Hermann Gruson

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hermann Gruson
Switch from the Gruson factory in Buckau-Magdeburg in the Rittersgrün station museum

Hermann Gruson (born March 13, 1821 in Magdeburg ; † January 30, 1895 there ; full name Hermann August Jacques Gruson ) was a German engineer , inventor and entrepreneur .

Life

Hermann Gruson was born in the Magdeburg Citadel as the descendant of a Huguenot immigrant family and the son of Prime Lieutenant Louis Abraham Gruson . He attended the cathedral high school in Magdeburg , but then switched to the trade and business school, which he graduated in 1839, and did military service as a one-year volunteer in a pioneer unit . He then studied at the University of Berlin . He devoted himself primarily to the natural sciences and mathematics and also attended lectures by his uncle Johann Philipp Gruson .

Gruson then worked for five years in the engineering works of August Borsig , who was friends with his father, and thus got to know mechanical engineering . This is where, at the suggestion of Borsig, his passion for tropical and subtropical botany began . Borsig then placed Gruson in a position with the Berlin-Hamburg Railway , which he took up in 1843 and held until 1851. In November 1847, he saved a boy from drowning, for which he was awarded a life-saving medal. On February 1, 1851, as chief engineer, he accepted a position as an engineer for three years at the F. Wöhlert mechanical engineering institute and iron foundry in Berlin. After his mother's death, he returned to Magdeburg for family reasons.

In 1854 he first became the technical director of the United Hamburg-Magdeburg Steamship Company .

On June 1, 1855, he founded the machine factory and shipbuilding workshop H. Gruson in Buckau near Magdeburg . At the mouth of brawn in the same one created shipyard . The associated foundry was an important pillar of his company . He significantly improved the strength of cast iron by charging (mixing different types of pig iron) so that chilled cast iron products from the Gruson works became a branded product. These gained great importance for the development of mechanical engineering and railway construction in Germany . Many locomotive and wagon manufacturers marked their products with the label “only with Gruson's hard cast wheels”.

In 1856 Gruson declared in writing to join the founding assembly of the Association of German Engineers (VDI), which was held in Alexisbad .

In 1859 his company was on strike . The generally conservative Gruson saw himself compelled to pursue a more social wage policy in the face of a growing labor movement . Under his leadership, the company never went on strike again.

Initially, the company's products were successfully used on the Magdeburg-Halberstädter Eisenbahn . After 1860 he received more armaments orders from the Prussian army . It was necessary to expand the production capacities, whereupon modern facilities were built on Buckauer Marienstrasse between 1869 and 1871 .

At this time Gruson's involvement in the Berggießhübel iron ore mining area in Saxony began. Mining here goes back to the 15th century. The extracted magnetic iron ore (magnetite) was of particularly high quality and gained national recognition as "Pirnisch Eisen" as early as the 16th century. In 1870 Gruson acquired the Grube Mutter Gottes unified Feld including Gott mit uns and Friedrich Erbstolln , which he renamed Marie Louise Stolln after his first daughter and which he modernized and expanded extensively over the next few years. However, the productivity of the deposit fell short of expectations, so that mining here was largely stopped as early as 1892. An inscription above the mouth of the Marie Louise Stolln visitor mine still reminds of the former mine owner Hermann Gruson and his daughter Marie Louise.

Fahrpanzer to Gruson in Bulgaria

The first armored towers for fortifications in Germany also emerged from his Buckau foundry. For example, after 1871 several forts ( Langlütjen and Brinkamahof ) with rotating armored towers based on the Gruson system were erected in the mouth of the Weser for coastal defense . These towers were manufactured using special casting processes.

Further large orders such as the armored turrets and gun stands for the Italian naval port of La Spezia , the in-house development of the carriage construction by Max Schumann and the development and construction of own guns required further system extensions. In 1886 the Grusonwerk was converted into a stock corporation and now operated under the name of Grusonwerk AG Buckau .

At Tangerhütte , the company built a 10 km artillery range under Gruson's direction . The guns tested and demonstrated there were exported all over the world. However, Grusonwerk AG also built a wide variety of civil plants such as ore processing plants, hoists and transport equipment.

On July 1, 1891, Gruson ended his work on the board of Grusonwerk AG. Two years later the company was acquired by Krupp and renamed Friedrich Krupp AG Grusonwerk . After the end of the Second World War, this became the heavy engineering combine "Ernst Thälmann" .

After his departure, Gruson continued to devote himself to scientific studies. In 1893 he published, largely unnoticed, a scientific work on zodiacal light with the title "In the realm of light". However, his work as a botanist was successful . He owned the largest collection of cacti in Europe. With his death he donated his extensive plant collection, including a large amount of money, to the city of Magdeburg. In 1896 the Gruson greenhouses - a collection of many rare exotic plants that are now threatened with extinction - were made accessible to the Magdeburg residents .

Honors

Gruson was an honorary citizen of the city of Magdeburg . The city of Magdeburg named Grusonstrasse in his honor , and the University of Magdeburg named a building (G 10) for the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. Furthermore, a species and a genus of the cactus family were named after him: Echinocactus grusonii and Grusonia . The city of Frankfurt am Main named a street in the Ostbahnhof, Munich in 1939 in the Freimann district, and the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg named a street in the Billbrook industrial area after him. In 1894 he was awarded the Grashof commemorative coin from the Association of German Engineers (VDI). Since 1995, the Magdeburg district association of the VDI has been awarding the Gruson plaque of honor to people from the Magdeburg area who have made outstanding contributions to the district association or to technology.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Norbert Kaiser: Hermann Gruson and the modern Berggießhübel iron ore mining 1870-92. In: Landkalendererbuch Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge 2015. Schütze-Engle-Weber-Verlag, Dresden 2014, pp. 42–48.
  2. Source: “Eine Zeitung 1879”, Brouwers archive, gef. in "Am Wall", association for fortress studies
  3. Erich Kothe : On becoming and working of the VDI . In: VDI-Z. tape 98 , no. 14 , May 11, 1956, pp. 664 .
  4. Awards and prizes at a glance. Association of German Engineers, accessed on August 13, 2019 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Hermann Gruson  - collection of images, videos and audio files