Eduard Honigmann

Eduard Honigmann (born January 1, 1809 in Wetter (Ruhr) , † February 19, 1886 in Aachen ) was a German miner and mine owner.

Live and act

The son of the Essen mine director Johann Ehrenfried Honigmann (1775–1855) and Helene Wilhelmine Bohnstedt (1783–1859) studied mining and mining after attending the mining school in Bochum and after completing several internships in Westphalian collieries at the universities of Bonn and Berlin . After passing his exams in 1836, Honigmann was taken on by the mining office in Düren as a mine surveyor and two years later as a mine surveyor. This was followed in 1841 by the promotion to mining authority assessor and finally in 1847 to mining foreman .

Honigmann's significant merit was that, on the basis of precise observations and scientific considerations, he came to the conclusion that the coal deposits north of the worm area and east of the so-called Feldbiss must have a continuation. For this purpose he had test drillings carried out in the Alsdorf and Hoengen area in 1846 , which confirmed his thesis, whereby significant deposits of fatty coal could be detected. This was of particular importance, since in the previous mines in the Wurmrevier the less productive lean coal was mostly mined. However, during the development, Honigmann had to accept that considerable problems could arise when sinking due to the high water content of the floating rock layers. In further test bores, he also demonstrated a possible connection between the Aachen and Belgian coal basins.

Finally, in 1848, Honigmann received the concession together with the Aachen justice of the peace and cousin of his wife Friedrich Boelling as well as the Düren textile manufacturer Leopold Schoeller , with whom he shared the entrepreneurial venture against the strong competition of the Eschweiler Mining Association and the Association for Hard Coal Construction in the Worm District Operation of a new mine in Alsdorf-Hoengen, which he named after his wife's first name, Grube Maria . He succeeded in overcoming these floating mountain layers, which was of great importance for the further development of this pit and the Aachen district as a whole. In order to be able to concentrate fully on his mine, Honigmann resigned from the civil service in 1853.

Since high investment costs were required for the development and promotion, Honigmann and his shareholders wanted to put the Maria mine on a broader capital base and for this reason renamed their company on November 30, 1863 to " Aachen-Hoengener-Bergwerks-Aktiengesellschaft ". Nevertheless, Honigmann was forced to lease the expensive Maria mine to the Vereinigungsgesellschaft on May 15, 1878, in order to reduce the financial burdens for his further business plans. Ultimately, the Maria mine was finally sold to the association company by Honigmann's sons in 1890.

In the meantime, Eduard Honigmann had also received the concession both for the Königsgrube near Würselen in order to open and expand it again and later in 1873 for the Nordstern mine near Merkstein , after he had already sold the Königsgrube to the Vereinigungsgesellschaft in 1869. On Nordstern, Honigmann succeeded in using a new type of compressed air method, which his brother Ludwig Honigmann (1822–1898), a mountain master first in Saarbrücken and then in Merkstein, had invented to sink shafts through water-rich floating sand covers, and which was also more advantageous for ventilating seams with heavy weather. Thanks to this modern technology, Honigmann was able to build a double shaft system with three tunnels on Nordstern by 1876 and steadily increase the yield in the decades that followed. After the death of Eduard Honigmann in 1886, Nordstern fell proportionally to his sons, whereby his son Moritz transferred them to " Hahnsche Werke AG " in 1914 , which later became a company of the Mannesmann Group itself .

family

Eduard Honigmann was married to Maria Boelling (1811–1878), daughter of the Aurich regional and city court director Theodor Boelling. Together they had two daughters and four sons, including:

• Friedrich Honigmann (1841–1913), mining entrepreneur at the Sophia-Jacoba colliery in Hückelhoven - Ratheim and the “ Oranje-Nassau-Mijnen ” in Heerlen / NL as well as shareholder in the Nordstern mine in Merkstein. His son Eduard (1872–1917) became a mining engineer and owner of his father's mines.
• Carl Eduard Honigmann (1842–1903), mine owner and director of the Nordstern mine, as well as a representative of mining in the Aachen Chamber of Commerce . His first daughter, Emy Marie Rosalie (1871–1944), married the Vice President of the Government Robert von Görschen and the second daughter, Emma Helene (1872–1954), married the District Court Judge Rudolf Püngeler .
• Moritz Honigmann (1844–1918), chemist, inventor and shareholder in the Nordstern mine. One of his sons, Otto Honigmann (1879-1959), was a well-known travel photographer and hotel owner in Bad Toelz , whose works during the year 2010 at the National Museum of Ethnology were issued

Literature and Sources

• Hans Jaeger:  Honigmann, Eduard. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7 , p. 598 f. ( Digitized version ).