History of the Dillinger Hütte
The history of the Dillinger Hütte goes back to the year 1685 and even further back in its prehistory and is characterized by its proximity to France . If the affiliation of the plant changed from one country to another, this was not without consequences for sales markets. In addition to these indirect effects of the war, direct effects of the war often impaired the plant. By adapting the products to requirements and by constantly modernizing the production facilities, the company was able to overcome all crises and continues to exist today.
Foundation phase
In 1583 the Duke of Lorraine sent ore graves to Dillingen to bring ore to Moyeuvre , where it was smelted on a trial basis. The good result of the test prompted the Duke to lease the ore mine from the Seigneur von Dillingen for 12 years for an annual interest of 100 francs and to build a hammer in Dillingen or the surrounding area.
17th century
The hammer, like many other companies on the Saar, probably fell victim to the circumstances of the Thirty Years' War . Dillingen was attacked by the troops of Gallas , the castle plundered and razed ; the region suffered from famine and plague from 1630 to 1635. A new upswing came when Lorraine fell to France in the Peace of Nijmegen in 1679. From 1680 the French King Louis XIV had the Saarlouis fortress built to protect the French eastern border. In December 1685 , the King gave the Marquis Charles Henri Gaspard de Lenoncourt, who ruled the Barony of Dillingen, permission to build an ironworks with a furnace at the gates of the Saarlouis fortress. In return, he committed himself to the annual payment of one écu d'or (gold taler). De Lenoncourt was Grand Chamberlain and envoy in the service of the Duke of Lorraine and knew the Sun King personally.
The four-year construction resulted in high costs, since local workers from the rulership could not be used, but skilled workers from the Liège industrial area were hired. The people of Liège not only brought their knowledge of iron smelting with them, but also the potato, which was little known on the Saar , in their cross sacks . After completion, the plant consisted of a 20 foot high melting furnace with two bellows and a fresh hut . This included a foundry for sand and clay casting and a luppet hammer for stretching nail and bar irons. The melting furnace and hammer were operated with water power. For this purpose, the water of the prims was led in wooden canals to be stored in a pond. The brown iron ore was probably extracted north of Dillingen, the charcoal came from the Hüttenwald , which is still the property of Dillinger Hütte today. The wood felled there is still used today to fire up the blast furnaces. Initially, products were wrought iron, bar iron, nails and cast goods such as take plates , pots and pans. Most of the production was initially delivered to nearby Saarlouis.
Since Lenoncourt could not or did not want to take care of the business himself, he entrusted the Jesuit Father Renard with these tasks. Renard was able to conclude the first major contract with the fortress management in Saarlouis by agreeing to supply the furnaces and cast goods required in the garrison . A price of 45 francs for 1,000 pounds of iron was negotiated. Soon, however, the border situation affected business. The factory was initially in France. This provided good sales opportunities. That changed with the Peace of Rijswijk in 1697 , when Dillingen fell back to the Duchy of Lorraine. As a result, the plant was at the customs border and had to realign its business.
18th century
A few decades after it was founded, the plant was supplemented by auxiliary plants in production or supported in the supply of raw materials. The son of the Marquis de Lenoncourt had another smelter built with a stamping mill and foundry in Bettingen, today's Schmelz . Iron of high ductility could be produced with the 20 percent ore mined in Steinbach, Gresaubach and Greinhof . The reason for the addition was not only production support, but also the increasing exhaustion of resources on site. The forest was running out, the ore was meanwhile coming from Erzüge , Merchingen and Hargarten . Because Lebach eggs can be extracted in open-cast mining, most of the pig iron was supplied from Bettingen until the middle of the 18th century. The further processing steps then took place in Dillingen. A branch was also set up in Münchweiler, now part of Nunkirchen .
- Awards
Silver medal from 1806 for the surface quality of the tinplate
back
Gold medal from the exhibition of the "Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale" in 1809
back
.jpg)
.jpg)
Gradually, sales channels in the direction of the Moselle and Rhine could be developed via the Saar . New products such as sickles, scythes, scoops , planing knives and other tools for agricultural use could then be shipped via the ports in Holland across the Atlantic to southern France. This sea transport was a detour for deliveries to France; At the time of the American War of Independence , in which France fought alongside the rebels against England from 1778 to 1783, the sea sales channel could also be used to deliver the entire production to the French Navy.
