Jacob Bartholome Rittmeyer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jacob Bartholome Rittmeyer (born September 20, 1786 in Lindau (Lake Constance) ; † December 25, 1848 in St. Gallen , from 1832 or 1835 from St. Gallen) was a textile merchant.

Life

Rittmeyer was born in 1786 as the son of Elisäus Rittmeyer, a senator of the free imperial city of Lindau. He attended Latin school there. At the age of thirteen he moved to Intra via the Bernhardino , where he completed a commercial apprenticeship at Cobianchi. After completing this apprenticeship, he moves to Berlin , where he works in the cloth business of a Mr. Thedy from Gressoney . After a stay in Basel , he returned to Lindau, where, together with his brother, he took over the cloth business founded by his grandfather from his father. In 1818 he married Anna Mariette Mange, the daughter of Franz Mange .

The shop, which operates from Lindau, deals in trimmings made of wool, silk and metal. These are an important part of the common national costumes. Later French and English woolen fabrics were also traded. Trade relations existed in the entire Lake Constance area and trade fairs were visited as far as Zurzach . Because in 1822 high tariffs were introduced in the southern German states for exports to Switzerland, Rittmeyer moved his business from Lindau to St. Gallen in 1829 , where he was soon accepted as a citizen. He continued to deal with the textile trade, but began to concentrate on the export of St. Gallen textile products instead of importing. Cotton towels came from St. Gallen in Turkish red, which was rare at the time, as well as so-called white goods, white towels, often with hand embroidery. These were exported to Germany and increasingly also to America.

Construction drawing of Josua Heilmann's hand embroidery machine, which Rittmeyer and his son have significantly improved

In 1840 Jacob Bartholome Rittmeyer received two multi-needle hand embroidery machines that had belonged to his father-in-law Franz Mange . These were invented by Josua Heilmann in Mühlhausen and delivered to Mange, but were not yet suitable for the market due to various problems. Mange had tinkered with it for ten years without being able to fix the problems. Jacob Bartholome succeeded in doing this together with his son Franz Elisäus and the mechanic Franz Anton Vogler . The improved embroidery machines now became the basis of St. Gallen embroidery , so that by 1910 around 20,000 such hand embroidery machines were built according to the Heilmann / Rittmeyer system. Rittmeyer itself opened its own embroidery factory in Bruggen , in which over 100 of these machines were installed as early as 1854.

Selling machine embroidery was initially difficult because, despite the improvements, the quality did not quite reach that of hand embroidery. In addition, one could only embroider ribbon-like and strongly repeating patterns with the embroidery machines. The turning point was achieved by the Hamburg merchant S. Hammel, who worked for a New York trading house and offered the St. Gallen embroidery as hand embroidery under the name "Hamburghs" - to disguise their origin.

Jacob Bartholome Rittmeyer did not experience the great triumph of hand embroidery, which was largely based on the embroidery machines he further developed. He died in St. Gallen on Christmas 1848. The Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie formulates his legacy as follows:

“Even if R [ittmeyer] has not seen this development with his own eyes, the beginnings of machine embroidery remain closely linked to his name for all time, and the later fruits of the tireless, conscientious work of the just as strictly legal as The willing man reaped not just a large family, but the entire Swiss industrial area. "

Remarks

  1. ↑ The sources contradict each other in the date of inclusion in the St. Gallen citizenship: HLS writes 1835, ADB however 1832.
  2. ↑ HLS and Tanner; ADB calls the number four.

swell

personal data
SURNAME Rittmeyer, Jacob Bartholome
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rittmeyer, Bartholome
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Textile merchant
DATE OF BIRTH September 20, 1786
PLACE OF BIRTH Lindau
DATE OF DEATH December 25, 1848
Place of death St. Gallen