Robert Held (industrialist)
Robert Held , whose full name was Robert Carl Ernst Held (born October 2, 1862 in Berlin ; † December 9, 1924 there ), was a German businessman and entrepreneur . Under his leadership, C. Lorenz AG , from which Standard Elektrik Lorenz AG (SEL) emerged in 1958 , developed into one of the leading manufacturers of devices and systems for wireless and wired communication technology.
Life
Robert Held was the son of the trimmers Heinrich Friedrich Julius Robert Held and the baker's daughter Karoline Sandeck. He completed a commercial apprenticeship and initially worked in the textile industry, following the family tradition. His grandfather, the father of his father, was a cloth maker from Goldberg in Silesia . At the age of 27, Robert Held came across an advertisement in a Berlin daily newspaper that the telegraph construction company C. Lorenz at Prinzessinnenstrasse 21, transverse building, III. Stock was to be sold after the death of its owner Carl Lorenz . Whether he was just looking for any other field of activity because the previous work did not correspond to his inclination or talent, or whether he had a special interest in the new technology that has developed since the Bell Telephone Company was founded in 1877 by Alexander Graham Bell of the United States had spread to Berlin and quickly developed with the construction of the Prussian railways , at least he immediately got in touch with Carl Lorenz's widow.
Telegraph construction company C. Lorenz
The contracting parties quickly agreed that Held should take over the company as sole owner for a payment of 50,000 marks . Alfred Lorenz, the younger brother and long-time foreman of the founder, who had also temporarily led the company after his death, remained as technical director. In 1890, at the time of purchase, the telegraph construction company founded ten years earlier employed around 20 mechanics, who mainly built Morse code machines. He immediately took over commercial management with a firm hand and introduced new bookkeeping and payroll accounting based on commercial principles. For the technical side, he first had to familiarize himself with the new subject. He seems to have succeeded in doing this very quickly, at least so far that he was able to undertake a complete reorganization of the company. In addition to setting up a warehouse with strict inventory control and separating the locksmith's shop and precision mechanics, he introduced a rational division of labor and performance wages with only nine hours of work per day. The latter was in clear contrast to the twelve-hour day that was customary at the time and was practically a great social achievement.
The railway telegraph workshop at Görlitzer Bahnhof was one of the company's main customers for line bells . The telegraph inspector Hermann Hattemer, who worked there as a department head, became a mentor and advisor for Robert Held. Hattemer contributed numerous ideas for the further development of the signaling devices built by C. Lorenz , which were recognized as particularly progressive in specialist journals and specialist books. At the International Electrotechnical Exhibition in Frankfurt am Main in 1891 , the company presented its products to the general public for the first time. The company grew and after three years it had expanded to three floors and the number of its workers fivefold.
Robert Held took over the Telegraphen-Bauanstalt C. F. Lewert in Berlin at Luisen Ufer 11 from Carl Friedrich Lewert (* 1808) or his heirs in 1893. Its predecessor was founded in 1800 by the mechanic David Friedrich Lewert (1779–1863) and had distributed the first German Morse telegraph in Prussia from 1851. In 1893 the company had about 30 workers and was a contractor for the Reichspost for the construction of telephone sets.
Several hundred Morse code machines were also delivered to Russia by C. Lorenz every year . When he heard that Russian Finance Minister Sergei Yulievich Witte had advised his authorities to place their orders with companies in his own country, Held, on the advice of his Russian sales representatives, decided to set up a branch in St. Petersburg . In the interests of national defense, the Russian Tsar Nicholas II pushed ahead with the expansion of the railway network, so that strong growth could be expected for the local C. Lorenz business . The company Trepplin took over the management of the workshop, which opened in mid-1900 with 30 workers. In order to keep up with the successful business development, the workshop moved into its own factory building in 1904.
