Wilhelm Spindler (entrepreneur)

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Monument to Wilhelm Spindler at the Wilhelm Spindler Bridge
Overall view of the monument

Johann Julius Wilhelm Spindler (born April 8, 1810 in Berlin ; † April 28, 1873 there ) was a German laundry and dyeing entrepreneur and founder of the W. Spindler company .

Life

Wilhelm Spindler was the only child of Martin Spindler from Bayreuth and Johanna Friedericia Fischer from Berlin. His grandfather was Johann Jakob Spindler , Hofbauconducteur of the Principality of Bayreuth and who had built the Fantaisie Palace . When he was around 20 years old, Wilhelm went on a journey, including to Paris, where he learned the craft of silk dyeing . In 1832 he returned to Berlin and, with the support of an uncle, founded a small silk dyeing factory on October 1st in the basement at Burgstrasse 3 in Berlin-Mitte . In an advertisement in the Royal Intelligence Gazette, he announced the opening of his small factory "to the honored silk goods manufacturers and silk traders with great devotion" . "Likewise, I recommend myself to the honored public [...] for the cleanest washing of shawls and smoothing of calico clothes" .

Business was going well, and so in 1841 he bought a plot of land for a dye works and laundry, the so-called Spindlershof, near the Spittelmarkt at Wallstrasse 12 . Further branches were opened in the following period at Poststrasse 11, Friedrichstrasse  153 A and Leipziger Strasse  36.

Wilhelm Spindler was always interested in technical advances in his trade and maintained numerous relationships with colleagues abroad. From Paris he brought the knowledge of dry cleaning from the “Teinturerie Jolly Belin” (dye works Jolly Belin) to Berlin and in 1854 he was the first to introduce it in Germany. He is therefore one of the pioneers in dry cleaning. In this process, the clothing was cleaned with benzene or gasoline with the exclusion of water (ie "dry", therefore also dry cleaning ). This enabled mass cleaning, which Spindler helped his company break through.

In addition to laundry , dyeing was the company 's second mainstay. Spindler was particularly concerned with dyeing silk black . He maintained good relationships with well-known European dye works (for example the Pullar dye works in Perth ) and was thus able to adopt the knowledge of the chemists François-Emmanuel Verguin from Lyon and William Henry Perkin from London . Wilhelm Spindler was even related to the paint and varnish factory of the Gessert brothers in Elberfeld : his daughter Marie Friederike Charlotte, born on June 15, 1845, married Julius Gessert at the end of the 1870s and both had four children together. Adolf von Brüning , one of the founders of Hoechst AG , worked at W. Spindler from 1859 to 1862 after completing his doctorate and married Spindler's first daughter Clara (1843–1909) on July 14, 1863.

tomb

He is buried in the St. Marien and St. Nikolai Cemetery I in Berlin-Pankow.

Company history

Spindler's sons, William and Carl Spindler , followed in their father's footsteps, took part in the development of new dyeing techniques and became company partners around 1870. In 1871 the three acquired a 200 acre site on the Oberspree near Köpenick and built the dry cleaning, laundry and dyeing facility on it , which opened in 1873. Only four days after the opening of the first wing of the main building, Wilhelm Spindler died on April 28, 1873 as a result of a stroke . As further utility buildings, wash houses , flattening and finishing rooms , dye works, drying and expedition rooms were gradually built and always equipped with the most modern technical devices of their time. After Wilhelm Spindler's death, his two sons successfully continued the business. The name Spindlersfeld soon became established for the new factory site . A work order handed down from 1892 shows the very social regulations for the workers and employees working here: the daily (except Sunday) pure working time was ten hours, upon express request they were even given a week of paid vacation in the summer.

After Julius Gessert died on March 3, 1875, Spindler's daughter Marie was married for a second time on June 12, 1877 to the architect Walter Kyllmann who, among other things, built the recreation house in Spindlersfeld and the Spindlers' hereditary funeral together with Adolf Heyden on the ( Alten) cemetery in front of the Prenzlauer Tor . The family grave, as an honor grave of the city of Berlin, is in field JK, G4. The Spindlerbrunnen on the Spittelmarkt, which was financed by the company for the 50th anniversary of W. Spindler , was also designed by Kyllmann.

In the memorandum for the 75th anniversary of W. Spindler's business , Wilhelm Spindler is characterized as " a robust, simple nature, with a far-sighted view, clear in perception, firm in wanting, and in action quickly ".

Posthumous appreciations

The Spindlerbrunnen on the Spittelmarkt

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm Spindler  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

swell

  1. ↑ a b c Karl-Heinz Audersch: 'Dry laundry' for delicate fabrics. 130 years ago in Wallstrasse: Spindler opened its first dry cleaning company. In: Neues Deutschland from 24./25. March 1984
  2. ↑ from the memorandum for the 75th business anniversary
personal data
SURNAME Spindler, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spindler, Johann Julius Wilhelm (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German laundry and dyeing entrepreneur and founder of W. Spindler
DATE OF BIRTH April 8, 1810
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH April 28, 1873
Place of death Berlin