Felten & Guilleaume

Statue of Franz Carl Guilleaumes at the Cologne city hall tower

Felten & Guilleaume , commonly abbreviated as F&G , has been a brand of Velatia Anlagentechnik GmbH since 2004 . For a long time it was an independent company for wire , wire rope, cable production and electrical engineering based in Cologne .

Company history

To 1900

Felten & Guilleaume, 1866

The origins of Felten & Guilleaume lie in the handicraft business of the Felten family: In the Middle Ages, the family belonged to the guild of rope makers and enjoyed a high reputation. The ropes were used in shipping and mining. The rope factory was to be found in Cologne on the corner of the streets In der Höhle and Große Sandkaule . At the beginning of the 19th century, Felten's daughter Christina (1788–1853) and Karl Guilleaume (1789–1837), pharmacist and chemist from Denklingen , son of the Solingen notary Christoph Guilleaume (1741–1804), married. Karl soon started working in the business of his father-in-law Theodor Felten (1747–1827).

In 1823 the first advertisement appeared in a Cologne newspaper under the name Felten & Guilleaume. In 1826 the Felten & Guilleaume rope factory was founded on Karthäuserwall . Four years later the first company health insurance fund was registered by Felten & Guilleaume. In 1838 the manufacture of the wire ropes invented by Bergrat Albert was taken up and considerably further developed; they were made from copper, bronze, brass and aluminum wires. In 1850, Theodor Guilleaume proposed that telegraph wires should no longer be manufactured in articulated tubes, but as part of wire ropes. Just one year later, a telegraph wire manufactured by F&G connected England to the mainland. In 1874, Franz Carl Guilleaume (1834–1887) opened another factory for wire production under the name Carlswerk in Mülheim, which was still an independent company at the time . Contact wires , overhead cables made of copper and aluminum, hollow overhead cables, line wires and power cables were part of the production program in the following decades. In 1876 F&G set up the first underground telegraph network from Berlin to Halle (Saale), which he proposed, and in 1883 began manufacturing impregnated, hemp-insulated copper high-power cables with lead sheath . Five years later, the first 2 × 45 km underground telephone cable connection was established. A year later, a 2 kV AC voltage network was produced and delivered for Amsterdam . By the turn of the century, a number of cables for city lighting were manufactured in Dresden , Saint Petersburg and Munich , but also submarine cables for the islands of Wangerooge and Sylt . In the Azerbaijani capital of Baku , 51 km of stranded high-voltage cables from F&G production were laid as early as 1900.

Share over 1000 Marks in Felten & Guillaume-Lahmeyerwerke AG on May 27, 1905

Old Viennese cable drum from F&G

In 1892 the Carlswerk became an independent company, in 1899 it was converted into a stock corporation under the name Felten & Guilleaume Carlswerk AG , which soon had subsidiaries in Vienna and Budapest : Felten & Guilleaume, factory electrical cables, Stahl- und Kupferwerke AG, Vienna. In 1896 the company acquired a shipyard in Mülheim and expanded it until 1899 in order to be able to carry out the loading traffic on the Rhine under its own control. In 1898 F&G merged with Lahmeyerwerke AG (Frankfurt am Main) to form Felten & Guilleaume-Lahmeyerwerke AG. However, just five years later, F&G separated again from Lahmeyerwerke and from then on operated under the name Felten & Guilleaume Carlswerk Actien-Gesellschaft . Through his involvement between 1912 and 1919 in the blast furnaces of Usine Steinfort, which were temporarily called " SA des Hauts-Fourneaux et Aciéries de Steinfort ", he came into contact with what would later become the Luxembourg steel group Arbed , which was the largest single shareholder for a long time. There was a kindergarten and a chapel on the factory premises, but very little is known about their appearance and furnishings. Works from the former chapel can be found today. a. in St. Johann Baptist in Cologne-Höhenhaus .

