Walter Körte (hydraulic engineer)

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Walter Körte

Walter Leberecht Körte (born February 13, 1855 in Flatow , West Prussia ; † May 8, 1914 ) was a German hydraulic engineer and the founder of German sea ​​mark science .

Life

Walter Körte was born on February 13, 1855 as the youngest son of an administrative lawyer in Flatow in West Prussia; his father, then still a lawyer, later became deputy president of the Reich Railway Authority . Walter Körte completed his high school in Glogau and Bromberg and passed the Abitur in 1872. In 1873 he completed a construction eleven year in Berlin with the architects Knoblauch and Wex, and then began his studies. After studying at the Berlin building academy and one year of military service with a guard grenadier regiment, he worked as a government building manager in the construction of the Moselle railway from 1877 to 1879 .

After he had passed the master builder examination at the end of 1882 and there was no vacancy in the Prussian administration, he went to Bremen and took over the local construction management for the construction of the Roter Sand lighthouse . A previous building of this lighthouse, which had to be erected on difficult terrain, was destroyed by a storm. While the lighthouse was being built, Körte had to live on a steamer and during this time he became interested in the topic of sea marks. In addition, a thesis on buckling resistance was created during this time. After the Roter Sand lighthouse had been completed, Körte, returned to the Prussian civil service in 1886, worked on the lighting of the Lower Weser and Lower Ems ; he built a total of five more lighthouses.

From 1891, Körte worked in the technical office of the Ministry of Public Works. Here he designed the lighting for the Flensburg Fjord and for the Kahlberg beacon .

In 1892 he was appointed hydraulic engineering inspector and advised the imperial commissioner on the preparatory work for the world exhibition in Chicago. Actually he should have taken up an office in Washington afterwards, but was then assigned to German embassies in The Hague and Brussels for health reasons . During this time he also made several study trips to France and England. As head of the Wasserbauamt I in Berlin, Körte worked in 1896 on the preliminary design for the conversion of the Heligoland beacon. In 1899 he became head of the technical office and one year later, on April 1, 1900, he became head of the department for the entire navigation system. During this time, a sea ​​mark test center was set up in the arches of the Stadtbahn in Lüneburgerstrasse in Berlin's Tiergarten, which dealt with all technical innovations in sea mark systems.

Körte also dealt with making electrical waves usable for the fog signal service.

Walter Körte worked closely with the Goslar sea mark manufacturer Wilhelm Weule , who founded a factory for optical and mechanical devices in 1896. This factory made lenses for navigation lights and Fresnel lenses forth for Seebefeuerung. Together they improved Fresnel optics by changing the catadioptric profiles and thus reducing the deflection errors. This new look is known as the Körte mirror and was first installed in the Kap Arkona lighthouse on Rügen . Körte later developed the Prussian arc lamp , which had a carbon pen that was automatically pushed up. This meant that the light source could always be kept in focus. This technology remained in use at the Arngast , Wangerooge and Westerhever lighthouses until the 1960s.

In 1914 Walter Körte was awarded the Golden Medal of the Prussian Academy of Civil Engineering, "in appreciation of the great services he has earned in the navigation system through scientific research and successful attempts to perfect the light sources of the optical devices of beacons such as fog and sound signals".

Awards

Two buoy layers were named after Walter Körte .

In 1926 a buoy laying company was built at the Unterweser shipbuilding company in Wesermünde-Lehe (today a part of Bremerhaven) and christened Walter Körte on April 27, 1926 . In the same year the sea sign steamer was delivered to the Swinoujscie Port Authority. On December 29, 1944, the buoy laying ship Walter Körte (368 GRT) sank in the Geranium 2 mine field off Swinoujscie.

In June 1957, the Jadewerft Wilhelmshaven laid down the buoy layer Walter Körte as construction number 41 for the Rendsburg waterway machinery office . The delivery was to take place on April 4, 1958. In April the buoy laying machine for the WBA Brunsbüttelkoog was put into service. This buoy laying machine was one of the first for which the occupation-related building restrictions had fallen. The head of department responsible for construction in the water and shipping administration H. Waas (1906-1991) set out the requirements for the ship in detail.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Official communications, Prussia. In: Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung, vol. 2 (1882) No. 51, p. 467
  2. ^ W. Körte: About kink resistance. In: Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung, vol. 6 (1886) No. 10A, pp. 97-100
  3. ^ Ke .: Electric waves in the fog signal service. In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, vol. 29 (1909) No. 87, pp. 570-571
  4. ↑ Wilhelm Weule GmbH & Co .: Company → Who-we-are  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved July 2, 2012.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.weule.com  
  5. ↑ Awards. In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, vol. 34 (1914) No. 24, p. 192
  6. ↑ Official communications, Prussia. In: Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung, vol. 31 (1911) No. 9 (January 28, 1911), p. 57
  7. ↑ [1] (PDF; 1.5 MB) List of building officials employed in the Prussian state and by the authorities of the German Reich: Supplement to the Zeitschrift für Bauwesen, vol. 65 (1915) issue 7–9, column 518.
  8. ↑ http://werften.fischtown.de/archiv/schiffsliste.html ( Memento from March 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ Reinhart Schmelzkopf: Construction list of the shipbuilding company Unterweser. In: Strandgut, (1989) Issue 20, pp. 81-92
  10. ^ Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the naval war 1939-1945. Edited by the Library for Contemporary History. Stuttgart: Württembergische Landesbibliothek, 2007, 1944, December and LOSSES OF GERMAN COMMERCIAL SHIPS 1939–1945 and foreign ships sailing under the German flag
  11. ↑ Hansa, Vol. 94 (1957) No. 22/23 (June 1, 1957) p. 1134
  12. ^ Photo by Walter Körte ( Memento from May 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ Ministerialrat Dipl.-Ing. H. Waas: The buoy laying ship "Walter Körte". In: Hansa, Vol. 95 (1958) No. 16/17 (April 19, 1958) pp. 719-730
personal data
SURNAME Körte, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Körte, Walter Leberecht (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German hydraulic engineer, and founder of German nautical science
DATE OF BIRTH February 13, 1855
PLACE OF BIRTH Flatow , West Prussia
DATE OF DEATH May 8, 1914