Curt Adolph Netto

Plaque on his birthplace in Freiberg

Curt Netto, on the left Erwin Bälz

Cover draft by Curt Netto for the score of the Japanese national anthem (1880) edited by Franz Eckert

Curt Adolph Netto (born August 21, 1847 in Freiberg ; † February 7, 1909 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German metallurgist and author. He is considered to be a pioneer for the industrial utilization of aluminum .

Life

Netto came from a family of mountain officials, his father was Gustav Adolph Netto. He attended the boys' school in Freiberg and, after his father was transferred as a mountain jury in Schneeberg, the local school. In 1860 Netto returned to Freiberg to continue his education at the Freiberg high school. He enrolled at the Bergakademie Freiberg in 1864 and joined the Corps Saxo-Borussia Freiberg . After completing his studies in 1869 and doing voluntary military service in Schneeberg, he was called up for the Franco-German War , in which he was decorated with the Iron Cross, 2nd class .

From 1871 on, Netto received a position as a chemist in his brother-in-law Ernst August Geitner's enamel paint factory in Schneeberg. In 1873 he was appointed director of the lead and silver mines in Kosaka (Akita) on the island of Honshu . During his tenure, which lasted until 1877, he modernized the mining facilities and introduced new smelting methods.

After the privatization of the Kosaka mines, Netto was appointed lecturer for metallurgy in 1877 and, from 1878, professor for mining and metallurgy at the University of Tokyo . As early as 1873, Netto was one of the founders of the German Society for Nature and Ethnology of Asia (OAG). Between 1882 and 1883 he took a year off to embark on a research trip to Europe, Mexico and the United States.

In June 1885 he received the Tennō the award of the Order of the Rising Sun . After he had finished teaching in November 1885, Netto traveled back to Europe in 1886 because the Japanese population had seen a change in sentiment about the reputation of European culture and the importance of foreign contractors ( O-yatoi gaikokujin ). After his return he was forced to sell parts of his sizeable collection of Japanese woodblock prints, as he had lost his savings in a bank failure in Canton in 1886. Many of them went to the art collector and dealer Siegfried Bing (alias Samuel Bing) in Paris and thus made a decisive contribution to the emergence of Japonism .

In 1886 Netto worked for consul Martin Michael Bair in Paris. Employed at Friedrich Krupp AG between 1887 and 1889 , he developed a new, patented process for aluminum production via sodium reduction from cryolite , which, however, quickly became ineffective due to the development of smelting electrolysis . In 1889, on the recommendation of Clemens Winkler , who had been on the Supervisory Board of Metallgesellschaft in Frankfurt am Main since 1883 , Netto was appointed head of the Metallgesellschaft's technical department. After the Metallurgische Gesellschaft was spun off in 1897, Netto and Richard de Neufville headed the company for which he developed the Lurgi acronym .

In 1899 Netto married. The marriage to Emily Nothwang had three children. In 1902 Netto resigned from the executive board for health reasons and switched to the supervisory board. From 1906 onwards, Netto took regular cures in the Bad Nauheim salt bath due to his poor health . Curt Adolph Netto died in Frankfurt at the age of 56.

Fonts

Netto has written several mining and metallurgical specialist publications, which are based in particular on his activities in Japan and describe the situation there. He brought back drawings and sketches from his travels to Japan. His most significant writings are the art and cultural history works:

• Paper butterflies from Japan. After the author's sketches illustrated by Paul Bender . TO Weigel, Leipzig 1888.
• Japanese humor (with Gottfried Wagener), Brockhaus, Leipzig 1901. ( digitized version )

literature

• Robert B. Heimann , Rainer Slotta : Curt Adolph Netto. A cosmopolitan from Freiberg / Saxony (1847–1909). Bochum 1999, ISBN 3-921533-70-8
• Wolfgang Michel: Curt Adolf Netto (1847-1909). A German in Japan during the Meiji era. In: Annual Report No. 8 of the Japanese-German Society West Japan, Fukuoka 1984, pp. 13-21. (pdf, Kyushu University Institutional Repository; 32.2 MB)
• Museumsgesellschaft Kronberg: The happy eyes: the draftsman and watercolorist Curt Netto . Exhibition by the Kronberg Museum Society and the Metallgesellschaft AG Frankfurt am Main. Kronberg, 1981.

Web links

• Literature by and about Curt Adolph Netto in the catalog of the German National Library