1900 to 1945

In 1904, F&G took over the bankrupt company Heller in Nuremberg , with which a whole range of telephone cables and devices was acquired, which was continuously expanded in the following years. Just six years later, the Nuremberg branch became the independent company Süddeutsche Telefon-, Apparate-, Kabel- und Drahtwerke AG, which later had the telegram address TeKaDe , which was later known worldwide . In 1921 the construction of intermediate amplifiers began, which was later expanded to include practical amplifiers for sound film cinemas. In 1934 TeKaDe began producing radios and in 1936 had already developed a television with a Braunschweig tube . The "Volksfernseher" ( standard television receiver E 1 ) equipped with a new type of rectangular picture tube from Telefunken was developed together with other companies in the radio industry and presented in the summer of 1939 at the 16th Great German Radio and Television Exhibition in Berlin. It should come on the market at Christmas of the same year, but the beginning of the Second World War prevented series production. Large quantities of telephone cables and amplifiers, which were manufactured by TeKaDe in Nuremberg, were required for the post.

• Building of the former Felten & Guilleaume Carlswerk AG
• 
• 
• 

F&G enjoyed an excellent reputation early on in the field of submarine cables sold under the brand name F&G Neptun . In 1899, F&G and the Deutsch-Atlantische Telegraphengesellschaft founded a joint company in Nordenham , the Norddeutsche Seekabelwerke (NSW) , in which in 1904 the 7,993 km long gutta-percha- insulated submarine cable was produced with the cable builders " Podbielski " and " Stephan " von Greetsiel and Borkum was relocated to New York via the Azores island of Faial and thus connected the European and American continents with the first telephone cable. F&G also manufactured the first submarine 25 kV high voltage cable of 5 km in length for the Øresund , which was laid in 1914. Eleven years later, another submarine cable was pulled through the Öresund, the Höchstädter cable, which already carried a voltage of 50 kV. Because of its great know-how in submarine cable production, Siemens took a stake in the NSW in 1931. Between 1932 and 1935 developed NSW cable sheaths of polystyrene - plastic films used in extrusion technology were applied.

Wire rope production was by no means neglected. As early as 1903, F&G supplied the ropes for Switzerland's first cable car, the Wetterhorn elevator . In 1910, Mülheim built its own blast furnace directly on the Rhine , which could be supplied with the necessary raw materials from there. In 1929 F&G produced the suspension cables for the Mülheim Bridge , and twelve years later for the Rodenkirchen Bridge . In 1940 ropes for the Boliden – Kristineberg material cable car , the longest cable car in the world with a length of 96 km, were manufactured in Sweden .

The global economic crisis did not bypass F&G any more than it did the rest of the industry: In 1929 F&G had a workforce of 17,000, in 1931 it only had 9,000 employees.

As part of its diversification into raw materials and primary products, F&G leased the Wohlfahrt lead ore mine in Rescheid in 1936 , had a modern flotation system installed and a new bed set up in the eastern mine field. In five years of operation, just 1,000 tons of lead could be produced; the mine was shut down again in 1941, despite the National Socialists' intentions to become self-sufficient . Another plant in Cologne-Nippes operated under the name Land- und Seekabelwerke AG , right next to Franz Clouth Rheinische Gummiwarenfabrik AG (later Clouth Gummiwerke ), which existed together with Papierfabrik GmbH. Brothers Kämmerer , Osnabrück , also belonged to the F&G group. Important preliminary products for the company's own cable production were produced here.

Until the 1970s, F&G was one of the leading companies in the telecommunications industry , alongside Siemens & Halske and AEG . On April 7, 1920, Siemens & Halske, together with AEG and F&G, with the participation of Deutsche Reichspost, founded a joint venture to expand the long-distance cable network, which was named Deutsche Fernkabel Gesellschaft (DFKG). As early as 1942, F&G insulated telephone cables with polyethylene . During the Second World War in 1944, part of the production was relocated to an area in Austria that was as difficult to reach for the Allied bombers as possible, for example the manufacture of electrical coils was relocated to Eugenia near Schrems in the Lower Austrian Waldviertel . Production in Cologne was stopped on March 6, 1945 as a result of the severe war damage and the lack of labor caused by the war.

