Stantien & Becker
Stantien & Becker was a company founded in 1858 by Friedrich Wilhelm Stantien and Moritz Becker in Memel, today's Klaipėda (Lithuania), for industrial amber extraction. The company became state-owned in 1899.
Company history
The sources on the company's founding date are clear, even if different authors have given different dates. It is unclear, however, whether Stantien and Becker had a larger number of partners (Memel merchants) involved in the establishment of the company due to the immense capital requirement, as is claimed in various sources (including Becker 1896).
The company's headquarters were relocated to Königsberg (Klapperwiese 9a) between 1870 and 1880 . The minable deposits of Baltic amber are located on the coasts of Samland and in the Curonian Lagoon . Therefore, the focus of the company's activities was on the industrial mining of Baltic amber in these regions. In addition, gold mining was carried out in Roudný (Czech Republic) from 1893 - albeit to a significantly smaller extent - which was continued by Moritz Becker after the company was sold to the Prussian state.
Friedrich Wilhelm Stantien and Moritz Becker complemented each other happily. Stantien was the driving force in the field of technology. He continuously developed economic processes for amber extraction and processing and managed the technical part of the company. Becker was the businessman who primarily took care of sales channels and was said to have excellent connections to authorities and investors. It was also Becker who pushed the company's branches abroad. By 1885, Stantien & Becker had offices in Asia ( Bombay , Calcutta , Shanghai , Tokyo , Hong Kong ), Africa ( Cairo ), America ( New York , some Latin American countries) and especially in other European countries (including Vienna , Paris and London ) . The entrepreneurs knew how to meet the demand by providing an assortment in which the raw material was strongly diversified according to various quality features (up to 250 commercial varieties) in such a way that the buyers could buy specifically for their purpose and thereby optimize further processing and the were able to minimize waste. This reorganization of the raw amber trade was accompanied by an increase in demand.
The company flourished from the beginning, to which in particular the amber dredging in the Curonian Lagoon near Schwarzort , operated from 1862 to 1890, which employed up to a thousand people. Various private and government attempts to mine amber had previously failed. From 1873 amber was also mined on the Samland coast, where it is still mined by a Russian company in the open-cast mine near Jantarny . The economic success of Stantien & Becker is expressed, among other things, in the production volumes, sales and lease payments to the state. For example, in 1890 more than 200 tons were extracted on the Samland coast. The proceeds for this are said to have been around 1,800,000 gold marks. The total production (dredging, amber digging and mining) has reached 400 to 500 tons in some years. The state's lease income increased from an average of 27,000 marks before 1879 to 827,000 marks shortly before the company was taken over by the state (1899).
In 1879 the so-called pressed amber appeared: small, until then relatively worthless and unworkable pieces of amber could be "fused" into larger blocks with the help of a technical process, which could then be worked like larger pieces of raw amber. The manufacture of pressed amber (also called ambroid ) spread rapidly (around 1900 annual production was around 20 tons), so that the price, especially for larger pieces of raw amber, gradually fell. Stantien & Becker tried to use their monopoly-like market position to counter the further advance of pressed amber, for example by making the sale of their amber conditional on not reselling it to pressed amber manufacturers. Not least for this reason, there were legal disputes between Stantien & Becker and raw amber processing companies in Germany, some of which were facing ruin due to these business practices. The outcome of such a legal dispute (caused by a Westphal company in Stolp ) to the detriment of Stantien & Becker is seen as a decisive trigger for the sale of the company to the state in 1899.
Reports that Becker is said to have "pushed" his partner Stantien out of the company in 1871 are probably not correct. Becker himself (see Becker 1896) points out that in any case Stantien, but probably also Cohn, were still co-owners of the company in 1883, on the company's 25th anniversary. At least for a time, two of Becker's sons were also partners (entry in the directory of the Königsberg merchants from 1893). In 1899 at the latest, however, Becker was the sole owner. In that year he sold the company to the Prussian state. The Prussian state parliament had approved a purchase price of 9.75 million marks for the acquisition of the company. It is not clear whether this sum was paid out in full and whether this amount possibly contained other possessions of Becker. Stantien is said to have been compensated by Becker with two million marks when he left the company, the timing of which is controversial. The history of this company ends with the acquisition of Stantien & Becker by the Prussian state. The now state amber mining takes place initially under the name "Königliche Bernsteinwerke Königsberg", from 1919 under "Staatliche Amberwerke" and from 1924 as " Prussian Mining and Huts AG, branch Bernsteinwerke Königsberg i.Pr. ".
Amber mining
The development of technologies with the help of which amber could be promoted on an industrial scale and the redesign of the marketing of the raw materials are undoubtedly the company's merits, which have had an impact far beyond its existence.
