Anton Raky

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Anton Raky (1868-1943)

Anton Raky (born January 5, 1868 in Seelenberg im Taunus , † August 22, 1943 in Berlin ) was a German designer and entrepreneur . He is considered a successful pioneer and ingenious inventor in the field of deep drilling technology . Its derricks were in Europe, Africa, Central and South America. He drilled for water, crude oil , hard coal , lignite , potash and ore and founded two important mechanical engineering companies in Erkelenz and Salzgitter-Bad that still exist today.

family

Anton Raky was born to Franz Raky and Karoline Abt. Two of his uncles were Catholic priests; Anton Abt and Ludwig Abt . His grandfather Johannes Josef Abt operated a hammer mill .

  • Anton Raky married Martha Immler on September 14, 1893 in Durrenbach ( Alsace ) (born November 5, 1873 in Zeulenroda ; † February 7, 1898 in Cologne). With her he had the sons Anton and Otto.
  • The widower married in 1902 in Osek am Erzgebirge Rosa Thiele (born May 9, 1883 in Osek; † June 9, 1955 in Langebrück ), the daughter of drilling contractor Julius Thiele. The couple had a daughter, Annerose. The marriage ended in divorce.
  • His third marriage was to Sophie Devaux (born June 7, 1884 in Vienna, † January 24, 1961 in Vienna). The children were Hasso, the later actress Hortense , Sigrid Antoinette, Judith and Udo.

Beginnings

Anton Raky learned the trade of a locksmith and made a special drill bit in his father's business in Kiedrich for the Cologne-based drilling contractor Emanuel Przibilla, who came from Lower Silesia, when he was drilling for a salt spring in Kiedrich . Przibilla became aware of the talented man and took him into his business. Anton Raky improved and developed deep drilling technology from now on.

As a drilling engineer at the Alsatian trade union “Gute Hoffnung” run by the entrepreneur Otto Seib in Durrenbach , he was able to patent the “Rapid-impact drilling crane No. 7” in 1894, which was used to drill 180 to 340 m deep oil wells in Alsace. His global entrepreneurial road to success was based on this. Raky and the "Gute Hoffnung" offered the license of the invention to the larger Alsatian competitor " Pechelbronner Ölbergwerke", but they refused. At that time (since 1871) Alsace belonged to the German Empire .

The Internationale Bohrgesellschaft AG in Erkelenz

Erkelenz factory, advertisement around 1900

Anton Raky founded the “Internationale Bohrgesellschaft AG” (IBG) on August 8, 1895 in Strasbourg- Ruprechtsau together with the Strasbourg businessman Heinrich Otto Seib and other people from Alsace. It should exploit the patent commercially; the share capital was 400,000 marks and was increased to 500,000 marks in 1898.

In 1896 there was only a small repair shop in Erkelenz (with a single 2 hp engine); Nevertheless, the IBG moved its headquarters to Erkelenz in 1902. Seib left the company, now A. Schaaffhausen'sche Bankverein became the main financier. By 1905, the repair shop had developed into a large factory with its own rail connection to the nearby Aachen – Mönchengladbach railway line . 300 workers were employed here, 1,500 workers in the external drilling companies and 70 technicians and engineers.

Since the company had grown rapidly, but there was not enough workforce in Erkelenz, they had to be recruited from outside and living space created for them. In the years 1904 to 1906 a new residential area was built east of the city and not far from the factory, which the vernacular called and still calls "Cairo" (spoken: Ka-iro) because of its idiosyncratic gables and turrets on some houses. In 1905 the IBG took part in the world exhibition in Liège with its own pavilion , where, in collaboration with Professor Henry Potonié , a model of this residential estate and a diorama of a coal landscape were exhibited with great attention from the professional world .

The name of the street around which the district is divided on both sides as "Rosenstraße" was a tribute to Raki to his second wife Rosa Thiele and their daughter Annerose.

Initially he was drilling for coal in the Erkelenzer Land and in the neighboring areas of Aachen Revier , Ruhrgebiet and the Belgian province of Limburg . In 1901 he was in Ace on behalf of André Dumont first drill for this part of the country Belgian coal, in the following years was there the Limburg coal basin with seven mines.

