Tomáš Baťa

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tomáš Baťa
Statue of Tomáš Baťa ( Svit , Slovakia )

Tomáš Baťa (born April 3, 1876 in Zlín ; † July 12, 1932 in Baťov ) was a Czech entrepreneur and founder of the Baťa group , which is still the world's largest manufacturer of shoes today .

Life

On August 24, 1894, he founded a shoe factory in Zlín. The company was new, but the family had a tradition in shoemaking that was over three hundred years old ; Tomáš Baťa already belonged to the eighth generation practicing this profession. With the introduction of factory production and the first delivery to the retail trade, Baťa modernized the shoe industry.

Baťa was enthusiastic about aviation and supported the Masaryk Aviation League ( Masarykova letecká liga ) founded in 1923 by the Czech President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk . From 1924, the construction of gliders was promoted in premises made available by the Baťa Group . In 1935 this resulted in the aircraft construction company Zlín, which still exists today .

The Baťa Group rose to become the world market leader by 1930 . In 1931 the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg published a critical report from Zlín, which brought him a lawsuit from the shoe king and a suspension of the book and film fees obtained with this text.

On the morning of July 12, 1932, at around 5 a.m., Baťa wanted to take off from Baťov airfield in his private plane for a flight to Basel, Switzerland, where he had given his 18-year-old son the construction management for a new factory in Möhlin . After his private pilot Jindřich Brouček did not want to risk the take-off due to the heavy fog, Ba schließlicha finally ordered the departure anyway. The F 13 with the registration number D – 1608 crashed eight minutes after take-off at 05:58 at a point called “Na bahňáku” not far from the paper mill, and Baťa and his pilot died in the process. They were buried side by side on July 14, 1932 in the new forest cemetery in Zlín . The company passed to his son Tomáš John Baťa , who came from Tomáš Baťa's marriage with Marie Menčíková, the daughter of the court librarian Ferdinand Menčík.

Urban development in Zlín

Baťa was temporarily mayor of Zlín and also acted as a patron of his hometown. There he initiated major urban development changes. Under his guidance, Zlín was designed by well-known architects in the functionalism style, with the residential areas built for factory workers being particularly important. Today, Zlín is considered the first functionalist city in the world.

Named after Baťa are:

Further buildings by the Baa company worldwide

  • In November 1931, the newly built shoe factory of the subsidiary Deutsche Schuh-Aktiengesellschaft Baťa in Ottmuth an der Oder (today Krapkowice -Otmęt, Poland) was put into operation.
  • The Bata Park Möhlin in Switzerland, built in 1932, is now a listed building.
  • Since 1933, a Ba entstanda factory town has been built in East Tilbury in the English county of Essex , but since 2005 no shoes have been produced there.
  • From 1934 the factory town of Batanagar was built in what is now the Indian state of West Bengal .

exhibition

literature

  • Tomáš Baťa. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 1, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1957, p. 53.
  • Tomáš Baťa, edited by Anton Cekota, German by Karl Klaudy: Wort und Tat . Tisk, Zlín 1936 (in Prague (Praha) Souček).
  • Tomáš Bat'a: Reorganization of the shoemaker's trade . Bat'a company, Zlín 1930.
  • Eugen Erdély: Thomas Bata - A shoemaker conquers the world . Interna, Bonn 2004, ISBN 3-934662-84-6 (reprint of the edition: Kahler, Leipzig 1932).
  • Egon Erwin Kisch : Footwear . In: Bodo Uhse , Gisela Kisch (ed.): Prager Pitaval-Späte Reportagen (Collected Works in Individual Editions II / 2) . Structure, Berlin / Weimar 1969, p. 415-428 .
  • Rudolph Philipp: The unknown dictator Thomas Bata . Agis, Vienna / Berlin 1928 (465 pages).
  • Rudolph Philipp: boots of the dictatorship . Resoverlag, Zurich 1936 (265 pages).
  • Ladislav Pomališ: Výsledek šetření insp. Pomališe o haváríi letadla Junkers v Otrokovicích dne 12.července 1932 . In: Ladislav Keller, Václav Kolouch (ed.): Nehody dopravních letadel v Československu, díl 1. Svět Křídel, Cheb 2009, OCLC 438101309 .

Movie

  • Bata - a shoemaker conquers the world, Arte / CT 2018

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ehrenburg reports on this in his memoirs ( Menschen - Jahre - Leben II 1923-1941 , special edition Munich 1965, pages 186-188). The text of the report originally appeared under the title Der Schuhkönig in Tage-Buch on November 7, 1931
  2. ↑ Impressions from a visit and background information are provided by Martin Leidenfrost 2007 , accessed on April 24, 2011
  3. ↑ Handbook of German Stock Companies , 37th edition 1932, p. 4201 f.
  4. ↑ The shoemakers and their 80 factory towns. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung from August 14, 2011, p. 32.
  5. ↑ The film on www.arte.tv

Web links

Commons : Tomáš Baťa  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Baťa, Tomáš
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bohemian-Czech entrepreneur, founder of the Baťa shoe company
DATE OF BIRTH April 3, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Zlín
DATE OF DEATH July 12, 1932
Place of death Baťov