John August Roebling II.

John August Roebling II (born November 21, 1867 in Mühlhausen , Germany , † 1952) was an entrepreneur , financier and philanthropist , and grandson of the German-American John A. Roebling , the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York .

Life

John August was born during a European trip of his parents Washington Roebling and Emily Warren Roebling in Mühlhausen, Thuringia, where his grandfather was born. He had no siblings. Like his father, he attended the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy , New York , where he studied engineering. As Washington's health deteriorated towards the end of the century, he took over the presidency of the family-owned John A. Roebling's Sons Company .

With the US entry into the First World War , Roebling's company developed into an arms company . His cable and steel wire mills produced goods that were used in airplanes, automobiles and ships. In November 1915, the John A. Roebling's Sons plant in Trenton was the victim of two fires in one week, causing more than $ 1,000,000 in damage. The fires followed months of threats from prominent Germans that US industrial companies would be paralyzed. Immediately after the fires at the Roebling factory, an American German-language newspaper, the Brooklyn Free Press, ran the headline "MADE HARMFUL - Factory buildings of the Roebling Society laid to rubble" .

In reality, John A. Roebling's Sons' production capacity had been negatively affected. The company soon got going again and expanded to play an important role in the fight against German submarines. During the war, the Roebling Company produced more than 95 million feet of steel cables and coupling devices for submarine nets for American and European ports.

In 1931, the German biographer Wilhelm Anener wrote about the Roeblings' participation in the defeat of Germany: "It seems a tragic fate that the split in the nationality of this emigrant continues long after his time. With Roebling, the fatherland lost a technical genius and a great industrialist; but what he created was damaging to Germany. In this war materials were produced in enormous quantities. "

After the end of the war, he managed the family assets and left his leading role in the family business. Together with his wife Margaret, he lived in the beautiful property called Boulderwood Mansion in Bernardsville , New Jersey , which was only 50 km from his office building in New York City . In the late 1920s, he built a winter residence in Lake Placid , Florida . During construction, the region around Lake Okeechobee in the south was hit by a hurricane that claimed hundreds of lives.

LVTs during the Battle of Iwo Jima .

Due to the fact that the rescue workers could only sparingly advance into the disaster region with their vehicles, he commissioned his youngest son Donald Roebling to develop a vehicle suitable for land and water. Financed by his father, the technically talented Donald built numerous prototypes of his tracked amphibious vehicle in the years that followed . It was not until a newspaper article appeared in Life Magazine in 1937 that the US military became aware of the tank, which was later used successfully in World War II under the name LVT . More than 18,000 of Donald Roebling's prototypes were built in different variants.

John August Roebling II was also an active supporter of the American zoologist Richard Archbold . So he built near Lake Placid, the 2101 ha large Red Hill Estate , where the Archbold Biological Station has evolved over the 1941st

John August Roebling II died in 1952. In addition to Donald Roebling, he also had sons Siegfried Roebling (1890–1936) and Paul Roebling (1893–1918).

Web links

• Roebling's Amphibian, The Origin Of The Assault Amphibian (English)
• Archbold Biological Station (English)