Gustav Siegle

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Gustav Siegle

Gustav Siegle , from 1898 by Siegle , (born February 2, 1840 in Nürtingen ; † October 10, 1905 in Stuttgart ) was a German chemist , entrepreneur , founder of the paint factory G. Siegle & Co. and co-founder of BASF , who also worked politically and socially committed. He was a member of the German Reichstag , a hospital in Feuerbach and the Gustav-Siegle-Haus in Stuttgart go back to him.

The entrepreneur

Siegles birthplace

Gustav Siegle was a son of the Nürtingen pharmacist and manufacturer Heinrich Siegle (1815–1863), who in turn came from an old miller family in Ditzingen . From 1842 the father ran a small paint factory - first in Munich, from 1848 in Stuttgart - which he bequeathed to his son. Siegle studied chemistry at the Stuttgart Polytechnic and joined his father's company in 1857. For further professional training he went on trips abroad, which took him to Russia and the USA, among others. After taking over the management of the company in 1862, he experimented primarily with the tar colors (aniline colors) discovered by William Henry Perkin in 1856 and expanded production. In 1873 he brought his company together with that of the paint manufacturer Rudolf Knosp to the Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik ( BASF ) , which was founded in 1865 by Friedrich Engelhorn .

Siegle took over the management of the sales department at BASF, which at the time was based in Stuttgart. Siegle brought in his own extensive trading relationships and thus led BASF to great economic success. From 1873 to 1887 he was a member of the Board of Management of BASF, and then to 1905 of the Supervisory Board . In 1889, Siegle broke the ties between his company and BASF and founded a new paint factory in Feuerbach (which was not incorporated into Stuttgart until 1933) under the company G. Siegle & Co. in the legal form of an open trading company . It specialized in the production of mineral and lacquer paints and was economically very successful. Siegle rose to become one of the richest men in Württemberg and also acquired stakes in numerous other companies, including a. The Siegle family was the majority shareholder of the Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik (WMF) for a long time . Siegle's company, founded in 1889, was acquired by BASF in 1970 from the property of his descendants.

The politician

Memorial plaque on the birthplace
Grave site at the Fangelsbach cemetery in Stuttgart

Gustav Siegle was a member of the Stuttgart Citizens' Committee from 1868 to 1870 and was a strong supporter of the establishment of a German Empire under Prussian leadership. In 1887 Siegle was elected to the German Reichstag in Stuttgart for the National Liberals , which were organized as a German party in Württemberg , and held this mandate until 1898. He represented the constituency of Württemberg 1 (Stuttgart city and office ).

Gustav Siegle House, 1914

Honors

The sponsor

As a patron, he provided the Stuttgart city administration with 50,000 marks at the beginning of the 1890s in order to grant low-interest or interest-free loans to medium-sized businesses (especially wine growers) . In 1893 he financed the construction of the first hospital in Feuerbach in order to improve health care. The Gustav Siegle Foundation , which was founded in 1907 (two years after his death) with a capital of 500,000 marks and opened the Gustav Siegle House in Stuttgart in 1912, goes back to him . The aim of the house and foundation is to serve popular education without distinguishing between religious and political tendencies.

A serious illness forced Gustav Siegle to withdraw from economic and political life. He died at the age of 65. His grave is in the Fangelsbach cemetery in Stuttgart .

family

Siegle left three daughters:

The yearbook of millionaires in Württemberg with Hohenzollern lists among the 20 richest Württemberg citizens of 1914, in addition to Siegles widow Julie, the two sons-in-law Fritz von Gemmingen and Karl von Ostertag, whose combined assets of around 30 million marks are only slightly lower than that of King Wilhelm of Württemberg II. (36 million marks) was.

Known employees

literature

  • Esslingen district (ed.): The Esslingen district. Konrad Theiss Verlag, Stuttgart 1978, ISBN 3-8062-0171-4 , p. 157.
  • Jutta Pillower:  Siegle, Gustav von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 355 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • R. Piloty: Gustav Siegle. A picture of life. Stuttgart n.d. [1910].
  • Steffen Seischab: Wealth and responsibility. A portrait of the industrialist Gustav Siegle (1840-1905). In: Steffen Seischab: Nürtinger Köpf, Nürtingen: Senner 2018, pp. 99–106.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Schaible: True stories from Ditzingen . In: Heimatbuch Ditzingen. (Ed. by the municipality of Ditzingen on the city survey 1966) Ditzingen 1966, p. 209.
  2. ^ Fritz Specht, Paul Schwabe: The Reichstag elections from 1867 to 1903. Statistics of the Reichstag elections along with the program.
  3. ↑ Court and State Manual of the Kingdom of Württemberg 1901 , p. 160.
  4. ↑ Court and State Manual of the Kingdom of Württemberg 1901 , p. 33.
  5. ^ Rudolf Martin: Yearbook of the wealth and income of the millionaires in Württemberg with Hohenzollern. Berlin 1914, pp. 3–5.
personal data
SURNAME Siegle, Gustav
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Siegle, Gustav von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German entrepreneur in the chemical industry and politician (DP), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH February 2, 1840
PLACE OF BIRTH Nürtingen
DATE OF DEATH October 10, 1905
Place of death Stuttgart