Axel Welin

Axel Welin (1862-1951), was a Swedish inventor and industrialist.

Ernst Axel Martin Welin studied at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm from 1879 to 1884. Between 1886 and 1888, Welin worked as a weapons designer for Thorsten Nordenfelt in London. In 1889 he started his own engineering firm, the Welin Davit & Engineering Company Ltd. He soon designed the famed "Welin Breech".

However, his main interest was davits. He invented a new and improved davit for lowering boats om board ship, a quadrant davit for double-banked boats which simply became known as the Welin davit.RMS "Titanic" was equipped with Welin davits [Michael Davie: "The Titanic. The Full Story of a Tragedy", Grafton Books, 1987, p. 103] , and after the disaster the demand for his product skyrocketed. He retired a wealthy man in 1932 and returned to Sweden.

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