A Brief History Of The Development Of Metal Hose
Jun 01, 2026
Initially, people used animal hides sewn together to form tubular structures to meet the needs of production and combat. After a considerable period, by the late 17th century, the Dutch brothers Van der Geigen created longitudinally sewn canvas hoses, which were widely used in firefighting at the time. Later, with the emergence of rubber on the international market and the development of vulcanization technology, rubber hoses and hoses armored with metal wire or hemp rope were introduced. However, for engineering applications involving high-temperature media such as steam and hot air, low-temperature media such as liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, and liquid helium, and corrosive media such as gasoline, kerosene, acids, and alkalis, rubber hoses were unsuitable. Especially under high-temperature conditions, their safety and reliability were even more difficult to guarantee.
Therefore, people gradually focused their attention on metal pipes, modifying their geometry to create corresponding corrugations on their inner and outer surfaces. This gave them the flexibility of rubber hoses while also providing resistance to high and low temperatures, aging, and corrosion. Thus, the corrugated metal hose, as the body of the metal flexible hose, was developed.
In 1855, Germany first published a patent for manufacturing bellows. It utilized existing principles of jewelry making. Thirty years later, E. Levavasseur of France and H. Witzenmann of Germany collaborated to develop a new type of metal bellows, obtaining patents in France and Germany in August 1885. This was a spiral bellows made by winding S-shaped metal strips on specialized equipment. Rubber strips, cotton fabric, or asbestos rope were used to fill the seams between adjacent turns to facilitate a seal within the bellows.
In 1894, the structure of this type of bellows was improved: two metal strips of different diameters were wound in opposite directions. This allowed the metal strips to achieve mutual balance under stress, overcoming the problem of self-unwinding.
In 1929, another technological revolution occurred in the structure of bellows, completely solving the problem of loss of sealing performance caused by uneven changes in the grooves of the rubber strips or asbestos ropes used for filling during bending. This opened up broad prospects for the development of bellows. Integral bellows were made from steel and copper-zinc alloys, using seamless or welded pipe materials. These bellows rely on the elastic deformation of the corrugated sidewalls to maintain a certain degree of compressibility or tensile strength while ensuring a reliable seal.
From the 1950s onwards, double-layer, triple-layer, and multi-layer bellows, especially ultra-thin-walled stainless steel bellows, developed rapidly. To meet application requirements, various processes such as welding, electroforming, machining, hydraulics, and mechanical spinning were used to manufacture bellows. The minimum nominal diameter is 2 mm, and the maximum nominal diameter can reach 400-500 mm, with even giant bellows reaching 10 meters in diameter. The number of corrugations ranges from a minimum of 1-2 to hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands.
From the perspective of the significant role of corrugated pipes as the body of metal flexible hoses, the development of metal corrugated pipes signifies the development of metal flexible hoses. Subsequently, people covered the outer surface of the corrugated pipe with materials such as rubber, plastic, or nylon, armored it with a braided sleeve made of metal wires or metal strips, and varied various joint types, creating a variety of forms of metal flexible hoses to adapt to different requirements under various usage conditions.