At the beginning of the 18th century, Lenoncourt leased the works including the ore mines, the forest and the farm. After the de Lenoncourt family owned the plant for half a century, it was sold in 1743 and changed hands several times until it was converted into a public limited company in 1809.
The company thrived in the second half of the 18th century. A year before the French Revolution, a foundry furnace and four refining furnaces were counted in Dillingen, as well as two large hammers with a horizontal hammer running along the shaft . A tin hammer ran on its own wheel. There was also a cutting unit, a stamping mill, magazines and workers' apartments. Day and night production required a shift system.
French Revolution
A year before the French Revolution , the factory employed around 400 workers, including loggers, charcoal burners and carters. The plants in Dillingen and Bettingen together produced around 500 t of pig iron from 52,000 quintals a year. Due to the French Revolution, production and the number of workers were greatly reduced. That changed only three years later with the almost exclusive supply of the French people's armies. Instead of stove plates, pots and scythes, cannonballs and howitzers were cast.
This changed abruptly in 1793, when the Austrians invaded Dillingen down the Prims. On the 3rd Ventôse , the Austrians penetrated the plant and destroyed it, after which the plant stood still for four years. With the formation of the four Rhenish departments in 1797, production was resumed. Weapons and ammunition were also produced again.
Napoleon Bonaparte , whose Marshal Ney had worked as an apprentice and clerk in the office of the Dillinger Hütte, stayed in Styria in 1797 and was very impressed by the ironmongery production there. That moved him to send 38 specialists from there to Dillingen to build up the production of small iron items for civil use. The attempt failed and the original method of production was resumed.
19th century
With the construction of the first sheet rolling mill on the European continent in 1802, sheet metal determined the further development of the plant. The smelter advanced to become an important black and tinplate producer .
The time between the wars between England and France was used to study the iron and steel industry in England. With the knowledge acquired, it was possible in 1804 to implement the long-cherished plan to produce increased quantities of tin and black plate. The sheets were no longer forged with a hammer, but instead rolled out in the new water-powered rolling mill . The quality achieved was rewarded with the silver and gold medal at exhibitions in Paris in 1806 and 1809. Copper plates were also produced. The ore required for this was mined in St. Barbara and the Düppenweiler . The panels were used by the French Navy to clad the wooden ship floors.
In 1812 the plant had advanced to become a large company with 361 workers. But already in 1813 the decline began due to a labor shortage as a result of forced recruitment by Napoleon. With the invasion of the Prussian troops under General Yorck , production stopped in 1814. On November 20, 1815, Dillingen fell to Prussia with the Second Peace of Paris , which began the renewed search for new markets. The requests made to King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia for support for the hut were not without effect. The king replied:
" I hereby inform the owners of the copper and sheet metal factories in Dillingen for the time being that I am inclined to approve all admissible means for the maintenance of the intended factories and, in the end , I have given the State Chancellor Prince Hardenberg the order to be present in the Rhine provinces to gain closer knowledge of the same ... "
Corporation
With the approval of Napoléon Bonaparte , Dillinger Hütte became the first stock company in Germany and one of the first stock companies in Europe in 1809 . In 1815 the profitable production of weapons for the Napoleonic Army had to be converted to peace production. The stock corporation was realigned in 1818 with the takeover of 40% of the share capital by the Stumm brothers under the name "Dillinger Hüttenwerke". To avoid competition, the Neunkirchen plant concentrated on long products and the Dillingen plant on sheet metal. Black, white, copper and corrugated sheet metal, also leaded or galvanized, were produced almost exclusively. The thickness range ranged from the thin button plate to the thick boiler plate. The so-called Dillinger sheet metal gauge with 24 thicknesses has meanwhile been recognized as the decisive standard throughout Europe.
In 1828, the ironworks that were taken over in Geislautern and in 1845 the Hohenrhein an der Lahn blast furnace were added to the pig iron suppliers Bettingen and Münchweiler . After a few promising attempts, the charcoal, which until then had been used exclusively for smelting, was replaced by coke . In 1828 the company took on the name Anonymous Society of Dillinger Hüttenwerke .
