on a cold winter day in 2004 when Dipl.-Ing. Stefan Schubert (managing director of the engineering firm KESS, Prien) had to wait outside a building container. To kill time and because he was cold he drummed with his hand on the yellow plastic caps of district heating steel tubes which were lying on the ground. The tone he heard from the open end 12 metres away on the other side was something so new and  archaic that he couldn't get it out of his mind. Together with Prof. Dr. Dr. Peter Sadlo he built a prototype for the musical inauguration of the geothermal project in Pullach. The device then called "Geothermiephon" (geothermics phone), however, was disassembled again and the project was stopped for cost reasons.

Six years later, in 2010, the mammoth project, in both financial and constructional terms, was started. For six weeks three welders worked with the help of heavy-duty lifting equipment and welded, assembled, disassembled and reassembled more than 160 m of raw material. Prof. Dr. Dr. Peter Sadlo again contributed with many suggestions and ideas. However, the way of proceeding was rather more experimental than predictable.

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With regard to the design graphic designer Michael Wladarsch, 84 Ghz-München, helped to arrange and chamfer the tubes in the respective angles so that they were arranged similar to the pipes of an organ. The welders on site particularly enjoyed cutting the large steel tubes into the elliptical shape of "sidepipes", so that they looked like large-bore exhaust pipes. The final painting of the silver tubes with a black coating is reflected in the Tubophon lettering. The final metal work for the subframe and the cross struts separated the construction into four modules, each weighing between one and two tons.