When Atlas Copco was founded it made products for railways, but the core of our business dates back to the early years of the 20th century, when the first compressors, tools and rock drills were manufactured. Today, we are a world leader in these and many other areas.

Atlas was founded in 1873 in Stockholm, Sweden, to provide Swedish Rail with all types of equipment for building and running Sweden’s new railway. But with the growth of Swedish Rail relatively short-lived, Atlas had by the mid-1880s already begun a strategic shift toward the production of more advanced products, such as steam engines and boilers. In November 1890, the company was reconstructed and a new company, Nya Aktiebolaget Atlas, was founded with three new production lines: locomotives, commercial central heating systems and machine tools. At the beginning of the 1890s, a young engineer named Gustaf Ryd visited England and the US and came back with a pneumatic caulking hammer and riveting hammer, respectively.