Wilhelm Höpflinger

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Fries & Höpflinger AG, main plant in Schweinfurt 1913

Wilhelm Höpflinger (born September 30, 1853 in Langewiesen ; † January 17, 1928 in Schweinfurt ) was a German inventor and factory owner, Kommerzienrat (1912), secret Kommerzienrat (1924). He was a co-founder of Fries & Höpflinger AG and, among other things , decisively further developed the ball grinding machine designed by Friedrich Fischer .

Live and act

Höpflinger came to Schweinfurt in 1873 at the age of twenty. He was initially employed for more than a decade as a worker at the local iron foundry Reck & Joachim and in 1888 he was a founding member of the local association of metal workers and treasurer of the general health and death fund for metal workers.

From 1887 Höpflinger worked at Fischer & Osterloh (later FAG ) in Schweinfurt, which at that time traded not only balls but also bicycles and sewing machines. In the same year Höpflinger constructed a milling device for Fischer's ball grinding machine, with which the quality of the balls could be further improved.

In 1890 he started his own business with Engelbert Fries. They founded the company Fries & Höpflinger , which manufactured balls and ball bearings and sold them worldwide. Höpflinger was in charge of technical management and Fries of commercial management. Höpflinger applied for numerous patents. An important invention was the Höpflinger ball cage for roller bearings. Until the end of his life he worked as general manager in the management of the company. He died in 1928, a year before it was sold to SKF, at the age of 74. His lifetime achievement is significant for the city of Schweinfurt , which became the center of the European rolling bearing industry .

Wilhelm-Höpflinger-Strasse n are named after him in his hometown Langewiesen and Schweinfurt .

family

Höpflinger was born as an illegitimate child of Johanna Elisabeth Völker in Langewiesen, which is now part of Thuringia and which was then in the Principality of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen . Johann Georg Höpflinger, a Swabian carter, recognized the son, which is why he was given the surname Höpflinger. The parents were apparently married a few years later. As a toddler, he was temporarily accepted by his father's relatives in Haunsheim / Swabia. He later grew up with a horse butcher in his mother's hometown. Childhood evidently took place in the simplest of circumstances.

In Schweinfurt in 1881 he married Dorothea Geis, the daughter of a carpenter. At this point, the couple already had two daughters, aged 6 and 5. Apparently Höpflinger only now had the money necessary to acquire citizenship and the associated permission to marry. Of the four daughters of Höpflinger, the eldest (Betty) married Ernst Sachs, the inventor of the freewheel hub with coaster brake on the bicycle; the youngest (Ernestine) married the Sachs director Rudolf Baier. The husbands of the other two daughters are also later active in the Fichtel & Sachs environment.

After the death of his first wife (1912), the 62-year-old from Höpflinger married Katharina von Hörmann, a daughter of the Munich civil servants' nobility, who was thirty years his junior in 1915. The marriage was divorced after a year. There is evidence that Höpflinger had been baptized as a Protestant, but when he died he belonged to the Catholic Church. The first wife and four daughters were also Protestants. Apparently he had converted in the run-up to the second wedding.

literature

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personal data
SURNAME Höpflinger, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German designer
DATE OF BIRTH September 30, 1853
PLACE OF BIRTH Langewiesen , Thuringia
DATE OF DEATH January 17, 1928
Place of death Schweinfurt