August Thyssen Hut
Union August Thyssen-Hütte was since 1919 the name of a mining group's who from the smelter Bruckhausen and the rolling mill German Emperor in Dinslaken was. The Bruckhauser Hütte was built from 1889 onwards by the German Emperors' union controlled by August Thyssen .
After the disengagement of the coal and steel industry , August Thyssen Hütte AG was the name of the Thyssen core group until the takeover of Rheinstahl in 1973.
The hut in Bruckhausen is still the main factory of the ThyssenKrupp group today .
history
In the spring of 1889 August Thyssen began grounds close to the Rhine in the peasantry Bruckhausen to purchase - a total of 122 hectares. In the summer of the same year, following the establishment of the German Emperors' union, work began on building a steel and rolling mill that was connected to the Rhine via the Alsum port . The first tapping of the initially six basic Siemens-Martin furnaces on December 17, 1891 is considered the actual start of the Bruckhausen smelter. In the rolling mill to the north of the steelworks, five rolling mills were gradually put into operation from January 1892 to June 1894. The decision to build the hut was made in the midst of a boom, but the completion of the building in an economic downturn. Nevertheless, the construction of a Thomas steelworks with four 16-ton converters began in 1895 , as the Thomas patent had expired in 1884. The first Thomas batch was blown on July 20, 1897, in 1898 an annual production of 179,000 tons was reached. Almost simultaneously with the construction of the Thomas factory, the first blast furnace , which was started in 1886, was put into operation on July 17, 1897. The new independence from external suppliers and the good economic situation meant that further blast furnaces could be put into operation in 1897, 1899, 1900 and 1901. The coke has been produced in its own smelter coking plant since 1895 , to which a coal recycling plant was directly attached.
The rolling mill in Dinslaken in the immediate vicinity of the main train station was built in April 1897 and was mainly used for refinement - i.e. the production of steel strips and wire and, from 1899, also as a cold rolling mill .
Due to the capacity utilization of the blast furnace in Bruckhausen - which produced exclusively for the Thomas plant - Thyssen decided to build another blast furnace plant to supply the SM plants in Styrum and Bruckhausen in Duisburg-Hamborn . Due to official problems, the Meiderich ironworks with three modern blast furnaces was not started until 1901 and put into operation in 1904. Two more blast furnaces could be put into operation by 1908.
In 1904 August Thyssen took a stake in Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks AG , through which he reached an interest group with the Schalker Verein and the Aachener Hütten-Aktienverein when he switched to the year 1905 - a merger that was also formally realized in 1907. Due to the competitive situation with Emil Kirdorf , August and Fritz Thyssen withdrew from their stake in GBAG by 1909.
Starting in 1908, the construction of a power station with large gas engines began in Bruckhausen to operate an intensive network economy that ensured the optimal use of the blast furnace and coke gases to generate electricity. Gas supply contracts were also concluded with neighboring towns such as Hamborn, Dinslaken, Oberhausen and Mülheim in the period that followed.
In 1914, the new Thomaswerk started in 1911 with initially three 30-ton converters, and by 1911 four more Siemens-Martin furnaces with a total capacity of 130 tons were put into operation. In the same time window - 1910 - the first electric furnace went into operation in Bruckhausen in order to also be able to produce high-alloy stainless steels. As early as 1912/1913, the electric steel capacity was considerably expanded with a further 25-ton furnace.
In addition to the expansion of the liquid phase, construction of a new rolling mill was started in the direction of Duisburg-Marxloh (Rolling Mill II), which was connected to the previous smelter by a tunnel. The rolling mills for sheet metal, bar iron and fine iron began operating in the course of 1911–1914 after a construction phase that was costly due to the boggy soil.
Since the port of Alsum had meanwhile become too small and was restricted by official requirements, a new port was built downstream in Schwelgern , which began operations in 1905. Between 1903 and 1913, throughput through both ports increased from 1.3 to 4.3 million tons. The expansion of the works railway network associated with the increase in cargo handling resulted in the company's own railway workshop being enlarged so that wagons could also be supplied to external customers.
literature
- Wilhelm Treue : The fires never go out. August Thyssen-Hütte 1890–1926. Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf / Vienna 1966.
- Wilhelm Treue, Helmut Uebbing: The fires never go out. August Thyssen-Hütte 1926-1966. Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf / Vienna 1969.
- Helmut Uebbing: Paths and waymarks . 100 years of Thyssen. Siedler, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-88680-417-8 .
- Tobias Witschke: Danger to competition. The merger control of the European Coal and Steel Community and the "re-concentration" of the Ruhr steel industry 1950–1963. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-05-004232-9 (= yearbook for economic history , supplement 10)
- Zeitzeugenbörse Duisburg eV: Duisburger Hüttenwerke , Erfurt 2014, ISBN 978-3-95400-364-8
