Charles Eisler

Charles Eisler (born November 14, 1884 in Hungary , † October 1973 in East Orange , New Jersey) was a Hungarian -American entrepreneur .

Childhood and youth

The second of nine children of Adolph and Helen Eisler learned mechanics and mechanical engineering. At the age of 17 he began an apprenticeship in a local factory and was licensed for steam engines and high pressure boilers. With the aim of emigrating to the USA, he first went to Eberswalde, north of Berlin, in 1902, where he worked as a crane operator at a foundry and then as a toolmaker for AEG in Berlin. In November 1904 he arrived in New York City with the Potsdam and quickly found employment with Westinghouse in East Pittsburgh . From 1907 he was the foreman of the toolmakers at Studebaker Metzger Motor Company .

In the spring of 1912 he returned to Hungary, worked as a toolmaker at the Standard Electric Company in Újpest and on December 24, married Frieda Schwartz († 1962), with whom he had four children: Charles Jr., Martha (Leff), Ruth ( Forest) and Constanze (Smith).

In 1914 the couple moved back to the USA with the newborn Charles Jr., where he constructed special machines for the production of incandescent lamps with tungsten filaments at the Westinghouse Lamp Company in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and where he was promoted to chief engineer. In 1918 he completed his mechanical engineering studies at the International Correspondence Schools .

Profession and own company

In 1919 he moved to the independent lamp manufacturer Save Electric Corporation founded by Max Ettinger in Brooklyn, New York. General Electric (GE), Westinghouse, and RCA had a monopoly on modern incandescent lamp production machinery and independent manufacturers had trouble competing with them. When GE bought Save Electric in 1920 to take it off the market, Eisler lost his job.

He then founded his own Eisler Engineering Company for consulting and equipping the production of electric lamps, picture tubes, radio tubes, glass products, neon tubes, welding equipment and laboratory equipment. He opened a workshop at 15 Kirk Alley, Newark, New Jersey, and doubled his workforce by 1924. When radio tube production peaked in 1929, the stock market crashed, causing him to sell a 49% stake in Frank Bonner's company had to.

In June 1933 he organized a group of independent lamp manufacturers in the Incandescent Lamp Manufacturer's Association (ILMA), in which the members pooled their resources for patent litigation. Eisler was the third largest supplier of machines for the manufacture of light bulbs, and ILMA members sourced most of their equipment from Eisler. The degree of automation and production speed did not come close to the GE machines, but they were also significantly cheaper. Between 1923 and 1928, Eisler Engineering was sued by GE for alleged patent infringement at least four times, but won every case. Several GE patents have been invalidated. Eisler's strongest defense tool was an article he published in 1916.

His son Charles, who held the post of vice president, became president in 1954 when Eisler retired to the post of chairman of the board until 1958. His son sold the company to Kahle Engineering Company, founded in 1920, in the late 1970s . Kahle, originally from the glass division, later concentrated on the manufacture of medical devices.

From 1916 Charles Eisler acquired 57 US patents for the mass production of glass articles. In 1951 he received an honorary doctorate from Bloomfield College in New Jersey and in 1952 he was elected a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers .

Publications

• The Million-dollar Bend: The Autobiography of the Benefactor of the Radio Tube and Lamp Industry ; 1960

Individual evidence

1. ↑ private genealogy page  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Smithsonian National Museum of American History ( Memento of the original from January 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.