Karl Wilhelm Scheibler

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Karl Wilhelm Scheibler

Karl Wilhelm Scheibler (born September 1, 1820 in Montjoie, today: Monschau ; † April 13, 1881 in Łódź ) was one of the most important industrialists in Łódź.

Life

Scheibler was born in Montjoie in the Eifel as the first child of the textile manufacturer Johann Carl Wilhelm from the Scheibler family and his wife Sophie Wilhelm, born there. Pastor born. There he also attended elementary school and later the higher middle school. Then he went to the grammar school in Krefeld . Then he began his apprenticeship in Verviers in Belgium in the worsted yarn factory of his uncle Konrad Gustav Pastor . He learned there so quickly that he was given a management position as early as 1837. In 1839 he went to Cockerill , where he got to know the then very well-known machine factory and made several trips abroad. a. to England, France and Germany.

The unrest in Europe in 1848 made him look for new perspectives. Russia and the associated Congress Poland were not affected by the unrest and the textile industry developed well there, so Scheibler decided to relocate there. His uncle Friedrich Schlösser had been there since 1816 and so he became the director of his factory in Ozorków . After Schlösser's death, Scheibler took over commercial management of the company. On September 16, 1854 Scheibler married Anna Werner , a niece of Schlösser and daughter of Wilhelm and Mathilde Werner, and had four sons and three daughters with her.

Beginnings in Łódź

Scheibler factory
Mausoleum of the industrialist Carl Scheibler in the Protestant cemetery in Łódź, 2006

In 1852 Scheibler tried to gain a foothold in Łódź. Together with Julius Schwartz , he bought a piece of land that had previously belonged to Titus Kopisch , and built a machine factory there on the corner of Emilienstrasse and Buschlinie (Widzewkastrasse). On October 27, 1853, he was given a "perpetual" lease of a larger area, 17 acres and 154 rods, on the water ring from the mayor Trager . In October 1854 Schwartz received a severance payment of 10,000 rubles from Scheibler , thereby transferring the machine factory to Scheibler as the sole owner. In 1855 Scheibler put a spinning mill with 34 spinning machines and a steam engine with 40 HP into operation on the site at the Wasserring . 180 workers produced 416,000 pounds of cotton thread there in 1857. Three years later, the annual output of the now expanded factory was 305,100 rubles; almost 3/4 of Louis Geyer's production . Scheibler had anticipated the danger of a shortage of raw materials caused by the civil war in the USA from 1861 to 1865 by having sufficient stocks. Economic hardship had turned the weavers against the factories, which were seen as the evil. On April 21, 1861, they penetrated Scheibler's factory and damaged the production facilities. Due to its stocks of raw materials superior to its competitors, Scheibler was able to generate good winners and in 1865 acquired a spinning mill in Źarki near Łódź. In 1866 the Scheiblerwerke were the third largest cotton producers in Poland with a share of 9.3 percent of cotton products produced in Poland. A few years later, the company was the largest of its kind in Poland, employing 1,911 workers in 1870.

Its expansion continued until 1880 and an industrial settlement developed in Księży Młyn . He acquired the spinning mill from Christian Friedrich Wendisch , who died in 1830, in Pfaffendorf ( Księży Młyn ), the bleaching plant from Titus Kopisch, who had returned to Silesia in 1847 due to economic hardship , and the cotton weaving mill from David Lande. In addition, the factories were constantly expanded. In 1870 Scheibler was awarded the Order of the Eagle in Saint Petersburg . In 1874 a fire destroyed the factory in Pfaffendorf, which only spared the weaving mill and the steam engine. But just one year later Scheibler had a new spinning mill built here with 88,000 spindles.

On December 12, 1880, Scheibler converted his company into the " Aktiengesellschaft der cottonmanufakturen von Carl Scheibler ", the shares of which passed into family ownership. The company had assets of nine million rubles, six million of which were for industrial buildings on an area of ​​177.63 hectares.

Scheibler died on April 13, 1881. His wife decided to have a mausoleum built. After a disappointing competition for plans for the building, she commissioned Joseph Dziekonski and Edward Lilpop , two architects from Warsaw . Under their leadership, an impressive neo-Gothic building was erected from 1885 to 1888 . The mausoleum is located in the Protestant cemetery in Łódź.

His descendants continued the company until 1944 and finally had to emigrate to São Paulo due to the forced eviction from Poland , where the family founded new companies. The Łódź company was expropriated and initially renamed Stalinwerke and later traded under the name “Uniontex Łódź”. Scheibler's palatial house currently houses the Museum of Cinematography .

social commitment

Statue of Karl Scheibler in Łódź

Scheibler was certainly not entirely unselfishly engaged in the social field for his workers. Through his activities he was able to rely on qualified staff on a permanent basis.

He had 200 workers' houses built, which were well furnished according to the standards of the time. Scheibler financed five elementary schools for around 2,400 children. He also paid a cost of around 150,000 rubles per year for a hospital with 500 beds and six doctors, together with the outpatient departments, and for a pharmacy where the workers in his factory received free medicines. Other facilities included a bakery, a kitchen for unmarried people, a kindergarten for 200 children and a home for the elderly. In 1877 Scheibler was the first factory owner to set up a boys' school for the sons of his workers in Łódź. In 1870 Scheibler bought land in Księży Młyn. Three years later there were three-story buildings for the yarn combing and weaving mill. A tree-lined avenue was laid out in front of the entrance to the factory, with the school on the other end and the workers' houses on the sides. There were 16 to 18 apartments in each building, a 1-room apartment was around 25 m², a 2-room apartment was around 40 m². The high-standard apartments were given to selected employees (administration, engineers, foremen, rarely workers). Allotments, fountains and stables were set up in the courtyards. A hospital, shops and elementary school were then built in the settlement. It was one of the first such settlements in Europe and the first in Poland.

Scheibler also provided significant support to other public institutions. He was one of the founders of the Christian Charity Association and donated significant sums of money for the Protestant St. John's Church , built between 1880 and 1884 (around 100,000 rubles) and the Catholic Church of the Holy Cross . Scheibler also supported the establishment of the Lodzer Städtische Kreditverein, the Łódźer Handelsbank and the Łódzer Industrielle bank.

Awards

Museums about Scheibler

  • part of the Red House in Monschau
  • his villas in Łódź

literature

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. ^ After the Żyrardowska factory and the Krusche factory in Pabianice
  2. Urząd Miasta Łódź, Księży Młyn , Łódź 1998, p. 20
  3. Urząd Miasta Łódź, Księży Młyn , Łódź 1998, p. 23