1945 to 1968

After the war, the company's property abroad and in the Soviet occupation zone was lost. But since the destruction in the Carlswerk in Cologne-Mülheim was comparatively low, reconstruction began as early as June 1945 and in 1946 a 110 kV pressure cable was manufactured for the Hamburg electricity supply . In Austria, the subsidiary moved to Schrems-Eugenia in 1948 and began producing Pupin coils for restoring the telephone network, which were also manufactured in Cologne. In the same year, the wire ropes for the Danube suspension bridge near Passau could be delivered. In 1949, the production of circuit breakers started here and grew rapidly. The next year F&G entered the market with the first high-frequency power cable. A 63 kV cable for Egypt was produced in 1952. Further power cables for Casablanca and the Belgian Congo followed in the same year. Steel cables for bridges and cable cars in Jamaica , Venezuela , the USA and Italy were manufactured, but the cable car from Cologne Zoo to Cologne-Deutz also received steel cables from F&G. The Cologne-based company Pohlig-Heckel-Bleichert AG , originally operating in the field of cable cars, was integrated into the group. In 1966 the wire ropes of the world's longest cable car with a length of 4,566 m were delivered to the Renon cable car in Bolzano , South Tyrol . The iron, steel, wire and rope business was leased to the majority owner Arbed in 1968.

In 1953, a well-known exhibition pavilion was built on the exhibition grounds in Vienna based on plans by Oswald Haerdtl .

In 1957 an own development center for low-voltage switchgear was founded in Vienna - Döbling . The residual current circuit breaker , which is still used today, was invented here and in Schrems under the direction of the physicist Gottfried Biegelmeier . The export share has increased continuously and reached a share of 67% by 1998.

After the first crossing of the Rhine with a 110 kV external gas pressure cable in Cologne in 1958, an order for the same type from Dublin followed three years later . In 1961/62 F&G laid an 85 km long 132 kV oil cable in Buenos Aires , with the longest cable length between two stations being 17 km. In 1960 “Felten & Guilleaume Carlswerk AG” had a capital of 93 million DM and a workforce of 23,560 employees.

In the halls of the former Weserflug in Nordenham , the range was expanded from August 1, 1949 to include cable fittings such as sleeves , bushings and terminations , but also in 1952 to include explosion-proof DC and three-phase motors with flameproof encapsulation, which were mainly used in mining . In addition, the Nordenham site was involved in the production of house connection boxes, circuit breakers and a large number of miniaturized circuit breakers .

In 1958 and 1959, the Norddeutsche Seekabelwerke in Nordenham supplied the 1,855 km long TAT 2 subsea telecommunications cable with a polyethylene jacket. The North German submarine cable works were also involved in ICECAN, a 3,224 km long submarine cable that connected Europe with the American continent via Iceland , Greenland and Canada and became part of the “hot wire” between the White House and the Kremlin , as well as the 2,223 km long transatlantic cable TAT 4 significantly involved through their product. Submarine cables supplied by F&G ran through the South China Sea between the South Vietnamese cities of Da Nang , Huế and Cam Ranh Bay , which were held particularly long and persistently by the American military during the Vietnam War . In 1967 the first 150 kV external gas pressure cable on the European continent was laid in Amsterdam.

1969 until today

In 1969, the majority owner Arbed sold half of his share package, i.e. 35% of the share capital of Felten & Guilleaume Carlswerk AG , to the Dutch N.V. Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken . In 1976 the loss reached 39.5 million DM. A board of directors, at times thirteen, rearranged the various production sites according to products: the Osnabrück paper factory Kämmerer was sold, the plants in Braunschweig and Herford closed. The old cable factory for paper-insulated cables in Cologne-Nippes was also given up. The production of coated wires and strands in the Bad Arolsen plant , which was founded in 1948, was transferred to kabelmetal electro GmbH , which was part of the Alcatel group. As early as 1978, F&G returned to profitability with a surplus of 14 million DM after the company was divided into ten independently calculating business areas.

Investments were made again in the cable factory in Cologne-Mülheim, where medium-voltage, high-voltage and extra-high voltage cables were produced. There was a melt from the turn of the century for the production of flat bars and semi-finished products from aluminum and copper cores and wires, but also a diamond train. In addition, roller tubes , cylinder tubes and special wires, but also 30 kV line ropes for powering the giant excavators and spreaders in the nearby open- cast lignite mine were manufactured. In 1977, Pohlig-Heckel-Bleichert AG was sold to the mining company Arbed , which merged the construction machinery company, which had meanwhile specialized in the construction of large excavators, with the Weserhütte to form PHB Weserhütte . In 1980 the Arbed group sold the Weserhütte to the Hoesch group.