Until the company entered history , amber was extracted almost exclusively through amber stinging , amber fishing and collecting from the beaches. The yield achieved with this is difficult to estimate. Runge gives 25 to 30 tons per year for the coastal section between Danzig (Gdańsk) and Memel (Klaipėda), whereas Tesdorpf gives five to seven tons per year for the region of the Amber Coast. As early as the period from 1781 to 1806, amber was extracted on a small scale by digging shafts and tunnels into the amber-bearing sediments in the seamounts near Groß Hubnicken. Attempts to have amber extracted by divers already existed around 150 years before the company was founded under the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I ; but they were doomed to failure for lack of suitable equipment. In the second half of the 19th century, Stantien & Becker developed dredging techniques, diving techniques and conveying techniques for opencast mining and civil engineering on land, all of which proved to be very efficient.
The diving for amber, revived by Stantien & Becker, was only successful for a few years because the supplies on the seabed were quickly exhausted, but reached a considerable extent in the years from around 1868 to 1885. Up to 50 submersibles were used and more than 300 employees were involved in this branch of amber mining. In 1881 around 14 tons of amber were lifted from the sea floor in this way, in 1883 it was only slightly more than two tons (for comparison: in the same year the company extracted around 88 tons through mining and around 75 tons through amber dredging). Although Stantien & Becker were quite inclined to extend the lease, which expired in 1891, the amber diving was finally stopped as a result of protests by the beach tenants, whose income had fallen significantly.
Amber dredging began in the Curonian Lagoon near Schwarzort on the Curonian Spit after the port construction inspector of Memel first recognized in 1855 that dredged material from the maintenance of the fairway contained considerable amounts of amber. In 1861, Stantien & Becker took over the keeping of the fairway free at their own expense in exchange for the amber. In addition, the company paid the government 30 marks for each day of dredging, from 1863 it was 45 marks and in 1868 this amount increased again to 75 marks per day and between 1868 and 1874 in the end it was 601.50 marks per working day. From 1874 a new contract came into force in which the so-called compensation amount to be paid by Stantien & Becker to the state was set in the form of an annual flat rate of initially 213,500 marks. The increase in taxes was offset by a steady expansion of the area in which the company was allowed to mine Bernstein. In 1864 around 17 tons of amber were mined off Schwarzort, in 1883 it was even more than 75 tons. The expansion of the development area was accompanied by an increase in the scope of technical equipment. With 22 steam dredgers ( bucket chain dredgers ), supported by five steam boats and up to 45 prehives , more than 75 tons of amber were finally extracted in 1883. A separate port was built for the fleet in Schwarzort (where the Juodkrante boat harbor is today ) and a repair yard was set up. The company also had a boiler shop and a machine factory on site. At the time, around a thousand people were employed in the amber excavation and its ancillary operations. The dredging operation was discontinued in 1890 due to significantly reduced production results.
The mining of amber by the company Stantien & Becker began in 1870 on the beach of Warnicken and was expanded in 1873 to a strip of land running parallel to the coast near the former manor Palmnicken . The latter section was chosen because of the considerable thickness of the amber-bearing blue earth . Even before that, in the 1860s, amber was extracted systematically in open-cast mining, mostly by the landowners themselves. The mining mostly only took place in the summer months on the steep west coast of Samland known as seamounts. In contemporary reports, without further quantification, “not insignificant” amounts are mentioned. Stantien & Becker revolutionized mining from a technical and organizational point of view and extracted the amber from the blue earth, which is more than 15 meters below sea level, all year round. In 1875 the first civil engineering work was done with the “Palmnicken” pit (also called “Henriette” pit), followed by the “Anna” pit in 1883. The women's names of these well-occupied pits go back to family members of Moritz Becker. The location of an allegedly further pit ("Walter") can no longer be reconstructed. The “Henriette” mine, located near the Palmnicken train station, is said to have produced around 85 tons of amber in the first year. The "Anna" mine was particularly profitable and continued to be operated by the Prussian state until 1922 after the company was sold. In 1887 about 900 workers were employed in Palmnicken. The total annual production in East Prussia in the last quarter of the 19th century was between 200 (in 1876) and 500 tons (in 1894), the largest part of which came from Samland and the vast majority of this came from the company Stantien & Becker . The "Anna" mine is said to have produced an annual average of just under 500 tons of amber between 1892 and 1896.
With the opening of the above-mentioned pits, amber mining was almost exclusively limited to civil engineering. Significant quantities of amber in opencast mining were only recovered by the state successor company from around 1917, until underground mining was finally completely replaced by opencast mining in 1923 (with an annual output of 400 to 500 tons).
