Melitta Bentz

AAM Liebscher / Bentz

Melitta Bentz (born January 31, 1873 in Dresden as Amalie Auguste Melitta Liebscher ; † June 29, 1950 in Holzhausen an der Porta Westfalica ) developed the prefabricated disposable coffee filter in 1908 .

Life

Melitta Bentz was the daughter of a Dresden bookseller. As a 35-year-old housewife and mother, she experimented on a simple method to avoid the coffee grounds in the finished coffee . The processes of that time used common funnels and filters made of textile or blotting paper, which first had to be cut out, and were therefore quite time-consuming. Melitta took the blotters from her sons' exercise books , which she put in a tin , the bottom of which she had pierced with nails. When this simple technique met with general enthusiasm among her friends, she decided to market her idea .

On June 20, 1908, the imperial patent office granted utility model protection for their round filters with prefabricated filter paper . On December 15, 1908, the company “M. Bentz, Marschallstrasse 31 ” entered in the Dresden commercial register with equity of 73 pfennigs.

Melitta's husband Johannes Emil Hugo Bentz (born April 20, 1873 in Clausthal-Zellerfeld as the twelfth son of the local rector; † January 28, 1946 in Minden), was a department head in a Dresden department store and started his own business in 1906. The Bentz couple and their sons Willy (born October 25, 1899) and Horst (born May 27, 1904) were the first employees of the up-and-coming company. In 1911 the company won gold and silver medals from the International Hygiene Exhibition and the Saxon Restaurant Association for the filter. Her daughter Hertha was born on February 24, 1911.

A Melitta coffee filter with a filter bag

The small four-room apartment in the Pirnaische Vorstadt became too small for the rapidly growing business, so that the family business had to move in 1915. During the First World War , Melitta Bentz kept the business going with the production of cardboard boxes and thus got herself and her children through the war years. Her husband was at the front. After the war, the company continued to grow rapidly: in 1920 and 1924 additional buildings were bought. At this point in time 100,000 filters had already been produced. In 1929 the company moved from Dresden to Minden in East Westphalia , as no suitable production facilities could be found in Dresden. The demand for the products was now so great that 80 workers had to work in a double shift system. Even after she had withdrawn from the business, Melitta Bentz was the company's “social conscience” and took great care of the employees.

Today the company founded by Melitta Bentz, the Melitta Unternehmensgruppe Bentz KG , is an international group with 4,550 employees, which is led by her great-grandson Jero Bentz and by the non-family members Volker Stühmeier and Pieter van Halewijn. The company's headquarters are in Minden.

Melitta Bentz died in 1950 at the age of 77 in Holzhausen near Minden. In her memory there is a Melitta-Bentz-Strasse in Dresden, Schwäbisch Gmünd , Sarstedt , Telgte and Munich , and Melitta-Strasse in Minden and Stuttgart . In 2000, she was voted one of the “100 Dresdeners of the 20th Century” in the daily newspaper Dresdner Latest Nachrichten . Her grave is in the Mindener Nordfriedhof .

literature

• Mechthild Hempe: 100 years of Melitta. History of a brand company . Ed .: Melitta group of companies. Geschichtsbüro, Cologne 2008, ISBN 3-940371-12-2 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ABC of German inventions . Report by Dorothee Ott and Kristine von Soden. Hessischer Rundfunk , December 23, 2010
2. ^ Johann Georg Krünitz: Economic Encyclopedia . tape 32 , 1784, pp. 172 ( full text in Google Book Search).
3. ↑ Did you know? that the first coffee filter was made from a tin can and blotting paper? (No longer available online.) Melitta Group, archived from the original on May 21, 2015 ; Retrieved May 19, 2015 . 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.  
4. ↑ Clean, freeze, brew coffee. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. May 17, 2010, accessed May 19, 2015 . 
5. ↑ 100 years of Melitta, the history of a branded company , Cologne 2008, p. 09 ff.
6. ↑ Melitta Bentz on the website of the Melitta group of companies ( Memento of the original from September 15, 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. 
7. ↑ 100 Dresden residents of the 20th century . In: Dresdner Latest News . Dresdner Nachrichten, Dresden December 31, 1999, p. 22 .