Escher Wyss AG
The Escher Wyss AG , originally Escher Wyss & Cie. , was a Swiss industrial company specializing in mechanical engineering and turbine construction until it was taken over by Sulzer AG in 1969 . The company's headquarters were in Zurich .
History and products
The company Escher, Wyss & Cie. was founded in 1805 by Hans Caspar Escher and Salomon von Wyss in Zurich under the cotton spinning company Escher Wyss & Co as the second successful mechanical spinning mill in Switzerland, after the Hard spinning mill in Wülflingen . Around 1801 Escher came to the St. Gallen monastery as a young officer and saw the first Swiss spinning machine of the General Society of the English Cotton Mill in St. Gallen in operation.
The company's first seat was at the former "Neumühle" from 1648 (Niederdorfpforte), where parts of the former paradise bulwark were incorporated into the factory. By 1892, an extensive factory with its own power plant was built in the area at what is now Neumühle-Quai. The cantonal administration buildings “Walche” and “Kaspar-Escher-Haus” now stand on the former company site. In order to maintain and manufacture the spinning machines and the water power plants required for their operation, a separate mechanical engineering activity was created, which is active in the areas of textile machines, paper machines, water wheels and turbines, pumps, transmission systems and later also in shipbuilding and in the manufacture of steam engines, steam ships and steam locomotives was. The company also ran its own foundry on the lower Stampfenbachstrasse. In 1860 the spinning mill was closed and the company concentrated on mechanical engineering.
In 1889 the management decided to move the factory from the city of Zurich to the then still independent community of Aussersihl , because the production conditions in the "Neumühle" had become unreasonable. The lack of a rail connection was a particular problem. The workers had to pull the finished products up to Stampfenbachstrasse with ropes, where they were brought to the train station at night by horse and cart. In the years 1892 to 1895, the machine factory relocated its plants and equipment to the vicinity of today's Escher-Wyss-Platz in the Hardquartier , today Escher-Wyss-Areal .
By the turn of the century, Escher Wyss made a name for itself internationally through innovations in the fields of steam and water power. Escher Wyss was a world leader, particularly in the field of hydraulics. On many historical steam engines and in old power plants you can still find the plaques with the company name "Escher, Wyss & Cie." Find. Escher Wyss built a total of 299 paddle steamers, the last being the Lötschberg steamship, completed in 1914 .
After the First World War, the company concentrated on the world market and was one of the largest exporters of industrial products in Switzerland. In 1931 a consortium of banks took over the majority of the company in order to prevent the collapse of the export company, which had been hard hit by the global economic crisis . Nevertheless, in 1935 the canton and the city had to keep the company alive for two years by means of a job guarantee with a simultaneous loss guarantee. At the same time the name was changed to Escher Wyss AG. Finally Jacob Schmidheiny bought the traditional company in 1937. The headquarters of the group remained in Zurich, where at times over 2000 workers were employed. At the end of the 1960s, Escher Wyss got into a sales crisis despite its technological market leadership, as cheaper competitors came onto the market, the global hydropower boom was coming to an end and the machines manufactured by Escher Wyss turned out to be very durable.
In 1966/69 Escher Wyss and its subsidiaries were taken over by the Winterthur industrial group Sulzer . In 1981, as part of an internal reorganization of the group, Sulzer established the companies "Escher Wyss AG, Zurich", "Bell Maschinenfabrik AG, Kriens / Luzern", "Escher Wyss GmbH, Ravensburg", "De Pretto-Escher Wyss SpA, Scio, Vicenza" to form the “Escher Wyss” division. In 1983, the thermal turbomachinery department was integrated into Escher Wyss AG, which then changed its name to “Sulzer-Escher Wyss AG”. In 1984 the daughter in Ravensburg took over this name. Expansion into the USA also followed in 1983 with the takeover of a company in the greater Cincinnati area that manufactured paper machines. It traded under the name “Sulzer-Escher Wyss Inc., Middletown”. Sulzer-Escher Wyss held stakes in Andritz AG in Graz, Austria (hydraulics, paper machines), Dominion Bridge-Sulzer Inc. Montreal, Canada, and TEISA in Mexico. In 1985, it also expanded its thermal turbomachinery business by taking over the US companies “Hickham Industries, Inc., La Porte, Texas” and “TurboSystems International, Inc., Latham, New York”. The focus of production was now in the areas of hydraulics and thermal turbo machines. In addition, the group was active in the areas of equipment for hydropower plants, fiber cement plants, process engineering plants and components, Nipco rolls and rolling mills, variable-pitch propellers for ships, foundry products and manufacturing for third parties.
In 1999 Sulzer sold the hydropower division (“Sulzer Hydro”) to the Austrian company VA Technologie AG (VA Tech) and in 2001 the turbo compressors division to the German MAN . When Siemens bought it in 2005, the hydropower division of VA Technologie AG had to be sold to Andritz in 2006 due to a requirement of the EU antitrust authorities and was temporarily operated as VA Tech Hydro GmbH until December 31, 2008 . On January 1, 2009, the company was renamed Andritz Hydro GmbH. Within Andritz Hydro GmbH, ship propellers will continue to be manufactured at the Ravensburg site using the Escher Wyss brand name.
