Boge GmbH
The Boge GmbH was a German company in Eitorf , with 1800 employees the largest local employer and the biggest shock absorber maker in Europe. The company was also active in the manufacture of machines, equipment, vehicles and aircraft.
Adolf Boge Senior
Adolf Boge Sr. (* 1874 in Bielefeld ; † 1952) was a lathe operator at the Solingen metal goods factory Weyersberg & Kirschbaum. As an enthusiastic artistic cyclist , he often came to Eitorf to practice with the local Schwalbe cycling club .
In 1903 he and Fritz Kasten founded the company Boge & Kasten - Solingen , or BKS for short , where he designed door closers and developed the well-known cylinder lock. His brother Otto Boge founded in 1907 in Bielefeld , a company whose mission first, the sales and maintenance of door closers from the BKS was that later, however, under the company Boge compressors in the compressed air supply to the world market leaders and one of Germany's oldest manufacturer of Compressors was.
In 1928 the plant was sold to the US company Yale & Thowne . Adolf Boge moved to Altglück near Hennef -Hanfmühle and in 1929 took a stake in the Steinmetz tool factory in Bad Godesberg , which he bought in 1930 when it ran into financial difficulties. In 1931 he and his son founded the Godesberg precision tool factory Boge & Sohn KG . The company was initially continued as a tool factory, at the same time the production of a lever shock absorber began, the foundation and starting point for the company's fundamentally new program. A year later, Boge shock absorbers were installed in cars for the first time.
Adolf Boge junior
The son Adolf stayed in the management of BKS. After the parent company refused to produce a car shock absorber he had developed , he had it manufactured in his father's factory in Bad Godesberg . Here a hydraulic, double-acting lever shock absorber was developed. In 1934 the newly developed Silentbloc was added to the range. Due to the great success, the decision was made to expand the company. Grete Lascheid, a domestic worker from Eitorf, offered his father the disused Hegeling plant in Eitorf.
The Eitorfer factory
In 1910 the Schwarzhaupt machine factory was established in Eitorf, where vacuum cleaners and fire extinguishers were manufactured. In 1917, CA Hegeling bought the bankrupt company. In 1921 he built the victorious upstream power plant Unkel mill and experimented with metal alloys. From 1922 only bicycles and typewriters were made. In 1930 the now closed plant was sold to Boge & Sohn KG .
Company history
On January 1, 1935, the company's headquarters were relocated to Eitorf . 175 employees worked here, compared to 120 in Bad Godesberg, who only worked on the new factory. In 1936 Boge & Sohn KG was converted into Boge GmbH . Boge supplied the shock absorbers for the KdF-Wagen , the forerunner of the VW Beetle .
Second World War
The son of Adolf Boge junior, Ernst-Adolf, was missing in the east. In 1945, a third of the plant was destroyed by bombing. Then US troops were billeted. Production resumed in 1946.
post war period
In 1948 mainly telescopic shock absorbers were produced. In 1951 Boge GmbH became Boge & Sohn OHG , which was split up in the following year into the Boge & Sohn OHG holding and the Boge GmbH operating company .
Adolf Boge senior died on June 25, 1952. At the time of the death of Adolf Boge jun. on May 5, 1961, five million shock absorbers and the same number of silent blocks were produced annually; also fourteen thousand couplings . The business was run by his sons-in-law Otto Rauschendorfer and engineer Karl Knauf as heirs. MacPherson struts were produced from 1957 .
In 1963 another branch for the production of silent blocks was built in Kempenich . In 1964, a plant in Ahrweiler was taken over to produce struts there. In 1966 another plant was taken over in Munich. This is where the new hydromates were made. This location later became independent with Hoesch AG as Hydropneumatik-Federungselemente GmbH .
In 1970 Boge acquired a stake in Sintermetall SA near Barcelona . Two years later, another plant was built in Simmern / Hunsrück for the production of rubber-metal elements and impact absorbers. In 1977 Boge completely took over Sintermetall SA in Spain .
In 1987 Boge & Sohn OHG was integrated into Boge GmbH, after which the GmbH was converted into a stock corporation.
production
| year | Employees | Produced shock absorbers million |
Produced Silentblocs million |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1951 | 600 | 0.361,000 | 1.0 |
| 1955 | 1228 | 2 | 2.0 |
| 1959 (Jan. - Oct.) | 2100 | 3 | 3.5 |
Further company history
In 1991 Boge GmbH was sold to Mannesmann AG and operated under the name Mannesmann-Boge. In 1992 the shock absorber division of Boge (Eitorf and Ahrweiler plants) was merged with Fichtel & Sachs AG and the AG was converted back into a GmbH. Boge now limited itself to the production of rubber-to-metal parts and impact dampers at the Bonn and Simmern locations . Headquarters became Bonn-Bad Godesberg.
In 1995, Boge successfully sued a former head of department, who had a percentage share paid out by supplier companies, for approximately one million DM in damages.
In 1997 it was renamed to Mannesmann Boge GmbH . Since then, there has been extensive internationalization: locations in the USA , Mexico , Brazil , Slovakia and Australia were established in the following years.
In 1999, Mannesmann merged the engineering and automotive sectors , including Boge, to form Atecs Mannesmann AG . This was taken over by Siemens after the takeover of Mannesmann by Vodafone . Siemens then sold the companies Mannesmann Sachs and Mannesmann Boge to ZF Friedrichshafen AG.
From 2001 Boge belonged to ZF Friedrichshafen, the Eitorfer plant operated under ZF Sachs , the renamed company Mannesmann Sachs. Boge GmbH was merged with ZF Lemförder Elastmetall GmbH to form ZF Boge Elastmetall GmbH , based in Damme ( Lower Saxony ). The Bonn - Bad Godesberg location became increasingly less important. As of 2011, there were only around 250 employees. "ZF Boge Elastmetall" GmbH was completely merged into "ZF Lemförder GmbH" in September 2010.
In 2007, around 800 people worked at the ZF Sachs plant in Eitorf. In the previous year, 6.9 million shock absorbers were produced.
In August 2011, most of the German individual companies were merged into a single company and since then have operated under the uniform name of “ZF Friedrichshafen AG”.
BOGE Elastmetall GmbH has been an independent company again since September 1, 2014 , as ZF Friedrichshafen AG sold the rubber-plastics division to the Chinese company Times New Material Technology (TMT). TMT is a subsidiary of the semi-state Chinese railway company CSR.
The original Boge locations in Eitorf and Ahrweiler were not sold because they belong to a different business area and are therefore still part of the ZF Group.
Trivia
In Eitorf, Bogestrasse was named after Adolf Boge.
literature
- Hermann Ersfeld: Eitorfer picture chronicle. Eitorf 1980.
- Josef Diwo: The development of Eitorf in the 19th and 20th centuries. In: Chronicle of the Eitorfer schools. 1968.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Boge shock absorbers. Stossdaempfer.net, 2010, accessed December 2, 2014 .
- ^ Theodor Rutt: Land on Sieg and Rhine - History-Culture-Economy. Scientific archive, Urkunde-Bild-Chronic GmbH, Bonn 1960.
- ↑ ZF: The ZF story: Restructuring with Go4ZF! Retrieved September 29, 2016 .