Philips, which had a 35% stake in F&G, took over the remaining capital shares of Arbed in 1979 and incorporated the greater part of the company under the new company Philips Communication Industry AG (PKI), while the Arbed group took over the much smaller wire production under the Name Arbed - F&G Drahtwerke Köln GmbH . The wire works later became Trefil Europe , which was renamed Wire Works Cologne (DWK) after several bankruptcies .

Philips declared energy technology to be a marginal activity and outsourced it as not having a promising future. In 1986, the energy technology division with the production locations Cologne-Mülheim, Cologne-Porz , Nordenham, Berlin and Krefeld was floated on the stock exchange together with the Austrian subsidiary in Schrems , its Spanish subsidiary Medex and the Luxembourg location in Walferdange under the name Felten & Guilleaume Energietechnik AG . The GEW Köln AG with 20% the largest single shareholder. Philips itself sold its core activity Philips Communication Industry (PKI) to Nokia (fiber optics division) in 1993 and to AT&T (network division) in 1996, which in turn passed PKI on to Lucent . In 1988, Philips had planned to build a new fiber optic cable factory in Cologne on "the green field", but had not gotten beyond the construction of a new administration building. The NSW had become a full subsidiary of the Siemens group , until the latter sold them on to the US American Corning .

In Krefeld, F&G took over a switchgear factory and the production program was thoroughly modernized. The protective gas SF ₆ has already been used for insulation and integrated into the new concept of medium-voltage switchgear. F&G quickly established itself on the market. Even the competition had their switchgear manufactured by F&G and then sold them under their own brand name.

The production of high-voltage capacitors and bushings in Cologne-Porz with around 300 employees was sold to Siemens in 1990. Meirowsky AG , founded in 1894 by Max Meirowsky at the same location, was "Aryanized" in 1941 as Dielektra AG and until 1981 also belonged to the F&G Group. After 1,500 employees temporarily produced printed circuit boards for the electrical industry here, 70 employees are still producing laminates after several bankruptcies .

When AEG was dissolved by the Daimler-Benz group in the early 1990s , F&G temporarily had the option and the necessary credit to take over AEG's entire cable production. Instead, F & G decided by the Treuhandanstalt which Hett townspeople catenary wire and bronze GmbH and the switchgear Uebigau to assume, in the since air- and gas-insulated medium-voltage switchgear produced. In addition, F & G got involved with Kablo Kladno in the Czech Republic in 1991 and relocated the production of its low-voltage cables from Berlin to there. The Berlin plant with around 100 employees was closed. In 1995 F & G bought the Austrian cable manufacturers Pengg Breitenfeld and Mayer & Drössler . F & G's involvement in the cable cartel for decades may also have played a role, which ended in record fines. With the purchase of the two Austrian cable manufacturers, F&G got a foothold in telecommunications technology for the first time since the exit forced by Philips , since this is where the fiber optic cable that F&G helped to develop was also manufactured.

In 1991 F&G set up a subsidiary for the production of switchgear and two more for cable production in the People's Republic of China . Unlike many small, more modern cable manufacturers, F&G had a large, well-equipped test facility. This also made it possible to construct a power cable specially developed for the Transrapid , which, however, was never produced due to decades of German discussions. In 1994, F&G achieved sales of DM 1 billion for the first time. Unlike most cable manufacturers, F&G achieved profits despite tough competition after the cable cartel was dissolved. In August 1998, the Moeller Group initially bought its share in F&G Energietechnik AG from GEW Werke AG and shortly thereafter also took over the majority of the remaining shares. Less than a year later, Moeller sold the entire cable division of F&G to the Danish competitor nkt , who concentrated its paper cable production in Cologne-Mülheim and sold the telecommunications cable production in Austria in 2005. The cable factory in Cologne-Mülheim still existed for a few years under the name F&G Kabelwerke GmbH and then completely merged into NKT Cables GmbH.

