Karl Scharfenberg

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Karl Wilhelm Heinrich Friedrich Scharfenberg (born March 3, 1874 in Wismar , † January 5, 1938 in Gotha ) was a German engineer and inventor of a coupling for railway wagons.

Life

He went to elementary and secondary school in his hometown and then attended the technical center in Neustadt-Mecklenburg (today Neustadt-Glewe ). There he was trained as an engineer and immediately afterwards worked at the sewing machine and gas stove manufacturer Junker & Ruh in Karlsruhe .

In 1896 he moved to the railway wagon factory, iron foundry and mechanical engineering company L. Steinfurt in Königsberg in East Prussia , which had been producing railway wagons since 1865. In 1900 he switched to the East Prussian Southern Railway in Königsberg; there, with the support of the owner of Steinfurt and his son, he developed the Scharfenberg coupling , an automatic central buffer coupling for railway wagons. On May 6, 1903, he had his invention patented; on March 18, 1904, his patent was finally issued. The first practical use of his new coupling took place in 1909 on the Memeler Kleinbahn on the Memel – Pöszeiten / Plicken line. 1926 followed the Berlin suburban railway network, 1928, the Berlin and Hamburg subway and from the mid-1930s, the subway in Buenos Aires .

Then Scharfenberg moved back to L. Steinfurt, where he became chief engineer. He was a co-founder of the Scharfenberg-Kupplungs AG , founded in Berlin in 1921 , which was the only one to use his patent. He continued to work at L. Steinfurt until 1926, after which he concentrated only on Scharfenberg-inkl.

After Scharfenberg had received a major order, he died on January 5, 1938 at the age of 63 in Gotha during a business trip.

At the Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences , the newly established Faculty of Transport, Sports, Tourism and Media was named in his honor at the Salzgitter site in the 2004/2005 winter semester, under the name of the Karl Scharfenberg Faculty.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ About us. (No longer available online.) In: Internet presence of the Faculty of Transport, Sports, Tourism and Media at Ostfalia. Archived from the original on February 18, 2011 ; Retrieved April 7, 2011 . 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ostfalia.de
personal data
SURNAME Scharfenberg, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Scharfenberg, Karl Wilhelm Heinrich Friedrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German railway engineer
DATE OF BIRTH March 3, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Wismar
DATE OF DEATH January 5, 1938
Place of death Gotha