Adolf Spitteler

Friedrich Adolf Spitteler (born June 7, 1846 in Liestal ; † January 12, 1940 in Zurich ) was a Swiss entrepreneur and chemist who developed the plastic Galalith made from milk .

Spitteler was the brother of Carl Spitteler . He attended the trade school in Basel and did an apprenticeship as a businessman in the important trading house Gebr. Volkart in Winterthur from 1862 . After completing his training, this company sent him to India in 1866, where he managed the branch in Kochi , Kerala . That ended in 1874 when he went to Liestal and did chemical studies about which details are not known (he was not enrolled at any university in Zurich). In 1875 he was back in India in Kochi, where he was co-owner and later an employee of a coffee plantation. As a result, he founded a coconut mat factory in Kochi and finally a soda factory. He became Vice President of the City Council in Kochi and German Consul. Due to illness, he went back to Switzerland in 1884. From 1885 he was back in India, this time in northern India as director of the branch of a Scottish paper mill. In 1893 he went back to Europe and from 1893 to 1895 was the editor of a specialist journal in Berlin, probably the paper newspaper (publisher Carl Hoffmann).

When in 1896 the Hanoverian printer Wilhelm Krische wanted to produce white blackboards by applying casein to cardboard, he called in Spitteler to solve the problems. Spitteler had a reputation as a paper specialist. This resulted in Galalith, whose German patent was granted to Krische und Spitteler in 1897 (Spitteler was listed there as from Prien am Chiemsee , in the British patent of the same year Wolfratshausen near Munich was given as the place of origin).

In 1896 he married a woman from Prien, with whom he initially lived in Prien. From 1897 to 1899 he lived temporarily in Wolfratshausen and then in Prien until 1900.

In 1900 he sold his Galalith patents to the Vereinigte Gummiwaren-Fabrik Harburg-Wien and the French rights to the Compagnie Francaise de la Galalithe in Levallois-Perret near Paris. The patents turned out to be very profitable for him. The sale was necessary because Krische and Edler's (and von Spitteler's) funds were not sufficient for the further development of Galalith and was initiated by Carl Kunth, Krische's brother-in-law, who had also financed the development up until then.

In 1905 he separated from his wife and apprenticed to the Graubünden painter F. Simi in Florence for two years. From 1908 he lived in Zurich, where he lived on his royalties and lived with his former housekeeper.

literature

• Entry in German Biographical Encyclopedia . KG Saur (it is wrongly stated that he first lived in Ceylon from 1866).
• Günter Lattermann: Who invented it? Adolf Spitteler and the invention of the galalith, Ferrum. In: News from the Iron Library. Volume 89, 2017, pp. 27-28.