Ferdinand Heye

Ferdinand Heye (born July 13, 1838 in Bremen , † July 26, 1889 in Düsseldorf-Gerresheim ) was a German entrepreneur and royal Prussian councilor who founded the Gerresheimer Glashütte in 1864 .

biography

Heye was the fourth and youngest son of the respected businessman Caspar Hermann Heye , who settled in Bremen in 1819 and acquired the Obernkirchener Glashütte (see Heye International ) for his trading business . Son Ferdinand, at the age of 25, had his inheritance of 30,000 thalers paid out in 1864 and founded the Gerresheimer Glashütte in southern Gerresheim (now Düsseldorf-Gerresheim ), which soon became world famous.

For Heye, the well-being of his workers, who had been brought in from large parts of Europe, was an important concern. Right from the start, he granted his workers free accommodation and tax exemption. The company apartments built by Heye had, among other things, a windowless room for the daytime rest of the night shift workers and received the highest award for social progress at an international exhibition. Since 1867 he financed the company health insurance and accident insurance . The pension fund he introduced was a kind of pension insurance. The Ferdinandheim was built for the old and disabled members of the Gerresheim glass factory, which offered them a place of refuge. Heye founded choirs and music bands, a works library with a reading room, the Heyebad , an athlete club and a cycling club.

In 1874, Heye introduced a melting process developed by Friedrich Siemens in 1867 for continuous glass melting, which led to the fact that the previously completely irregular working hours were adapted to the needs of the workers and their families, "so that the workers can have all the main meals with their families" . Gerresheimer Glashütte could boast of having undercut the eight-hour day with shifts of 7.5 hours , when working hours of ten or more hours were still common in other industries. The production output of the plant was increased fifty-fold by this process.

Heye's mother donated 600 thalers and two acres of land to the town of Gerresheim for the construction of a school in which, from 1868, a single teacher, with the support of a 16-year-old helper, taught a total of 200 pupils - the so-called Püsterkinder . In 1884 Heye had the rapidly growing school expanded significantly at his own expense.

In 1875, Heye introduced the uniform mineral water bottle with an adhesive label, which replaced the clay jugs that had been used until then. Around 1900, the Gerresheimer Glashütte and its branches produced 140 million bottles for almost every country in the world.

Gravestone Ferdinand Heye in the north cemetery in Düsseldorf

Honors

• Heye was awarded the Prussian honorary title of Kommerzienrat .
• The Heyestraße , main road in the southern Gerresheim at which both the former main gate of the hut and were many of the company housing, has been named after him.

literature

• Michael Kaufmann: glas. Ralf Schuster Verlag, Passau 2008, ISBN 978-3-940784-03-2 .

Web links

• Article in the Westdeutsche Zeitung ( memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )