Ludwig Hagen

This article deals with the civil engineer Ludwig Hagen; for other people see Ludwig vom Hagen .

Friedrich Ludwig Hagen (born August 29, 1829 in Pillau (Baltijsk), † November 19, 1892 in Berlin ) was a hydraulic engineer in Prussia and professor at the Bauakademie in Berlin.

Life

Ludwig studied with his father, the hydraulic engineering director Gotthilf Heinrich Ludwig Hagen , in Berlin. In addition, his career was shaped by his ancestors from the scholarly family in Königsberg, z. E.g. the universal scholar and Immanuel Kant friend Karl Gottfried Hagen (great uncle), the astronomer and mathematician Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (uncle), the physicist Franz Ernst Neumann (uncle), the art historian Ernst August Hagen (uncle), the economist Carl Heinrich Hagen (uncle) and the Königsberg pathologist and hematologist Ernst Neumann (cousin).

Hagen's area of ​​responsibility as a hydraulic engineer comprised the Baltic Sea region from 1876 to 1892, preferably the ports of Danzig , Swinoujscie , Pillau (Baltijsk), Koenigsberg and Memel (Klaipėda). To protect the coast of the Curonian Spit from further erosion, he developed a method of fortifying dunes, which was also used in England on the west coast there (publications translated into English in 1916). In 1876 he took over the department in the Berlin Ministry for Public Works in the special field of hydraulic engineering, which his father had held until then. Before that, as a young government master builder, Hagen was busy building ports in Duisburg-Ruhrort . He later took over the construction of the Prussian part of the canalization of the Upper Saar. In 1869 he traveled to the opening of the Suez Canal . In the war of 1870/71 he was called in to repair shot-up locks and structures and acted as a technical expert in the peace negotiations before he was appointed to the Baltic Sea Department in Köslin in 1871 as a government and building councilor. From here he developed his expertise in the port facilities of the Baltic Sea. In 1876 Hagen took part in the World's Fair in Philadelphia.

Hagen also taught at the Bauakademie in Berlin and became an associate professor for maritime and port construction. He was a member of the Academy of Civil Engineering and from 1876 worked at the Technical Examination Office in Berlin.

After the death of his first wife Emma, ​​b. Michels, Hagen was with Agnes, geb. Hemme, married. She gave birth to daughter Auguste on June 24, 1873. His son Otto Hagen was the third generation to work in hydraulic engineering and was promoted to senior government building officer in the Reich Ministry of Transport until 1924. Ludwig Hagen died of an unknown infection after a trip to Königsberg. His grave was under a granite obelisk in the New Twelve Apostles Cemetery in Berlin-Schöneberg .

Honors

Monument to Ludwig Hagen at the northern tip of the Curonian Spit near Smiltynė (Sandkrug)

His commitment to saving the coast of the Curonian Spit is still honored today in Lithuania: A dune (35 m high) to the north of the spit, directly at Smiltynė (Sandkrug), opposite Klaipėda (Memel), bears the name Hagen's Höh (lit. Hageno Kalnas). There is a simple obelisk, formerly with the inscription "In memory of L. Hagen", later changed to "Hagen's Höh".

Fonts

• Travel report on the tour of some rivers in France carried out on behalf of the Ministry of Public Works in the spring of 1880. Ernst and Korn, Berlin 1881.
• The seaports in the provinces of Pomerania and Prussia. 2 volumes. Berlin 1885.
• The Suez Canal. With 2 panels. Ernst and Korn, Berlin 1870.

literature

• D. Hagen: From Königsberg, via Pillau to Memel: almost forgotten, Prussian hydraulic engineering in the second generation . In: Königsberger Bürgerbrief , 2013, 81, pp. 65–67
• G. Strunz: Königsberg. Kaliningrad region. Berlin 2012, p. 364ff.
• S. Hagen: Three hundred years of Hagen's family history. Volume 1. Self-published, Kassel 1938, p. 52.