Otto Röhm (entrepreneur, 1876)

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Otto Karl Julius Röhm (born March 14, 1876 in Öhringen ; † September 17, 1939 in Berlin ) was a co-founder, long-term co-owner and company manager of the Röhm & Haas company .

Life

Originally trained as a pharmacy assistant, Otto Röhm first studied pharmacy at the universities in Munich and Tübingen . During his studies in 1898 he became a member of the Ghibellinia Tübingen Landsmannschaft . As a qualified pharmacist , he went on to study chemistry in Tübingen, which he successfully completed in 1901 with a dissertation on polymerisation products of acrylic acid . He is named as an inventor or co-inventor in over 70 patents . Streets at the company locations in Darmstadt , Weiterstadt and Worms as well as at his birthplace in Öhringen and in Jettingen-Scheppach bear his name . Otto Röhm was buried in the old cemetery in Darmstadt (grave site: 3 wall 124/125).

His son Otto Gustav Hermann Alfred Röhm , born in 1912, took over the position in the company from 1945.

Career

After completing his studies, he worked for the pharmaceutical company Merck from 1902 and as a chemist at the Stuttgart gas works , where Otto Röhm first devoted himself to processing animal hides, which he treated with gas water . His research resulted in an enzymatic leather stain, for which there was great demand in the leather industry.

In 1907 he founded the Röhm & Haas company in Esslingen together with the businessman Otto Haas . In 1909 the company moved from Esslingen to Darmstadt , where a larger factory was built close to the leather factories in the Rhine-Main area. In the same year, Haas opened its first subsidiary in Philadelphia , USA .

When he died in 1939, his company employed 1,800 people and had a turnover of 22 million Reichsmarks .

Since August 2019, the methacrylate network , which was spun off by Evonik Industries and sold to Advent International , has been operating again under the name Röhm GmbH, based on the former company founder Otto Röhm as the founder of methacrylate chemistry .

science

Otto Röhm was the first chemist to use enzymes technically. In doing so, he not only revolutionized traditional dog excrement methods in the leather industry, but also from 1914 on washing clothes. Around 1920 Otto Röhm introduced enzymes in the pharmaceutical industry and in 1934 in the food industry, here initially in fruit juice clarification. He was also a pioneer in the development of products made from polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), in whose invention the chemist Walter Bauer was involved. A large part of his business success was based on this work. In 1933 he registered the Plexiglas brand .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Berthold Ohm and Alfred Philipp (eds.): Directory of addresses of the old men of the German Landsmannschaft. Part 1. Hamburg 1932, p. 158.
  2. ^ R. Vierhaus: German biographical encyclopedia: (DBE) . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2007, ISBN 3-598-25038-X , p. 476 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  3. Röhm becomes an independent company - Röhm. Retrieved October 24, 2019 .