Paul Schwarzkopf was one of those men who united technical innovation and entrepreneurship in exemplary fashion. He studied chemistry at the Technische Hochschule and at the University of Berlin. It was in Berlin that he received his first ideas in the field of refractory metals and subsequently turned his attention to the research, production and use of the refractory metals tungsten and molybdenum. Schwarzkopf was one of the first metallurgists to turn to the then emerging field of powder metallurgy.
He sintered, i.e. fired, iron, tungsten or molybdenum powders and processed the resulting ingots into shaped parts such as sheets or wires. From 1911, Schwarzkopf organized the production of tungsten and molybdenum at the Wolfram Laboratorium company. After World War I, he founded the German Incandescent Lamp Factory in Berlin. In 1921 he founded Metallwerk Plansee, today’s Plansee Group. From 1929 to 1931, development in the hard metal field was driven forward.