C. Lorenz AG
After the main plant in Berlin had changed locations several times, Held rented suitable rooms on Elisabethufer (opposite Luisenufer, today: Leuschnerdamm / Erkelenzdamm ), but ever larger funds were required to finance the rapid expansion of production. Therefore, Held converted the company from his private ownership into a stock corporation. The C. Lorenz AG started in 1906 with a capital of 1.4 million marks. In the same year the company acquired a license to use the patents for the arc transmitter invented in 1903 by the Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen . The inventor turned to the company after his own company, Amalgamated Radio Telegraph Company Ltd. had already used up their first working capital in test operation. The application remained limited to the military area, but with a steadily increasing number of orders for Poulsen transmitters from the army and navy for fortress stations and warships, C. Lorenz AG grew to a workforce of around 3,000 employees by the beginning of the First World War . The production included telegraph and telephone sets for post offices, railways, ships, factories and mines, signaling devices of all kinds, stations for wireless telegraphy and telephony, pneumatic tube systems, fire alarm systems, lighting and ignition devices for motor vehicles. In 1917 a new factory building on the Teltow Canal in Berlin-Tempelhof was put into operation based on plans by the architect Karl Stodieck .
After the war he had to switch his production to civilian products. In this context, C. Lorenz AG began in 1924 from its experimental radio station in Eberswalde, which had been in operation since 1909, with the first radio experiments on short wave , and from 1928 on medium wave . The triumphant advance of broadcasting in Germany could only begin after inflation had been overcome. Robert Held only saw the beginning of this era.
family
Robert Held was married to Agnes Wolf (1855–1939), the widow of the merchant Wolf. She brought her son Georg with her from her first marriage, who attended grammar school in Berlin and then studied mechanical engineering and electrical engineering at the Technical University in Charlottenburg. After practical training in an American telephone factory from 1901 to 1904, Georg Wolf joined the company as an engineer. When the company was converted to a stock corporation, he received power of attorney, became a member of the board of directors in 1908 and, after Robert Held's death, became general director.
Aftermath
Under the direction of Robert Held, C. Lorenz AG developed from a workshop to a large company. Six years after his death, Standard Elektrizitätsgesellschaft (SEG), a subsidiary of the US International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT), took over the majority of Lorenz's share capital of 9.5 million Reichsmarks in 1930 . At that time the company had around 2,700 employees.
As an ITT subsidiary, C. Lorenz AG took over G. Schaub Apparatebau-GmbH from Pforzheim in 1940 and began producing under the common Schaub-Lorenz brand from 1955 . In 1958 it was merged with Standard Elektrik AG , to which Mix & Genest also belonged, to Standard Elektrik Lorenz AG (SEL) based in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen. In 1976, SEL had 33,000 employees and achieved sales of DM 12.6 billion .
In the following years, however, the SEL group of companies lost its size and importance. In 1988 the company was taken over by the French Alcatel and renamed Alcatel SEL AG in 1993 . With the merger of Alcatel and Lucent Technologies to form the telecommunications supplier Alcatel-Lucent in December 2006, the German subsidiaries of both companies were merged to form Alcatel-Lucent Deutschland AG , which at the end of 2014 only had around 1,800 employees.
literature
- Felix Gerth: Hero, Robert. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 8, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1969, ISBN 3-428-00189-3 , p. 466 ( digitized version ).
- Ernst Erb: Radio catalog , volume 1. Siebert Verlag 1998. ISBN 978-3-88180-686-2
- 50 Years of Lorenz, 1880–1930 - Commemorative publication by C. Lorenz Aktiengesellschaft , Berlin-Tempelhof. Berlin 1930.
- 75 years of Lorenz, 1880 to 1955 - commemorative publication by C. Lorenz Aktiengesellschaft Stuttgart . Stuttgart 1955.
- G. Schlesinger: The new building of C. Lorenz AG, Berlin Tempelhof . In: Werkstattstechnik - magazine for factory operations and manufacturing processes . XVI. Vintage. Issue 8, April 15, 1922. P. 217 ff.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Ernst Erb: C. Lorenz . In: Radio Catalog , Volume 1, on Radiomuseum.org; accessed on October 6, 2015
- ↑ CF Lewert . In: Berliner Adreßbuch , 1892, part 1, p. 772. - today Legiendamm, near Engelbecken , not far from Prinzessinnenstrasse.
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↑ Anton A. Huurdeman: The Worldwide History of Telecommunications . John Wiley & Sons, 2003, ISBN 978-0-471-20505-0 , p. 82
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| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hero, Robert |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Held, Robert Carl Ernst (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German businessman and entrepreneur in the Berlin electrical industry |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 2, 1862 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Berlin |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 9, 1924 |
| Place of death | Berlin |