The IBG soon expanded its drilling operations to include potash salts , crude oil and other usable products and has been developing Romanian oil fields near Moreni and Câmpina since 1900 . Raky acquired oil concessions in northern Germany and Romania and founded oil companies such as " Deutsche Mineralölindustrie AG " and the Romanian "Regatul Roman". Over 100 drilling rigs were in operation simultaneously in Germany, Belgium, France, Romania, Russia, Africa and Brazil. The IBG dividend climbed to 500 percent for 1906 and 1907.

Patrons and villa owners

Porter's house at the Rakyweiher in Dalheim

In Erkelenz, Raky was a generous patron of the city. As early as 1898, with great astonishment, he had provided electrical lighting for the main streets, the market and some pubs. He donated for the new building of the higher boys' school, the pastorate, for the design of the market and the Johannismarkt. The station Erkelenz was not for the maintenance of express trains provided, but that changed when Raky, the lot with the railway road was regularly pulled the emergency brake in order here to be able to get out. Because of his greater mobility, he was the first car owner in what was then the district of Erkelenz . He bought the Rödgener Mühle in nearby Dalheim-Rödgen and had a castle-like villa built opposite the Rödgener Mühlenweiher as a country residence, where he hosted large hunting parties . The villa's former gatehouse and a pavilion with a domed ceiling are still preserved today.

Lex Gamp

The IBG had secured a number of large coal fields through intensive drilling on hard coal. The Prussian state government became aware of the company and finally changed in 1905/1907 with the "Lex Gamp" (named after its most ardent advocate in the Prussian state parliament ) the mining exemption of the current General Mining Act to the effect that drilling for various mineral resources such as hard coal, stone and potassium salts no new Mutungsrechte could be purchased more, but the development of these deposits subject to state licensing. This meant that the IBG had to significantly reduce its drilling operations and gradually shifted to the manufacture of drilling machines.

Wirth

Due to this new legal situation, the A. Schaaffhausen'sche Bankverein withdrew as a sponsor in 1907 and forced Raky to resign from his position as general director of the IBG. Various branches of the IBG were sold. By 1916, the drilling department with the drilling park came to Deutsche Erdöl-AG (DEA) and when the latter wanted to close the machine and drilling equipment factory in Erkelenz that same year, entrepreneurs Otto Wolff from Cologne and Alfred Wirth bought the company and ran it under the management of Alfred Wirth as "Machine and drilling equipment factory Alfred Wirth & Co.".

The Norwegian plant manufacturer Aker Solutions has been the majority owner since 2009 . The Erkelenz company now produces tunnel boring machines , foundation construction machines for infrastructure projects, core components and complete solutions for the oil and natural gas industry as well as pump systems for the mining and processing industries. The company was renamed "Aker Wirth" and was a division of the Aker Solutions Group. In 2014 a restructuring took place within the group, the Erkelenzer factory is now part of mhwirth, which belongs to the Akastor group. Around 680 people are employed in Germany.

Other companies

Raky and his staff in a Romanian oil field, 1906

Raky remained an entrepreneur even after leaving the IBG. Until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 he carried out oil drilling abroad: in Kerch , Maikop ( Russia ) and Baku (Azerbaijan) and in Câmpina ( Romania ).

After the war he became general director at the headquarters of Deutsche Erdöl-AG (DEA) in Berlin and founded the company "Anton Raky, Tiefbohrungen" in Salzgitter , which developed iron ore fields at this location . In 1920 he formed the “Fortuna” consortium together with Rombacher and Ilseder Hütte . In 1923 he founded “Bergbau AG Salzgitter” together with August Thyssen . At the end of the 1920s, Anton Raky owned about 53 million m² of ore concessions, but their exploitation required high-risk capital investments.

Raky undertook oil drilling in the Upper Rhine Valley ( Bruchsal ) and in Lower Saxony ( Berkhöpen , Nienhagen and Wietze ). He was able to prove lignite deposits on the left bank of the Lower Rhine . He employed August Moos as chief geologist . However, the costly exploration work overwhelmed the company and finally Raky AG was insolvent in 1932/1933.

