Johannes Haag
Johannes Haag (born June 19, 1819 in Kaufbeuren ; † May 29, 1887 in Augsburg ) was a German engineer and entrepreneur .
Life
Johannes Haag was born as the eldest son of the carpenter Andreas Haag from Kaufbeur in what is now the house at Ludwigstrasse 42 (at that time Hintere Gasse). The Haag family can be traced back to Kaufbeuren as early as the 16th century and appears in the church records as foremen and municipal works foremen throughout the 18th century. Johannes Haag's grandfather, the carpenter Daniel Haag (* 1754), raised the first balloon , made of paper impregnated with alcohol , on January 14, 1785, around 18 months after the first attempts by the Montgolfier brothers in Kaufbeuren . In Augsburg, such experiments were only made a year later.
Haag attended the Protestant elementary school from 1825 , and in 1834 he entered the newly founded trade school . In addition, he completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter in his father's company. After completing the one-year trade school and obtaining a journeyman's certificate as a carpenter, he went to Augsburg in 1835 to study mechanical engineering at the Royal Polytechnic School established in 1833 . After completing his studies with top marks, the young engineer started working at the Swiss machine works Escher, Wyss & Cie. in Zurich , where he last worked in a management position. In 1842 Haag went to Great Britain for a longer study visit, where he got to know the steam central heating system developed by Jacob Perkins .
Foundation of the machine factory
After his return to Kaufbeuren in 1843, he founded a workshop for general mechanical engineering and for the production of central heating systems in Kaufbeuren on today's property at Johannes-Haag-Straße 9 . In addition, he operated a sawmill on the grounds on the mill canal . Also in 1843 he married his Augsburg cousin Rosina Elisabetha Held, daughter of a brewery owner, whom he had met during his student days. From February to July 1844, Haag was Technical Director at Sandersche Maschinenfabrik in Augsburg, founded in 1840 , one of the oldest predecessor companies of today's MAN . Haag took over the position of Jean Gaspard Dollfus , who had been killed by Sander , until Sander handed over the technical and business management of the company to Carl August Reichenbach and Carl Buz on September 1, 1844 .
Elisabetha Haag had seven children in the eight years up to her death, all of whom, with the exception of Rosette, who was born on May 27, 1845, died in the first year of life. She herself died a few days after the birth of the last child on July 20, 1851, who died immediately after the birth with an emergency baptism .
Meanwhile, Haag's company flourished, not least because of Haag's resourcefulness and activity, who was far ahead of German technicians in the construction of central superheated steam heating systems and produced many of their own inventions and designs. In May 1852, a year after the death of his wife, Haag applied to move to Augsburg, where he moved into a workshop on the property at Vorderer Lech 5 and soon afterwards married his sister-in-law, the widowed brewery and inn owner Maria Anna Strehle from Augsburg. She brought an eleven-year-old daughter with her into the marriage, but she contracted cholera in Vienna in 1854 and died of it. This marriage remained childless, and Haag's daughter Rosette was the only surviving child in the family. The first workshop in Augsburg soon became too small, after a stopover (Mittlerer Lech 28), Haag and his workers moved into a factory built on his behalf in the Jakober suburb of Augsburg. The factory buildings were on what was then Bauhofstrasse (today Johannes-Haag-Strasse) and were put into operation on September 4, 1857. The construction of the factory was financed with 15,000 guilders from Haag's personal fortune and 38,500 guilders, which his wife earned from the sale of the family-owned brewery restaurant "Zum Schwarzen Bären". Complete superheated steam heating systems from the boiler room to ovens and radiators were planned and manufactured in the factory and then installed on site. The company flourished and Haag opened branches in Berlin (1863), Vienna (1874) and agencies in Switzerland, Russia and Scandinavia. In 1870 he already employs around 500 people. Like many other Augsburg entrepreneurs, Haag was concerned about the welfare of his factory workers. In 1861 he founded a company health insurance fund (“Krankenverein”) and a bank (“Sparkassenverein”) for his employees. The engineer Haag had a long series of inventions and designs to show for his entrepreneurial activity and is considered one of the main initiators of the Reich Patent Office founded in Berlin in 1877 .
1875–1877 Haag had the Haag villa , a representative factory owner's villa in the neo-renaissance style, built on the edge of his factory premises on an artificial hill , in which he lived and ran the business with his family. Maria Anna Haag died in 1883. Haag, who had been increasingly hard of hearing since the late 1860s, fell ill in the last years of his life with a nervous disease that eventually led to complete paralysis. Haag died in May 1887. In accordance with his wishes, his coffin was taken in a funeral procession by his workers to Augsburg train station after a ceremony at the Protestant cemetery in Augsburg, and from there to Kaufbeuren, where he was buried the next day in the old city cemetery.
The sole heir to the company was Haag's daughter Rosette, who continued it with the factory director Reimer. The two married in 1889. The Haagsche Villa in Augsburg became the property of the city of Augsburg in 1932. Spared from war damage, it is now a well-known monument that was restored in 2013 and serves as an event location. The Haagsche estate in Kaufbeuren was inhabited by descendants of the founder until the 2000s and has been vacant for several years. The first outbuildings were demolished between 2012 and 2014. At the endeavors of the Kaufbeuren home association, the facility was placed under monument protection in 2015.
Haag as a founder
Haag bequeathed 100,000 marks each to the cities of Augsburg and Kaufbeuren : In Augsburg the money is intended for the support of the poor, for schoolchildren and for the beautification of the city. In Kaufbeuren, 50,000 Marks went to support the poor, 50,000 Marks went to a school foundation that gave scholarships to secondary school students. In Augsburg, the orphanage and the institutions sponsored by Luise Barbara Countess von Ysenburg-Büdingen-Philippseich (children's sanatorium and children's detention center) were also given bequests. After the inflation of the 1920s and the currency reform of 1948, the Kaufbeur Foundation's assets, which were mainly invested in shares, were so depleted that the Foundation was later merged into other Kaufbeur foundations.
Posthumous honors
The cities of Augsburg and Kaufbeuren each named a street on the workshops and factories he built after Johannes Haag. In Kaufbeuren, 25 years after his death, a memorial plaque was attached to his first workshop at Johannes-Haag-Straße 9. The panel was designed by the Munich sculptor Mauritius Pfeiffer , who also created the nearby war memorial. It shows a putti with a hammer and a tube on his shoulder above a high relief by Haag with the inscription:
- Johannes Haag
- Born in Kaufbeuren in 1819, Gest. 1887 in Augsburg
- laid ground here for machines and tubes
- Johannes Haag factory in Augsburg
- He immortalized himself there through a rich foundation
- Erected by the grateful hometown
- Kaufbeuren, AD 1912.
literature
- Hans Kaiser, Fritz Schöllhammer: 125 years of Johannes Haag. Stuttgart 1968.
Individual evidence
- ↑ L. Weißfloch: Johannes Haag, a son of Kaufbeuren, founder of the German central heating industry. In: Kaufbeurer Geschichtsblätter , Volume 8, No. 3 (October 1978), pp. 70 ff.
- ↑ Hörmann Chronicle 3, page 339
- ↑ Johannes Bähr: MAN. A German industrial history. 2008, p. 136 ff.
- ↑ https://www.kreisbote.de/lokales/kaufbeuren/heimatverein-freut-sich-eigentuemer-nicht-nachvollziehbar-5334586.html
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hague, Johannes |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German engineer and entrepreneur |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 19, 1819 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Kaufbeuren |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 29, 1887 |
| Place of death | augsburg |