Fred C. Koch

Fred Chase Koch ( born September 23, 1900 in Quanah, Texas, USA, † November 17, 1967 Bear River near Ogden (Utah ), USA ) was an American chemist and entrepreneur who founded the oil refinery firm that later, as Koch Industries became the second largest privately held companies in the United States.

Life

Fred C. Koch was born in Quanah, Texas, the son of a Dutch immigrant Harry Koch. Harry Koch began as a printer 's apprentice in Workum, The Netherlands, and worked for over a year in printing shops in The Hague and in Germany before emigrating in 1888 to the United States, where he became the owner of the daily newspaper Tribune - Chief. Fred C. Koch graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1922 from a chemical engineer.

Fred C. Koch began his career with the Texas Company in Port Arthur, Texas, and then became chief engineer at the Medway Oil & Storage Company on the Isle of Grain in Kent, England. In 1925 he founded his own company in the U.S.. He was married to the artist Mary R. Koch since 1932. They had four sons: Frederick ( born 1933), Charles ( b. 1935 ), David ( b. 1940 ) and William ( b. 1940 ).

Koch in 1927 invented an efficient method for petroleum refining. Since he first could not prevail against the big oil companies, he went to the Soviet Union and there instructed engineers in the construction of modern oil refineries. However, the experiences under Stalin could return to the U.S. it. Koch was a staunch anti-communist and was also active politically. So he counted 1958 of the founders and major donors of the right-wing John Birch Society ( JBS ), which sought specifically to influence public opinion. The JBS threw himself so unique anti-Communists as Harry S Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, due to their social and tax legislation that merely to be instruments of a communist conspiracy, and called for tax cuts that she wanted to make by a far -reaching degradation of the State not only state pensions and health insurance declined cooking and the JBS as "communist " from, other approaches, in the sense of environmental protection industry to make legal requirements, they were always as attacks on freedom. Sons Charles and David Koch are continuing their father's politics and are now one of the main financiers of the right-wing populist Tea Party movement.