United Wire Works Biel
The United Wire Works Biel was a wire works in the Swiss city of Biel / Bienne .
history
A mill on the Schüss near Bözingen has been mentioned since 1347 . The waterworks used the gradient of the river in the lowest section of the Taubenloch Gorge . The mill was known under the name Lochmühle. 1622 was adjacent to the first waterworks an iron forging, and 1634 built crowd Ludwig Andi with a license from the Prince Bishop of Basel , Johann Heinrich von Ostein , at this point a wire drawing . The wire factory opened up a wide sales area through international trade relations. From 1850 to 1914 the plant was owned by the Bloesch and Schwab families from Biel. In 1914 the company merged with a wire hoist built in Biel-Madretsch in 1852 to form the United Wire Works in Biel, which built another factory in Biel-Mett in 1942.
In 1882 the company replaced the drive with a water wheel with a small power station with a turbine and an electric generator that supplied the electricity for lighting the factory rooms. This system was the first power station in the Biel region and the first permanent direct current transmission in Switzerland, which from 1884 led from the small power station in the Taubenloch Gorge to the wire drawing shop in Bözingen . The power station became the property of the city of Biel / Bienne in 1992. Today it is operated by Bielersee Kraftwerke AG.
From 1910, the wire mill operated a narrow-gauge industrial railway from the factory to the SBB train station near Biel-Mett together with the Renfer AG sawmill . The freight trains were pulled by an accumulator locomotive that had been designed by SWS together with Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon . Today the locomotive belongs to the Kerzers-Kallnach Railway Museum . The factory railway ceased operations in 1995.
In 1990 the company stopped production. It then continued to exist as a finance and real estate company, which merged in 2001 with Espace Real Estate AG , which had recently been founded .
DT Swiss emerged from a production area of the former wire works and has an important position as a manufacturer of bicycle components.
literature
- Fernand Schwab: 300 years of wire industry. Festschrift for the three hundredth anniversary of the Bözingen plant of the Vereinigte Drahtwerke AG Biel 1634–1934 , Solothurn 1934.
- New Museum Biel: rolled away. 360 years of wire industry in Biel , Biel 2012.
Web links
- History of DT Suisse
- Walter Thut: United Wire Works. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Set courses
- ↑ Doku-Zug: 300 Years of the Wire Industry ( Memento of the original from September 25, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
Coordinates: 47 ° 9 '16.1 " N , 7 ° 15' 57.3" E ; CH1903: 586 903 / 222627