Reiniger, Gebbert & Schall
The open trading company "United Physico-Mechanical Workshops Reiniger, Gebbert & Schall - Erlangen, New York, Stuttgart" (RGS) was a manufacturer of precision mechanical, physical, optical and electromedical apparatus. It was created in 1886 as a merger of Erwin Moritz Reiniger's workshop in Erlangen and the Stuttgart company of Max Gebbert and Karl Friedrich Schall . The workshops in Stuttgart and New York were soon given up.
In the joint company, Reiniger was responsible for commercial matters, Gebbert for production and Schall for construction and sales. Products included galvanometers , head lamps, mouth lamps and larynx lamps, batteries, medical induction apparatus and microscope lamps; in 1890 arc lamps, motors and electrical lighting systems were added.
However, the company soon proved too small to support three owner families. That is why Karl Schall left the company in 1887 in order to set up a business with his own capital in London, which took over the general agency of RGS for Great Britain and the colonies with great success.
In 1893 the now around 100 employees moved into a new factory building. The product range had also expanded, e.g. B. incandescent lamps, dental drills and induction equipment as well as devices and electrodes for galvanization , faradization and endoscopy .
Reiniger left the company in 1895 and had a severance payment of 100,000 marks . With this he acquired the Bavarian light bulb factory in Munich. Max Gebbert was now sole entrepreneur. Shortly thereafter, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen made his revolutionary discovery of a "new kind of rays". Gebbert reacted quickly and ensured that as early as 1896 the manufacture of RGS concentrated primarily on X-ray tubes and devices. In 1896/97 the company presented a draft for the power station licensed in Neustadt an der Aisch in 1898.
In 1906 the company was converted into a stock corporation with 1,250,000 marks in share capital. Max Gebbert died a year later.
From RGS to the Siemens-Reiniger-Werke
Coordinates: 49 ° 35 ′ 47.1 ″ N , 11 ° 1 ′ 7 ″ E
After the First World War, RGS got into trouble because of dubious business dealings with one of the board members, namely Karl Wilhelm Zitzmann . After the conversion to the Rentenmark took place in November 1923 , the company's situation turned out to be even worse than it had looked at times of inflation: the debt was 6 million gold marks , with interest at 24%, with a share capital of 3 million gold marks. As an alternative to bankruptcy, there was a merger with a similarly oriented company. Here came AEG or Siemens & Halske in Berlin in question. AEG was not interested, and negotiations began with Siemens & Halske in 1924. At the beginning of 1925, an agreement was reached to sell the RGS shares at a price of 200% to Siemens & Halske and to keep medical technology manufacturing in Erlangen.
In 1932, RGS with Phönix Röntgenröhren-Fabriken AG based in Rudolstadt (Thuringia) and the sales company Siemens-Reiniger-Veifa Gesellschaft für medical Technik mbH in Berlin (Veifa: "United Electrotechnical Institute Frankfurt - Aschaffenburg ") became " Siemens-Reiniger-Werke" AG "united. The electromedical production of Siemens & Halske was gradually relocated from Berlin to Erlangen.
Web links
- Siemens Healthineers MedMuseum and Archive
- national and international history of Siemens AG from the corporate archives in Munich
Individual evidence
- ^ Max Döllner : History of the development of the city of Neustadt an der Aisch until 1933. 1950; 2nd edition, Ph. CW Schmidt, Neustadt an der Aisch 1978, ISBN 3-87707-013-2 , p. 758.