We owe a clear description of the amber mining on the Samland coast to the company's long-standing geological consultant, Richard Klebs:
“ ... The egg of Columbus in the whole complex consisted of leading a tunnel into the blue earth from a large open-cast mine on the lakeshore and only reaching the tunnel through a shaft from above when this was fixed by carpentry. The colossal masses of water that were freed as a result found their way through this free run-off into a pit of the open-cast mine, which is significantly below lake level, from which lifting works pumped the water into the Baltic Sea. In this way it was only possible to lead the shaft upwards from below and cut off the water from the higher lying drifting sands. ... Only now did extensive mining begin, the tunnels were continued in all directions in order to extract the blue earth. ... So far , tunnels have been mined, the total length of which is estimated at 250 kilometers. ... [In the tunnel] the so-called tusk goes cautiously forward, loosens the blue earth of the tunnel with the pickaxe ... [and] ... makes sure that the larger pieces of amber are not smashed, but are collected in sacks, which everyone can use Miner hung around his neck. The detached earth is carried in wagons with a capacity of 1/2 cubic meter by horses into the shaft ... [where they] are lifted up and their contents are disposed of in suitable tilting devices. This falls into a large box-shaped room, in which the water from the mine pumps pour out in thick jets. ... "
In the further course of this report, the harvest of amber from the dissolved blue earth and its sorting according to size and quality into "almost a hundred commercial varieties" is described. Up to 250 people were employed here in separate rooms.
Scientific collection
From 1876 Stantien & Becker employed the geologist Richard Klebs, who worked at the Royal Prussian State Geological Institute, as a scientific advisor. Klebs supported the company in the search for amber deposits suitable for mining in Palmnicken. In the course of this activity, Klebs built up a company's own amber collection, which mainly consisted of pieces with organic inclusions. Klebs also organized amber exhibitions for Stantien & Becker in Chicago, Paris, St. Petersburg, St. Louis and London.
The very extensive collection (1889 appeared a catalog of the company's own museum with 26,000 numbers, but the collection still has grown significantly in the years after his) and the private collection of Richard Klebs later formed along with the collection of the royal Physikalisch-economic society to Königsberg to The basis of the world's largest amber collection, with more than 100,000 pieces, at the Albertus University in Königsberg . Most of the collection was destroyed by bombing during World War II. The approximately 17,000 preserved pieces are now in the Institute and Museum for Geology and Paleontology (IMGP) of the University of Göttingen.
Social benefits
Unusually for the time, the Stantien & Becker company had a hospital, a company health insurance fund and a pension fund. A school was built in Schwarzort and a Protestant church in Palmnicken.
Beckerite and Stantienite
Two of the accessory resins (varieties of amber that are not succinite) that occur in the Baltic Sea region together with Baltic amber (succinite) were named after the owners of the company "Stantien & Becker" as stantienite and beckerite . Both amber varieties are also found in Bitterfeld .
literature
- Moritz Becker: Memorandum on the verdict of the Royal Regional Court of Stolp. Berlin 1896.
- Richard Klebs: Amber and its history. Koenigsberg 1889.
- Wilhelm Tesdorpf: Extraction, processing and trading of amber in Prussia from the time of the order to the present. Jena 1887.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Richard Klebs: Extraction and processing of amber. Königsberg 1883. Quoted in Brekenfeld 1996.
- ↑ a b c K. Andrée: The amber - The amber country and its life. Stuttgart 1951.
- ↑ G. Reineking von Bock: Bernstein - The gold of the sea. Munich 1981.
- ↑ a b R. Slotta: The amber extraction in Samland (East Prussia) until 1945. In: Amber - tears of the gods. Bochum 1996
- ↑ a b c d Karl Andrée: Amber and its significance in the natural sciences and humanities, art and applied arts, technology, industry and trade. Koenigsberg 1937.
- ^ A. Kossert: East Prussia - History and Myth. Munich 2007. ISBN 978-3-570-55020-5
- ^ W. Runge: The amber in East Prussia. In: Collection of Commonly Understandable Scientific Lectures, III. Series, issue 55 and 56, Berlin 1868.
- ↑ a b W. Tesdorpf: Extraction, processing and trading of amber in Prussia from the time of the order to the present. Jena 1887
- ↑ HL Elditt: The Amber shelf in Prussia. In: Old Prussian monthly. tape 5 . Königsberg 1868, p. 577-611 .
- ↑ Ch. Bartsch: Palmnicken and his amber. Munster 1974.
- ^ S. Ritzkowski: History of the amber collection of the Albertus University in Königsberg i.Pr. In: Amber - Tears of the Gods. Bochum 1996.
- ↑ A. Brekenfeld: The entrepreneurs Friedrich Wilhelm Stantien and Moritz Becker. In: Amber - Tears of the Gods. Bochum 1996.