Laurenz Jecker

Laurenz Jecker (born December 28, 1769 in Hirtzfelden , † July 4, 1834 in Aachen ) was a French needle manufacturer who, in 1803, was the first entrepreneur on the continent to set up a pin factory in Aachen.

Live and act

Laurenz Jecker was the brother of François-Antoine Jecker and came from a family resident in Alsace with roots in the Solothurn area . In 1783, at the age of 14, he went to England, where he managed a needle factory as a mechanic until 1803 after appropriate training. He then returned to Germany and settled in Aachen. Together with the brothers Jean Baptist and Jean Vincent Migeon from Charleville, he set up a brass pin factory in the vacant Klosterrather Hof on Eilfschornsteinstrasse, which had previously served as a city apartment for the Rolduc Abbey . Jecker acquired this property with the express permission of Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte at a price that was extremely affordable for the time. He benefited from the collaboration with brass wire factories in nearby Stolberg , which were an important source of suppliers for his plant. This made Jeckers pin head factory the first of its kind on the continent.

Thanks to his creativity in the mechanical field, Jecker has now developed a machine that made it possible to cast on the heads of the pins, which previously had to be attached individually. As a result, he was able to manufacture the needles at a price up to 20% cheaper and at the same time in larger quantities of up to approx. 1,000,000 pieces per day than comparable factories abroad. A second technical invention made by him meant that the needles could be written in or attached to paper more quickly. A reasonably skilled worker could now attach around 30,000 needles in an hour. For both inventions Jecker applied for and received patent protection with a term of 15 years. The function of his machine was later improved to such an extent that the daily turnover could be increased to approx. Two to three million needles. These machines were designed so simply that children between the ages of four and ten could use them.

When Napoléon visited Aachen in September 1804, he also visited the Jecker needle factory and expressed his admiration. As a gift, he gave him a pendulum clock with Urania , the muse of astronomy, on top . Two years later, Jecker was awarded a First Class Silver Medal for his products at the General Industrial Exhibition in Paris . The pins from his factory, in which he employed around 150 workers, including many children, at that time, were now selling well throughout the French Empire .

Only a few years later, however, there was a serious economic crisis, in the course of which Jecker left his factory to the two brothers and co-partners Migeon, who merged this factory with the neighboring copper yard of Johann Heinrich Schervier on the Templergraben and finally the new factory from 1811 as Migeon et Schervier frères operates. After 1816 the Migeon brothers also left and Schervier became the sole owner.

After waiting for a while, in 1818 Jecker had the opportunity to acquire a third of the Elgermühle through his Stolberg contacts . There he also built a sewing needle factory, in which he again introduced many technical innovations. After Jecker's death, this factory was continued by his son Franz Xaver Jecker (1822–1891), whereas the old Aachen factory was later returned to the family by Franz Xaver’s older brother Julius Caesar Jecker (1820–1881). In 1850 he relocated his factory outside the city limits at the time to the Soers , where it existed for another five generations until the 1990s and whose employees were then taken over by Singer in Würselen. His old factories in Eilfschornsteinstraße were acquired by Ludwig August Hugo Heusch (1836–1908) and Heinrich Butenberg in 1877. It traded there initially as the Heusch & Butenberg needle factory and later, after Butenberg withdrew from the company, as Hugo Heusch & Co. Around 1910 the company was relocated to the empty Lochner cloth factory and finally taken over by the Rheinische Nadelfabrik AG in 1955 .

Laurenz Jecker was married to Therese Holmacher (1784–1869), with whom he had seven children. He found his final resting place in the Aachen Ostfriedhof .

Literature and Sources

• Friedrich Haagen :  Jecker, Laurenz . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1881, p. 749 f.
• Will Hermanns : Julius Jecker, Laurenz Sohn, needle factory ; in: Home chronicle of the spa town and Kronstadt Aachen - pictures from the past and present ; Archive for German Home Care, Cologne, 1953, pp. 224–225
• Wolfgang Trees / Arthur Stürmann: Good old Soers - as it was then - as it is today , Triangel-Verlag, Aachen, 1987, pp. 263–265