Parts of his company were taken over by Preussag and Wintershall AG . A new owner continued to run "Bergbau AG" in Salzgitter-Bad am Windmühlenberg, which was incorporated into the Reichswerke Hermann Göring on August 5, 1937 . Today the company is called Salzgitter Maschinenbau AG (SMAG).

In a petroleum explosion in Romania in 1928, Raky was seriously injured, so that he retired into private life in 1936. He last lived with his wife in a villa in Berlin-Zehlendorf, where he died in 1943 at the age of 75.

In terms of its great importance for the development of deep drilling technology, Raky can only be compared with a few other technicians, including Gustav Wilhelm Richard Sorge .

Honors

  • In 1921, the Clausthal Mining Academy awarded Anton Raky an honorary doctorate as Dr.-Ing. Eh
  • The city of Erkelenz granted him honorary citizenship on July 12, 1920 .
  • In 1955 a street in Erkelenz was named after him as Anton-Raky-Allee .
  • In Dalheim-Rödgen near Erkelenz, where he built a villa, Anton-Raky-Strasse and the Rakyweiher remind of him.
  • The Anton-Raky-Realschule existed in Salzgitter until 2005 , today's Realschule Salzgitter-Bad .
  • In Nienhagen (district of Celle) , Anton-Raky-Strasse commemorates the drilling pioneer.
  • In Westercelle streets were named after drilling pioneers, Hunäusstraße and Raky-Ring , meanwhile renamed Rakyweg .
  • In Wietze, a roundabout on the B 214 was designed at the entrance to the village in 2014, with a work of art that is 5 meters high, weighs a ton and is made of Corten steel . It represents a raky derrick in abstract form. Furthermore, three sculptures show workers. Oil flows are indicated at the edges of the top. The Hunäus drilling took place near the monument in 1858.
  • In 2015, investors in a planned apartment building on Glück-auf-Straße in Erkelenz named the building Anton-Raky-Haus . They are reminiscent of the previous building, which was built by Anton Raky here in a workers' settlement, popularly known as Ka-iro . It should serve several purposes; as an inexpensive consumer shop for employees, as a hotel for guests and fitters of the "International Drilling Company" and as a restaurant with an outdoor terrace and ballroom. Such use did not take place, however, as in 1907 the drilling contractor left Erkelenz shortly after the building was completed. The house was a great relief from plaster mounted that the initials wore the International drilling company. It showed, among other things, two workers, a cogwheel and three oil rigs. It will be given a worthy place on the west facade of the new building.

Museums

Exhibitions

  • The Heimatverein der Erkelenzer Lande eV organized an exhibition with the title Mythos Raky in cooperation with the city archive of Erkelenz from August 31st to October 28th, 2012 . From Erkelenz into the world . At the same time an extensive supporting program was organized.

literature

  • Josef Gaspers, Leo Sels and others: History of the city of Erkelenz. Erkelenz 1926, p. 88 ff.
  • Gerald PR Martin: Industrial pioneers in our homeland. Anton Raky. In: Local calendar of the Heinsberg district , year 1974, p. 52 ff.
  • Gerhard Martin: Anton Raky (1868-1943). Old master of deep drilling technology, inventor, oil prospector and legend, born in Seelenberg. In: Hochtaunusblätter , Volume 16 (2003), pp. 30–35.
  • Ann-Katrin Struken: ups and downs. The life of deep drilling pioneer Anton Raky. (= Writings of the Heimatverein der Erkelenzer Lande eV , Volume 25.) Erkelenz 2012.
  • Rainer Merkens, Hubert Rütten, Christoph Stolzenberger: The Myth of Raky. From Erkelenz into the world. (Documentation for the exhibition from August 31st to October 28th, 2012 in Haus Spiess in Erkelenz) Heimatverein der Erkelenzer Lande eV, Erkelenz 2013, ISBN 978-3-9815182-3-8 .
  • Hubert Rütten: The casino on Glück-auf-Straße . In: From the history of the Erkelenzer Land. With 12 contributions by 10 authors , writings of the Heimatverein der Erkelenzer Lande e. V. No. 30, Erkelenz 2015, ISBN 9783981518283 , pp. 90-103.

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