Thank God Friedrich Thomas

Gottlob Friedrich Thomas (* 1755 in Lengenfeld / Vogtl. , † 1835 in Graslitz / Bohemia ) was an industrial pioneer, merchant and spinning mill owner. He built and operated the first fine cotton spinning mill in Vogtland .

Life

The son of the teacher and organist Gottfried Thomas (1727-1810) learned the craft of a weaver . In the mid-1750s, Thomas became a member of the Falkensteiner Weavers' Guild. Here he developed from a simple weaver to a publisher and later to a master craftsman. In 1786 he married Christiane Rosine Bonitz, the daughter of a Zwönitz lace dealer. The children Ferdinand (1790-1858) and Auguste Henriette came from the marriage. By trading in Falkensteiner Kammertuch, a new batiste-like fabric , of which he was the sole publisher until 1795, Thomas rose to become one of the ten most important cotton goods wholesalers in the Vogtland. From 1800 he was increasingly concerned with the development of machines for spinning cotton and the construction of spinning mills in Lengenfeld. Around 1810 he finally gave up his activity as a cotton merchant in favor of his spinning mills. In the 1820s he retired from running his factories and devoted himself to machine wool spinning. He died in Graslitz in Bohemia in 1835.

Services

As a cloth and cotton goods dealer, he was aware of the increasing dependence of Vogtland weaving on English, machine-made cotton yarns. That is why Thomas has been involved in machine spinning since 1795. In particular, the production of fine yarn, which was needed for Vogtland muslin , was a technical challenge at the time. The success of the first Saxon machine spinning mills of Carl Friedrich Bernhard in Harthau and Wöhler & Lange in Chemnitz spurred his efforts on. For the time being, Thomas ran a mechanical engineering workshop and a small cotton mill in his home in Lengenfeld for experimental purposes. In 1802 he had a factory building built on his property and, since no spinning machine construction existed in Saxony, equipped it with largely self-made spinning technology. The foreman Johann Gottlieb Mehnert (1779–1825) employed by Thomas played a major role in the development of the machines. Thomas succeeded in putting the first three fine spinning machines, including the carding and roving machines, into operation in his factory in 1806 and producing high-quality cotton yarn. This is considered to be the hour of birth of the mechanical fine spinning mill in Vogtland. It was a milestone on the way to industrialization of the regional textile trade.

In the course of the Napoleonic Continental Dam, Thomas expanded his spinning capacity considerably. Together with his brother-in-law Friedrich Gottlob Bonitz (1773–1841), he built a cotton spinning mill in the upper Lengenfelder Aue in 1808, the so-called "upper machine", and in 1812 another spinning mill in green . During these years, Gottlob Friedrich Thomas was one of the largest spinning mills in the region, alongside Christian Gotthelf Brückner in Mylau and Ernst Wilhelm Conrad Gössel in Plauen . The town of Lengenfeld / Vogtl was primarily responsible for the Thomas Bonitz spinning mills. 1816 with 24,400 machine spindles at times over the largest spinning mill capacity in the entire Vogtland. In addition, the Thomassche mechanical engineering workshop had installed a total of 18,420 fine spindles by 1812, making it the third largest spinning machine manufacturer in the Kingdom of Saxony . With the lifting of the continental barrier in 1814, the boom in cotton spinning came to an end and many smaller spinning mills got into financial difficulties, which the Thomas-Bonitz spinning mills were not initially affected by due to their size. In the 1820s, Thomas increasingly left the operation of the cotton mill to his brother-in-law and co-owner Friedrich Gottlob Bonitz, his son Ferdinand and his son-in-law Carl Wilhelm Rollmann. In the last years of his life, Thomas himself is said to have dealt with the then little widespread machine wool spinning and the sale of spinning machines.

literature

• Michael Hammer: The Lengenfeld industrial pioneer Gottlob Friedrich Thomas (1755–1835) and the beginnings of industrialization in Vogtland . In: U. Hess, P. Listewnik, M. Schäfer (eds.): Companies in the regional and local area: 1750-2000 . Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2004, pp. 73–98.
• Karl Böhm: Chronicle of the City of Lengenfeld iV Verlag M. Rau, 1935

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Louis Bein: The industry of the Saxon Voigtland: economic history study . Volume 2, published by Duncker & Humblot, 1884, p. 154
2. ^ Siegfried Rätzer: The cotton goods manufacturer in the Saxon Vogtlande from its beginnings to the collapse of the Napoleonic continental system . Verlag Krüger, 1914, p. 100
3. ↑ Albin König: The Saxon cotton industry at the end of the last century and during the continental barrier . BGTeubner, 1899, p. 352