In May 2008 the foundation stone for a new cable factory was NKT in the Leverkusen Chemical Park set, which was opened in October of 2010. The property in Cologne-Mülheim was sold to the real estate service provider Beos GmbH, which has been renting the Carlswerk space since then .

In a long-standing dispute between individual small shareholders and the Moeller Group, which was temporarily pending in court, Moeller was forced to disclose the real value of the acquired industrial group, which last had 3,700 employees, and to distribute it to the existing shareholders until Felten & Guilleaume AG on December 31, 2004 completely merged with the Moeller Group.

The plant engineering division, located in Krefeld, was sold to Grupo Ormazabal Anlagentechnik GmbH in March 2004 . The busbar trunking division was acquired from Siemens.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Franz Brill : Guilleaume, Johann Theodor. In: New German Biography . Volume 7, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1966, ISBN 3-428-00188-5 , p. 299 (digitized version)
2. ^ Günter Schulz: The workers and employees at Felten & Guilleaume. 1979, p. 101.
3. ↑ Ludmilla Hauser: Leverkusen: nkt cables opens cable plant in Chempark , rp-online.de, October 26, 2010, accessed on December 21, 2011.
4. ↑ ormazabal.com
5. ↑ general-anzeiger-bonn.de

literature

• Sascha Widdig: Felten & Guilleaume - Carlswerk . Sutton, Erfurt 2011.
• 100 years of F&G wire ropes. In: Felten & Guilleaume Carlswerk-Rundschau. Issue 17/18, Cologne 1935.
• 75 years of Carlswerk; 1874-1949 . Felten & Guilleaume AG, Cologne 1949.
• Alexander Faridi: From AEG to ARBED: the failed steelworks project of 'Felten & Guilleaume Carlswerk AG' 1910–1920. In: Raw material base and sales market: the heavy industry of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the Aachen area. (= Aachen studies on economic and social history. Volume 2). Shaker, Aachen 2005, pp. 143-178.
• Wilfried Feldenkirchen: Far East business of Felten & Guilleaume Carlswerk AG until the beginning of the Second World War. In: Journal of Company History. 22, 1977, p. 91.
• Wilfried Feldenkirchen: Far East business of Felten & Guilleaume Carlswerk AG until the beginning of the Second World War. Part 2. In: Journal of Company History. 22, 1977, p. 161.
• A tour of the Carlswerk. Felten & Guilleaume Carlswerk Actien-Gesellschaft, Cologne-Mülheim 1924.
• Carl Herrmann: The importance of the Carlswerk in the cable industry. o. O. 1927.
• W (ilhelm) Jutzi: 50 years of Carlswerk 1874–1924 Felten & Guilleaume Carlswerk Aktien-Gesellschaft . Ziegler Beckmann, Cologne 1926.
• Günther Schulz: The workers and employees at Felten & Guilleaume. Social historical investigation of a Cologne industrial company in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In: Journal of Company History. Supplement 13. Wiesbaden 1979 (also Phil. Diss. Bonn 1977)
• Wilhelm Vogel: The more recent development of high-voltage cable technology Felten & Guilleaume Carlswerk A.-G. In: Journal for Technical Physics. Barth, Leipzig 1927, pp. 477-489.

Web links

Commons : Felten & Guilleaume  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Full history of the transatlantic cables and F & G's involvement in it
• History of the North German submarine cable works NSW
• Early documents and newspaper articles on Felten & Guilleaume in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Takeover of F&G AG by Moeller ( Memento from September 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
• Kölsch for everyone! ( Memento from April 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Development of the dielectric between 1997 and 2004.
• Development of Dielektra 2005
• Entry on Felten & Guilleaume in the Austria Forum  (in the AEIOU Austria Lexicon )
• Gabriele Oepen-Domschky: (from) Guilleaume, entrepreneurial family . Ed .: Portal Rhenish History of the Rhineland Regional Association. Cologne September 30, 2010 ( lvr.de [accessed on May 31, 2013]).

Coordinates: 50 ° 58 ′ 3.7 ″  N , 7 ° 0 ′ 51.7 ″  E