Steam power
In 1835 steam power found its way into Dillingen. A steam engine built in Aachen at the mechanical engineering company Dobbs & Nelleson was pulled by 14 horses to Cologne and then shipped over the Rhine to Mainz. From there, the overland transport was continued and duly received by the Dillingern. The machine developed 40 hp and drove a rolling mill. Like water power, horse power has also been replaced by the steam engine.
In the 1850s, Westphalian factories increasingly competed with Dillingen on the sheet metal market. In the devastating price war, in which the price fell by two thirds, a number of competitors could not survive. The Saar line built in 1858 not only benefited from the rapid removal of the products, the rails for it were also produced. Due to the demand for railway tracks and the use of the railway for sales, the plant was able to develop further. In 1861 597 workers produced 10,890 tons of finished products and 2,040 tons of pig iron. Inspired by England, steel production was switched from the puddle process to the Bessemer process in 1860 . This made the production of mild steel possible. The Bessemer process was replaced by the Thomas process in 1894 . The Lorraine ore could be processed through better removal of carbon, phosphorus and sulfur. This freshening enabled productivity to be increased enormously compared to the previous puddling process. What used to require ten days of manual stirring now only takes one day.
Minette
The replacement of horse power with steam power was followed by the next technical upheaval, the replacement of domestic ore by the cheaper and easier to process minette . It was transported over the Saarkohlenkanal to Saarbrücken, from there by train to Dillingen. With the introduction of the Minette a hundred years later, a blast furnace could go back into operation. As a result, the subsidiary plants in Münchweiler and Geislautern lost their importance and were sold. The workforce doubled compared to 1861 to around 1,300 men. The products were sold in the Zollverein area , Switzerland and Austria.
During the Franco-Prussian War , hussars , artillerymen and infantrymen were billeted at the plant. The bought Dillinger paper mill and the sleeping quarters served as a hospital , the stables as a horse hospital .
After the increased demand caused by the war did not materialize at the end of the war, production stagnated. In addition, the Lorraine iron production, which was now within the German borders, competed with Dillingen. That changed only in 1879 with the change from free trade policy to protection policy.
Since it was cheaper to transport the coal to the minette that was now in use than the other way around, minette pits were bought in Lorraine and the pig iron was produced on site. A first blast furnace was built in Redingen in 1861. Two more followed in 1881 and 1887. The coke came from the Ruhr.
Armor plates
The German Navy was dependent on supplies from England for the armor of their ships. These were good starting conditions for the development of armor plate production. The roll stand built for this purpose had rolls 1 m in diameter and a barrel width of 3500 mm. The drive developed 3000 hp. The plates supplied for the Imperial Navy were 6 m long, 1.5 m wide and weighed 12 t. The plates were initially made from welding iron obtained using the puddle process . After successful attempts at fire at the shooting range in Kummersdorf , mass production began. The armor effect could be improved through the development of clad sheet metal with Siemens-Martin steel . However, this required the construction of a corresponding Siemens-Martin steelworks, the first of its kind on the Saar. The steel produced in this way had a carbon content of 0.58% to 0.78%, a manganese content below 1% and a phosphorus content below 0.1%. The composite consisted of rolling iron and Siemens-Martin steel. In between, they poured steel made from scrap iron and fried iron . Finally, the composite was hot-rolled. H. Reusch also developed a variable vertical mold in which the liquid steel was not poured between two plates, but on one side of a steel plate.
Before the first German ships, the Chinese battleships Dingyuan and Zhenyuan, built by Vulcan in Szczecin, and the small armored cruiser Jingyuan were armored with Dillinger plates. The Dingyuan and Zhenyuan were used in the 1894 naval battle of Yalu in the First Sino-Japanese War . Their replicas are in Weihai . Next, the Bremen Werft AG Weser was supplied with armor plates for the construction of the Brummer and Bremse gunboats of the Brummer class .
The zeitgeist of those years and the supraregional perception of the Dillinger factory can be seen in the contribution “A Triumph of German War Industry” in the gazebo .
