Wilhelm Holert

Wilhelm Holert (born August 15, 1867 in Geesthacht ; † April 10, 1961 in Escheburg ) was a German entrepreneur .

Life

Wilhelm Holert came from a long-established family of boatmen in Geesthacht. He attended the village school in his birthplace and then worked as a house boy, basket weaver, deckhand and greengrocer. Together with his brother, at the age of 28, he founded a company that developed successfully. The siblings traded potatoes between England and mainland Europe. Holert made several trips at home and abroad, during which he gained experience.

In 1900 the brothers received parts of a large family-owned dune area in Geesthacht. Since the flourishing construction industry of the early days led to an increasing demand for building raw materials and new developments in the brickworks could not adequately serve them, Holert decided to produce sand- lime bricks from the dune sand . Production started on April 1, 1905 in the factory buildings built in 1904. By the company's 50th anniversary, the company had shipped 1.1 billion bricks, including for the construction of the Empire State Building .

In the early days, Holert had to dispel concerns from both local construction workers and experts from Hamburg. The experts considered the new building materials to be absolutely unsuitable for civil engineering due to the weather conditions. The Hamburg building authorities therefore commissioned a model building in which, according to Holert, they lit “a hellish embers made of block wood and kerosene” and had them extinguished “with real floods of water”. After the building passed this attempt "brilliantly", Holert quickly achieved success. In 1905 his company produced 15 million stones.

In addition to his entrepreneurial activity, Holert introduced technical innovations in limestone production. In 1936 he received a patent for a “stone grab”. This box, open at the bottom, is brought over loosely arranged in several layers and rows, dimensionally only slightly differing from each other, and the lowest stone layer is laterally braced by a lever mechanism. Self-locking was achieved through a suitable choice of dimensions ; when lifting, the pressure created sufficient frictional force between the stones in the lowest layer to prevent slipping. The block can be quickly reloaded onto trucks. This technology is still used today in limestone works but also on construction sites. He also made sure that limestones were probably given holes from 1954. This enabled higher masonry, made work easier for masons and optimized insulation. This form of production is still used today.

The city of Geesthacht, as the only resident to date, awarded Holert honorary citizenship on March 25, 1955. The hard stone works Geesthacht-Hamburg Wilhelm Holert existed after the death of the founder in 1961 until 1998. The factory building with an imposing chimney then existed for a short time. Today there is only a pier that was previously used by the works, on which a saloon ship is moored. On December 12, 2012, the city of Geesthacht named Wilhelm-Holert-Strasse after the former entrepreneur.

literature

• William Boehart: Holert, Wilhelm . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 5 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0640-0 , p. 192-193 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ With sand-lime brick for honorary citizen Bergedorfer Zeitung of January 18, 2015. Retrieved on June 28, 2016