The Escher-Wyss area
In 1889, the company acquired 153,800 m² of land in the lower Hard, on which it had the company Locher & Cie build a spacious, modern production facility. In 1891 construction began on the 2160 m² boiler shop, which also housed the ship assembly. The central machine factory was built between 1892 and 1894, with ten hall sections taking up an area of 15,000 m². In addition, the foundry hall with 6350 m² was built at the same time, which was connected to the machine factory by rails. Other buildings such as the hammer forge were attached to the complex. The whole system was planned in such a way that materials and products could be moved as efficiently as possible and without wasting time. For the energy supply, Escher Wyss had its own power plant built in Bremgarten-Zufikon , which transmitted three-phase current to Zurich over a distance of 15 kilometers, where it was converted into alternating and direct current in its own power station. A 1000 kW Zoelly steam turbine system was also available as a reserve . Together with a 250 HP steam engine for the light reserve, a completely autonomous supply of energy to the factory was guaranteed. The 46 m high factory chimney built at the time with the characteristic water reservoir of 50 t is still a visible landmark of the facility today. The Escher Wyss machine factory was regarded as a prime example of a modern machine factory well into the 20th century.
More factories were set up around the Escher Wyss facility, so that a new industrial quarter in Zurich developed there by the turn of the century . The intersection of Sihl-Quai, Hard-Strasse and Limmat-Strasse was renamed Escher-Wyss-Platz after the company . On the prominent corner was the neoclassical management building. The company also gave the quarter in which it was located its name ( Escher Wyss ). In addition to Zurich, Escher Wyss had other branches, including a. in Ravensburg , Leesdorf (today a district of Baden near Vienna ), Lindau and Schio and operated a worldwide license and export network.
Sulzer has gradually sold the former corporate site in the lower Hard in Zurich since the beginning of the 1990s in order to raise capital for its core business. At that time, a violent dispute broke out between real estate companies and the head of the city's building construction department, Ursula Koch , who wanted to maintain industrial production on the site. To date, industrial use has been preserved on six hectares, mainly the Escher Wyss successor companies MAN Turbo AG and Andritz Hydro.
The Escher-Wyss area represented the most extensive urban development zone in Zurich West . Numerous new buildings have been erected there since 1990 - for example the Technopark (1993), the Novotel, Ibis and Etap hotels, the “Westpark” office, commercial and residential complexes and “Puls 5” - or modernized, like the Mobimo high-rise (Bluewin Tower). Some industrial buildings have been converted, such as the boiler shop, in which the Schauspielhaus now operates a branch under the label "Shipbuilding" as an allusion to the former ship manufacture in the building, the foundry hall, which is integrated into the "Puls 5" development, or the administration tower , which was converted into the “Bluewin Tower” in 2001 (also known as the “Mobimo high-rise”). In addition, three new streets were built, the foundry, shipbuilding and Technoparkstrasse. The turbine square in the heart of the former industrial area became the largest square in the city of Zurich.
Large parts of the former Escher-Wyss area became the property of Allreal Holding in 2002 . Some of the remaining facilities are listed, such as the former administration building by the architect Robert Landolt (1954), the chimney of the industrial hall or the “shipbuilding” hall.
Trivia
The fictional Walter Faber from Max Frisch's Homo faber was temporarily employed as an engineer for Escher Wyss in Baghdad.
literature
- For the 150th anniversary of Escher Wyss AG., Zurich . Schweizerische Bauzeitung, Volume 73, Issue 38, 1955. doi : 10.5169 / seals-61985
- Hans-Peter Bärtschi: Industrialization, railway battles and town planning. The development of the Zurich industrial and working-class district of Aussersihl. A comparative contribution to the history of architecture and technology . (Series of publications by the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, gta 25). Birkhäuser, Basel 1983.
- Zurich City Archives: Escher Wyss AG. Company archive 1701-2005
Web links
- Hans Stadler: Escher, Wyss & Cie .. In: Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz .
- Escher Wyss, company archive Picture galleries on the Zurich City Archives website
- Website of the Escher Wyss area
- Subject Escher Wyss-Areal (PDF; 1.62 MB) In: Magazine Hochparterre
- VA TECH-HYDRO GmbH website
- MAN Diesel & Turbo website
- Matthias Scharrer: Historical Places. The heart of the industrial district. Limmattaler Zeitung from February 24, 2017
Individual evidence
- ↑ T. Büchi: Beurselaub - Pictures from four centuries of securities trading, p. 90
- ↑ Helmut Keck, Gérald Vullioud: The power of the wheel - water turbines for the energy future. In: Franz Betschon , Stefan Betschon, Willy Schlachter (eds.): Engineers build Switzerland. First-hand history of technology. Volume 2. Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-03823-912-3 , pp. 194-211
- ↑ Steamship Lötschberg , on dampfromantik-nostalgie.ch, accessed on June 15, 2015
- ↑ Walter Baumann: The Goods Still Times: Zurich from Biedermeier to Belle Epoque . Zurich 1986, p. 48/49 (advertisement “Sulzer-Escher Wyss today”)
- ↑ Bärtschi: Industrialisierung , p. 398f.