Heinrich Koppers
Heinrich Koppers ( born November 23, 1872 in Walbeck, † September 5, 1941 in Essen ) was a German engineer, inventor and entrepreneur.
Koppers has made through his work around the fuel technology, especially for coal, deserves. With his company, which was founded in 1901 Heinrich Koppers AG, Koppers took a leading global role in the development of coking and coal gasification technology. The entrained flow gasification after the Koppers - Totzek procedure and after the Shell - Koppers process goes back with him.
Life and work
Koppers was originally from rural conditions of the Lower Rhine. As a child he moved to Bochum, where his father had gotten a job as a janitor at a railway company. Koppers went in Bochum to school and completed a plumbing apprenticeship. He received his first job as a lathe operator in a rolling mill in Bochum. The ambitious Koppers but gave up with this simple position not satisfied and attended the technical evening and Sunday School, and later the Rheinisch- Westfälische Cottage School, where he earned his degree in 1893.
After that he started out as a general assistant in a Munich copper work, but switched after a short time ( in June 1894) to the coking plant construction company Dr. C. Otto & Comp .. Here he worked in the operation of the coking plant " Germania " in Dortmund and in the experimental coking plant of the company in Dahlhausen, where he developed a method for the recovery of cyanide from coke oven gas and various other methods and designs improved. Finally it came to a rift with Gustav Hilgenstock, Technical Director at Dr. C. Otto & Comp. about a radical redesign of the coke batteries from longitudinal to Querregenerator. Koppers left the company and started his own business in order to sell the patents, which he had filed in his time at Otto, and develop.
The superiority of Koppers design quickly became apparent and his company grew rapidly from 1904. From 1906 Koppers also received numerous commissions from U.S. Steel, so that from 1907 he worked for some time in America and in 1912 a subsidiary in the USA, which was based Koppers Inc. in Chicago. He later sold the company with the related patents to the financier and later U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, under whose ownership she moved to Pittsburgh.
Heinrich Koppers died in 1941, in the Second World War. His firm was continued by his son, among others Hans Heinrich Koppers ( 1903-1967 ). The company ran into financial difficulties later on, was taken over in 1974 by Krupp ( Krupp Koppers, later ThyssenKrupp EnCoke ) now risen and is in the ThyssenKrupp Uhde GmbH. The American offshoot, the Koppers Inc., still exists today, as well as their diversified Chilean offshoot, the conglomerate Sigdo Koppers.
The International School Ruhr their headquarters is at the Moltkestraße 29 of the same year at the Villa Koppers, Moltkeplatz 61, in the Essen Moltkeviertel, the 1911 built residential house of Heinrich Koppers family, today The lobby leads into the administration building of H. Koppers as office and commercial use.