Gottfried Schenker

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Gottfried Schenker

(Urs Josef) Gottfried Schenker (born February 14, 1842 in Däniken near Olten in Switzerland ; † November 26, 1901 in Vienna ) was an Austrian entrepreneur of Swiss origin. He was a co-founder of today's Schenker AG .

Life

Gottfried Schenker comes from a large family that has lived in Däniken for generations. He attended the normal school in Däniken and the old canton school in Aarau . After graduating from high school , he began to study law at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in 1861 . He became a member of the Corps Helvetia. Due to the bankruptcy of his father's locksmith business, he broke off his studies and in 1865 took a civil servant position at the Swiss Central Railway in Basel. In 1866 he switched to the private sector for the transport company F. Braff & Eckert, an agency of the French Eastern Railway . There he was only concerned with the tariff system. In 1867 he was sent to Vienna to look after a French grain import from Austria-Hungary and to manage the Vienna branch. Disputes with his superiors and difficulties in procuring train wagons left him exhausted. After a stay in hospital, he left the company at the end of 1867 and took over the Vienna agency for the Hamburg forwarding company Elkan & Co. in 1868 . He organized large rail freight under the principles of the most efficient and most profitable utilization of freight capacities, for example railway construction material from France via Switzerland to Austria and tobacco and food in the opposite direction. In the meantime, Schenker had settled in Vienna and married in 1869. During his honeymoon, he arranged an order for the transport of rail carriage parts from Switzerland to Romania . That gave him the idea of ​​starting his own business, but in 1871 he began to work for the forwarding company Rappaport & Kann as a tariff specialist.

At the beginning of 1872 he got to know Moritz Karpeles and Moritz Hirsch , the owners of the shipping company Karpeles und Hirsch , which had been founded earlier . The two were impressed by Schenker, who saw great opportunities in international freight traffic in Southeast and Western Europe and in sea traffic from Trieste and Fiume to implement his plans. Together they founded the forwarding company Schenker & Co. on July 1, 1872, based in Vienna and with start-up capital of 50,000 guilders . Karpeles and Hirsch brought in 20,000 guilders each, 10,000 came from Schenker, who, although he only had a minority stake, was able to skim off 50 percent of the profit.

In Vienna he set up groupage transport for the first time to various cities inside and outside Austria-Hungary . While he already handled these transports mainly by rail, the corresponding house pick-ups and deliveries were still carried out with horse-drawn vehicles. He soon set up branches in many cities such as Budapest , Prague , Belgrade and Istanbul . He also used shipping for bulk mailings, initially on the Danube.

Around 1879/80, Schenker founded the Adria Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft or Adria Steamship Company with a majority stake - soon the largest Hungarian shipping company in international maritime trade: He began with routes from Trieste and Fiume to Glasgow . Soon he expanded the timetable with five ships on routes between Trieste, Fiume, London , Liverpool , Hull and Glasgow. Contracts were signed over time with Cunard , Thomas Wilson and Clarkson.

River ship transport on the Danube was an essential part of Schenker's forwarding business. That is why the South German Danube Steamship Company was founded in Munich in 1895 . At the turn of the century, this subsidiary had 7 tugboats and 36 barges on the way and branches in Regensburg , Vienna and Budapest.

Also in 1895 he co-founded with William Burrell of Burrell & Son and August Schenker-Angerer , his later adopted son and designated successor company, again a shipping company, the Navigation Company Austro-Americana , to the trade with the United States cover. Austro-Americana, based in Trieste, was the first cargo ship line to set up regular lines between the Adriatic and North America . In 1913 a branch was opened in New York . But Schenker not only saw a mainstay in the transport industry, he also participated in the emerging telecommunications companies that connected Europe with America with their overseas lines.

Tomb in the Heiligenstadt cemetery

In 1896 Schenker became an Austrian citizen. In the same year he adopted his partner August Angerer, who was related through his wife, now Schenker-Angerer. In the last year of his life, Gottfried Schenker was placed under trusteeship due to a progressive illness and August took over management of the company.

Schenker is buried in the Heiligenstadt cemetery . In the 11th district of Vienna Simmering was Gottfried Schenker street named after him.

Honors

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Gottfried Schenker  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gregor Gatscher-Riedl : Red-white-red across the Atlantic: The Austro-Americana shipping . Berndorf 2019.
  2. ↑ The Kösener corps lists 1910 list him (with the wrong number) in the alphabetical list of names. He is missing from the list.
  3. ↑ The information differs from the year the shipping company was founded: According to Natmeßnig 2005 in NDB: 1880. According to a detailed company history on Answers.com: 1879.
personal data
SURNAME Schenker, Gottfried
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian entrepreneur of Swiss origin
DATE OF BIRTH February 14, 1842
PLACE OF BIRTH Däniken near Olten , Switzerland
DATE OF DEATH November 26, 1901
Place of death Vienna