Friedrich Peyer in the courtyard

Friedrich Peyer in the courtyard

Friedrich Peyer im Hof (born June 18, 1817 in Schaffhausen ; † May 18, 1900 in Zurich ) was a Swiss politician and industrialist . From 1848 to 1854 and from 1857 to 1875 he was a member of the National Council (1860 as President of the National Council ). He promoted railway construction in the Schaffhausen region and in 1853 was a co-founder of the Neuhausen wagon factory , later the Swiss Industrial Society (SIG). For two decades he was a member of the board of directors of the Swiss North Eastern Railway (from 1872 to 1877 as president) and thus had a decisive influence on the development of the Swiss railway system.

biography

The son of a cloth merchant from a long-established Schaffhausen bourgeois family attended the Schaffhausen grammar school . Due to the tight financial situation of his family, Peyer had to break off his high school education and instead complete a commercial apprenticeship in Geneva . From 1836 he gained experience at various German cloth factories before he took over his parents' business in 1838. In 1839 he made his first political appearance when he passionately described the advantages of the railroad at a popular assembly and urged his fellow citizens to strive for a connection to the new means of transport. In order to achieve this goal, he initiated the establishment of the Schaffhausen Railway Association in 1842.

In 1843 Peyer was elected to the Grand Council of the Canton of Schaffhausen for the first time . He was a member of this until 1845. On behalf of the cantonal government , he traveled to London in 1846 to interest British banks in financing a Rhine Valley railway between Basel and Lake Constance . His mission initially remained unsuccessful because the Grand Duchy of Baden postponed the construction of the route above Basel. From 1845 to 1854 Peyer sat on the cantonal education council, 1847/48 on the city council of the city of Schaffhausen (legislature). He was again represented in the cantonal parliament from 1851 to 1869 and from 1871 to 1875; he was in charge of this six times.

In October 1848, Peyer was elected to the National Council in the first Swiss parliamentary elections. Together with Alfred Escher , he submitted a motion in December 1849 calling on the Federal Council to plan a railway network for Switzerland. An expert opinion prepared by Robert Stephenson recommended, among other things, a branch line between Winterthur and Schaffhausen, for which Peyer vigorously advocated. He advocated the construction and operation of railways by the state, but the Federal Assembly followed Escher in deliberating on the Railway Act and in 1852 left this task to private companies. As a representative of the Schaffhausen cantonal government, Peyer signed a state treaty between the Grand Duchy of Basel and the cantons of Schaffhausen and Basel-Stadt for the construction of the Upper Rhine Railway (as a continuation of the Baden Main Railway ).

In 1851 Peyer was a co-founder of the Dampfboot AG for Lake Constance and the Rhine . On January 17, 1853, he founded the Schweizerische Waggons-Fabrik with his brother-in-law Johann Conrad Neher and Heinrich Moser . The company, based in Neuhausen am Rheinfall, proved to be extremely successful and operated under the name Schweizerische Industrie-Gesellschaft (SIG) from 1862 onwards . Despite his merits, Peyer was not re-elected in the National Council elections in 1854 . However, three years later he returned to the National Council, which he was a member of until 1875 and which he presided over in 1860 .

In 1853, Peyer was one of the co-initiators of the Rheinfallbahn to Winterthur, which merged with the Nordostbahn (NOB) before it went into operation in 1857 (the Dampfboot AG was also affected by the merger). For the next two years, Peyer was director of the NOB. Another highlight was the opening of the Hochrheinbahn in 1863, which he significantly advanced; On this occasion he received the Grand Duke Friedrich of Baden . Peyer developed various other activities: in 1848 he founded the Kunstverein Schaffhausen, in 1862 the bank in Schaffhausen and in 1873 the Handelsbank Schaffhausen . In addition, he sat on the board of directors of Schweizerische Kreditanstalt from 1856 to 1868 and on the board of directors of Rentenanstalt from 1858 to 1867 .

In 1864 he brought Johann Friedrich Vetterli , the later inventor of the Vetterli rifle , into the company as a managing board member of SIG and from the 1860s negotiated holdings in wagon factories in Hungary , where he also set up other risky companies. In January 1872 he succeeded Alfred Escher as president of the NOB and moved to Zurich. For this reason he gave up his political offices in the canton of Schaffhausen and resigned as a national councilor in 1875. The Swiss railway system slid into a serious crisis in the 1870s, caused by the general founding crisis and the collapse of the Swiss National Railways . In 1877 Peyer had to resign as president of the NOB, in 1880 the bankruptcy of the Swiss-Hungarian soda and chemical factory ruined him . After that he lived withdrawn and in modest circumstances in Zurich.

literature

• Karl Schib : Friedrich Peyer in the courtyard. In: Schaffhauser Contributions to History. Biographies Volume II . 34th year 1957, pp. 30–42 ( PDF, 62 kB )

Web links

• Matthias Wipf: Peyer in the courtyard, Friedrich. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .