Emil Rathenau

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Emil Rathenau
Emil Rathenau around 1880
Emil Rathenau (first row, sixth from left) visited on 12 September 1891, other celebrities, the first three-phase power plant in Lauffen that the International Electrotechnical exhibition was installed
Emil and Mathilde Rathenau (1881)
Emil Rathenau, portrayed by his cousin Max Liebermann

Emil Moritz Rathenau (born December 11, 1838 in Berlin ; † June 20, 1915 there ) was a German mechanical engineer and entrepreneur and the founder of AEG .

Life

The son of a wealthy Jewish businessman Moritz Rathenau (1800-1871) and his wife Therese (1815-1895), daughter of Joseph Liebermann , came after the visit of the high school as a volunteer in the his uncle Benjamin Liebermann belonging "Wilhelmshütte" in Eulau at Sprottau ( Lower Silesia ) a. After four years of practical training in his uncle's mechanical engineering factory in Silesia, he studied mechanical engineering at the Polytechnic in Hanover and at the TH Zurich , briefly found a job at the August Borsig locomotive factory in Berlin and then went to England for two years , where he worked in various workshops and companies deepened his knowledge.

Returning to Berlin in 1865, he and a former school friend bought a small machine factory. Part of the start-up capital came from the dowry of Mathilde Nachmann (1845–1926), daughter of a wealthy Frankfurt banker, who Rathenau married in 1866. He soon succeeded in profitably implementing the production of transportable "standard steam engines" and in continuously expanding the business. When, in the founding years of 1871/72, the banks were able to persuade the co-owner to convert the company into a stock corporation, Rathenau opposed such plans. When the company went into liquidation as a result of the start-up crisis in 1873 , Rathenau left the company. The attempts to install a telephone   network in Berlin and to set up electrical street lighting in Berlin together with Werner von Siemens failed.

Almost ten years of searching followed. Rathenau attended the World Exhibition in Vienna in 1873 , in Philadelphia in 1876 and in Paris in 1878 . Particularly on the trip to America, he was impressed by the abundance of technical innovations and the rational working methods. From 1880 to 1891 he worked as a representative of the Reichspost to set up a telephone network in Berlin.

When Rathenau saw Edison's invention of the electric incandescent lamp at the International Electricity Exhibition in Paris in 1881 , he recognized the future prospects of electricity as an energy supplier for lighting fixtures and machines. However, his attempts to win Werner von Siemens over to the plan for electric street lighting met with no interest. After lengthy negotiations, Rathenau acquired the rights to commercialize Edison's patents in Germany in 1882 . Due to the caution of the financing banks, at first only a study society was set up before the German Edison Society for Applied Electricity was founded as a stock corporation under the direction of Rathenau in 1883 . This did not happen without prior agreement with Werner von Siemens; a contract provided for a delimitation of interests and limited cooperation.

In 1887 Rathenau succeeded in breaking away from the American Edison Society and increasing the capital to 12 million marks. The German Bank and Siemens rose as shareholders in the now as General Electric Company (AEG) firmierende company. Rathenau's expansive corporate policy initiated the rise of AEG, so that by the end of the 19th century it almost surpassed Siemens as a leading electrical company. At the beginning of the 1890s, the small study company had become an internationally operating group with around 3,000 workers.

The relationship between Rathenau and AEG vis-à-vis Siemens was more and more determined by confrontation and competition instead of cooperation. Negotiations to terminate the cooperation agreement had already begun in 1888. In the early 1890s, the conflict escalated into a price war in all areas, before an amicable unbundling of contractual relationships was achieved in 1894. A mixture of cooperation and competition remained decisive in the period that followed - for example in the area of ​​wireless messaging, after the Telefunken Company was founded as a joint venture at the instigation of Kaiser Wilhelm II .

Behind the conflict was not least the clash of two contrasting types of entrepreneurs and the embossed of them corporate cultures . Werner von Siemens was the inventor-entrepreneur operating on the basis of a family business, who only entered new markets cautiously and with his own technical know-how. Rathenau, on the other hand, is often referred to as the first “manager-entrepreneur” who, from the start, specialized and, on the basis of acquired patents, entered promising markets with aggressive sales strategies, prepared to take risks. With this corporate planning based on flexible adjustment to market forces and with an entrepreneurial understanding oriented towards internationalization, opening of markets and marketing, Rathenau represented a new and "modern" type of entrepreneur. Even when the electrical industry got into a crisis around the turn of the century, he succeeded in leading AEG out of the crisis stronger and in a horizontal trust through a targeted merger, cooperation and participation policy, among others with the United States' leading General Electric Co. 1913/14 to expand almost 70,000 employees.

In 1907 he was awarded the Grashof Memorial Medal from the Association of German Engineers .

In 1912 Rathenau withdrew from active business due to illness and was represented by his son Walther Rathenau , who joined the AEG management team at the turn of the century with his brother Erich Rathenau, who died in 1903 . After Rathenau's death in 1915, his son Walther took over the presidency of the AEG.

Rathenau died at the age of 76 of the consequences (including leg amputation) of his diabetes mellitus . The hereditary burial of the German-Jewish family Emil Rathenau is located in the forest cemetery Oberschöneweide in the Berlin district of Treptow-Köpenick.

title

  • Dr.-Ing. E. h.
  • Dr. phil. hc
  • Dr. techn. hc
  • Secret building council

Memberships

progeny

The marriage with Mathilde Nachmann had three children:

literature

Web links

Commons : Emil Rathenau  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Björn Hartmann: Berlin's first start-up - Emil Rathenau and the AEG. June 20, 2015, accessed on March 22, 2020 (German).
  2. ^ Oskar Grosse: 40 years of telephone. Springer, Berlin 1917
  3. ↑ Hereditary funeral of the Emil Rathenau family. March 19, 2020, accessed March 22, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Rathenau, Emil
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rathenau, Emil Moritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mechanical engineer and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH December 11, 1838
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH June 20, 1915
Place of death Berlin