" ... Where is that supposed to lead? Dear fatherland, may you be quiet; Krupp, Gruson , Dillingen, they keep watch to three! A cheer for German industry, which, next to the tried and tested army command, also knew how to promote respect for the German army, the German people in defense and arms, to the outside world! ... "
In 1895 the delivery of a forging press manufactured by the LW Breuer machine tool factory in Schumacher was announced: "This will be the most powerful forging press on the mainland." With a force of 10,000 t, it was used to forge the armor plates.
20th century
With the exponential growth in the number of employees, production grew accordingly. At 200,000 t per year, steel production had increased tenfold since the end of the 19th century. One-sided hardened nickel steel plates were jointly developed with Friedrich Krupp AG , which also produces armor plates . The production quantities were shared. This expansion of armor plate production required the construction of a steam-powered hydraulic press with a pressing force of 10,000 t. The steam engine developed 10,000 hp. The shooting range built on the factory premises in 1904 was equipped with large-caliber guns. About half of the production consisted of armor plates; the rest of sheet metal and railroad tracks.
With the construction of the first European electrically operated sheet rolling mill, the focus on sheet metal began in 1902. This could be leaded, galvanized or tinned. Also dynamo sheet was produced. During production, the sheet metal thickness was doubled by folding and rolled in several layers. In order to achieve the thinnest possible end products, up to 16 layers were used. The same process is used in the manufacture of aluminum foil .
In addition to the now possible use of coke oven gas , the use of blast furnace gas as an energy source was also possible. This and the logistical decoupling of pig iron production and further processing of the pig iron in the steelworks through the invention of the pig iron mixer gave rise to the renewed construction of blast furnaces.
First World War
At the beginning of the war, armor plates were also produced for the army in 1914. Then there was the ammunition production. The grenades were shot across the road to Saarlouis. The circumstances of the war disrupted the supply of raw materials as the military requisitioned transport capacities . In addition to these indirect war-related impairments, there were also direct attacks in the form of air raids. As a result of the shortage, an attempt was made to resume ore mining in the Düppenweiler mine . Because of the low yield, operations were then stopped again. In order to achieve the production goals, the number of workers was increased to 9,000. However, their composition of women and unskilled workers impaired productivity .
State visit 1987
During Erich Honecker's visit to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1987 , Honecker took part in a meal in the Dillinger Hütte on September 10, 1987 with Prime Minister Lafontaine and representatives of the economy and politics from Saarland.
literature
- AG der Dillinger Hüttenwerke (publisher): "For the 275th anniversary of Dillinger Hütte - 1685–1960", Dillingen 1960.
- AG der Dillinger Hüttenwerke (Ed.): "300 Years of Dillinger Hütte - A Review", Dillingen 1985.
- AG der Dillinger Hüttenwerke (ed.): "325 Years of Dillinger Hütte", Dillingen 2010.
- Aloys Lehnert: "History of the City of Dillingen Saar", Krüger printing works, Dillingen 1968.
Footnotes
- ^ Saarbrücker Zeitung, 12. October 1999.
- ^ Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale
- ↑ Saarbrücker Zeitung, August 20, 2009.
- ^ Aktiengesellschaft der Dillinger Hüttenwerke (ed.): Us Hütt . Dillingen / Saar 1957.
- ↑ Sheet metal theory from the lexicon of all technology
- ↑ industrialmuseums-emr.org
- ↑ www.albert-gieseler.de
- ↑ Ship armor from Lexicon of All Technology
- ↑ The competition between gun and tank. In: Polytechnisches Journal . 321, 1906, pp. 359-363.
- ↑ Various sentences on the representation of Siemens-Martin-Eisen. In: Polytechnisches Journal . 259, 1886, Miszelle 8, p. 54.
- ↑ Innovations in the production of compound armor plates. In: Polytechnisches Journal . 247, 1883, pp. 15-18.
- ↑ Reusch's mold for the production of compound armor plates. In: Polytechnisches Journal . 249, 1883, p. 412.
- ↑ The Gazebo (1883). Leipzig: Ernst Keil, 1883, page 207. Digital full-text edition in Wikisource
- ↑ Large forging press. In: Polytechnisches Journal . 295, 1895, Miszelle 5, p. 94.
- ↑ Erich Honecker's visit to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1987. ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Accessed August 11, 2015.
Web links
_207.jpg&oldid=1850847){kind=link}
Coordinates: 49 ° 21 '18.8 " N , 6 ° 44' 8.5" E