The history of roller milling extends back to the first half of the 19th century. Roller mills, that is to say, machines fitted with rolls set either horizontally, or vertically, or obliquely, for the grinding of corn, are said to have been used as far back as the 17th century, but if this be so it is certain that they were only used in a tentative manner. Towards the middle of the 19th century the firm of E.R. & F. Turner, of Ipswich, began to build roller mills for breaking wheat as a preliminary to the conversion of the resultant middlings on millstones. The rolls were made of chilled iron and were provided with serrated edges, which must have exercised a tearing action on the integuments of the berry. These mills were built to the design of a German engineer, of the name of G.A. Buchholz, and were exhibited at the London exhibition of 1862, but they never came into general use. It has also been stated that as early as 1823 a French engineer, named Collier, of Paris, patented a roller mill, while five years later a certain Malar took out another French patent, the specification of which speaks of grooves and differential speeds. But the direct ancestors of the roller mills of the present day were brought out some time in the third decade of the 19th century by a Swiss engineer named Sulzberger. His apparatus was rather cumbrous, and the chilled iron rolls with which it was fitted consumed a large amount of power relatively to the work effected. But the Pester Walz-Mühle, founded in 1839 by Count Szechenyi, a Hungarian nobleman, which took its name from the roller mills with which it was equipped by Sulzberger, was for many years a great success; some of its roller mills are said to have been kept at work for upwards of forty years, and one at least is preserved in the museum at Budapest.
It may be noted that Hungarian wheat is hard and flinty and well adapted for treatment by rolls. Moreover, gradual reduction, as now understood, was more or less practised in Hungary, even before the introduction of roller milling. Though millstones, and not rolls, were used, yet the wheat was not floured at one operation, as in typical low or flat grinding, but was reduced to flour in several successive operations. In the first break the stones would be placed just wide enough apart to "end" the wheat, and in each succeeding operation the stones were brought closer together. But Hungarian milling was not then automatic in the sense in which British millers understand the word. For a long time a great deal of hand labour was employed in the merchant mills of Budapest in carrying about products from one machine to another for further treatment. This practice may have been partly due to the cheap labour available, but it was also the deliberate policy of Hungarian millers to handle in this way the middlings and fine "dunst," because it was maintained that only thus could certain products be delivered to the machine by which they were to be treated in the perfection of condition. The results were good so far as the finished products were concerned, but in the light of modern automatic milling the system appears uneconomical. Not only did it postulate an inordinately large staff, but it further increased the labour bill by the demand it made on the number of sub-foremen who were occupied in classifying, largely by touch, the various products, and directing the labourers under them. Hungarian milling still differs widely from milling as practised in Great Britain in being a longer system. This is due to the more minute subdivision of products, a necessary consequence of the large number of grades of flour and offals made in Hungary, where there are many intermediate varieties of middlings and "dunst" for which no corresponding terms are available in an English miller's vocabulary.