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Ritratto di Carl Leverkus, realizzato nel 1888 da Heinrich Johann Sinkel

Carl Leverkus (Wermelskirchen, 5 novembre 1804 – Wiesdorf am Rhein, 1 febbraio 1889) è stato un chimico, farmacista e imprenditore tedesco, al quale deve il nome la moderna città di Leverkusen.

Education

Leverkus iniziò il tirocinio da farmacista nel 1822 per poi iniziare a studiare all'università dei Marburgo. Dopo un periodo come assistente farmacista a Treviri si trasferì a Parigi, dove lavorò come farmacista studiando al contempo nei corsi serali di chimica alla Sorbona. Nel 1829 diede l'esame da farmacista a Berlino e l'anno successivo conseguì il dottorato presso l'università di Gießen con una tesi sulla chimica dell'argento revisionata da Justus von Liebig.

Life and work

Nel 1834 Leverkus aprì a Wermelskirchen la prima fabbrica in Germania per la produzione blu oltremare sintetico. Nel 1860 spostò la fabbrica nella zona di Kahlberg a Wiesdorf, allora un villaggio vicino a Colonia, e ribattezzò il piccolo insediamento che vi nacque intorno "Leverkusen", dal nome della tenuta di famiglia a Lennep.

In 1834, Leverkus opened the first German factory for the production of artificial ultramarine blue in Wermelskirchen. Later he moved his factory to the Kahlberg in Wiesdorf. He called the emerging settlement "Leverkusen" after the family home in Lennep. The factory was a model plant with the latest technology and facilities, making it a big economic success.

Carl Leverkus and his wife were committed to social causes, so they took care of the needs of the factory's workforce, building homes for the workers, establishing a consumer association for them, founding the factory's own volunteer fire department, and starting a choir.

In 1884, Leverkus received the honorary title of Geheimer Kommerzienrat ("Privy Councillor of Commerce") and was made an honorary citizen of the city of Wermelskirchen.

In 1890, Leverkus' sons founded the company Vereinigte Ultramarinwerke ehemals Leverkus, Zeltner und Consorten ("United Ultramarine Works, formerly Leverkus, Zeltner, and associates"). The largest associate was the Nuremberg ultramarine factory Joh. Zeltner.

After Leverkus' death his sons sold a portion of the factory site in Wiesdorf to the alizarin manufacturer Elberfelder Farbenfabriken vorm in 1891. Friedr. Bayer & Co AG ("Elberfeld Colors, formerly Friedr. Bayer & Co AG"). Thus, Carl Leverkus' factory was the core of the present-day Bayer AG plant in Leverkusen.

Leverkus married Juliane Auguste Küpper in 1838 and had eleven children. He is buried in Wermelskirchen. In 1930, the city of Leverkusen was posthumously named after him. The German artist Martin Kippenberger was a great-great-grandson of Leverkus.

Altro

Carl Leverkus was born on November 5, 1804 in Wermelskirchen as the second child of Wilhelm Leverkus and his wife Alexandrine Jaeger. His father was a pharmacist, his grandmother came from the old Lohe pharmacist family, originally based in Solingen. Alexandrine Jaeger was the daughter of a Remscheid manufacturer and wholesaler of steel goods.

After elementary school in Wermelskirchen, Leverkus attended the public school in Remscheid from 1816 to 1818. He received pharmaceutical training in his father's pharmacy and then attended a private commercial school in Burg an der Wupper, where he met the sons of numerous Rhenish and Bergisch entrepreneurs. He completed a short apprenticeship with the pharmacist Joseph Krahe in Winningen on the Mosel. In 1822/1823 he attended the University of Marburg, where he attended lectures in chemistry, pharmacy and medicine, botany, mineralogy and mathematics. He gained further practical experience as an assistant in his father's pharmacy and in Trier. In 1826 he went to Paris, the center of scientific chemistry at the time.

In Paris, Leverkus followed the dispute over priorities that had erupted over the synthesis of ultramarine. At the same time, but independently of each other, the chemists Gmelin (Tübingen) and Guimet (Toulouse) had developed a process for producing artificial ultramarine. The bright blue, non-toxic, light-, heat- and alkali-resistant pigment replaced the sought-after and very expensive powder obtained from the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli. In 1824, the "Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale" announced a prize for the development of such a process, which was awarded to Guimet in 1828, whose process turned out to be the more economical one.

In 1829, Carl and his younger brother Wilhelm enrolled at the University of Berlin, where Carl passed the first class pharmacist exam on October 10, 1829. Wilhelm continued his studies of ancient languages ​​and history, and later became an archivist and Privy Councilor of the Duchy of Oldenburg.

Carl Leverkus returned to Wermelskirchen. Since his efforts to obtain a pharmacy license were in vain, he came up with the plan to build his own small factory. This made him one of the pharmacists who, at the beginning of the 19th century, turned away from the pharmacy profession due to the difficulty of access and turned to research and chemical production. In addition, Leverkus submitted a ten-page "Treatise on Silver: Its Occurrence; Its Purification and Properties" as a dissertation to the University of Giessen. He was awarded his doctorate in absentia in November 1830, even though the assessor Justus Liebig (1803-1873, Liebig since 1845) was unable to find "anything new" in the work. Nevertheless, Liebig supported the doctorate because "Mr. L. has acquired the best evidence of his knowledge through his examination in Berlin, since he is also a foreigner and this is more about the title than the matter."

After an unsatisfactory job as operations manager of the Hösch & Langenbeck soda factory in Barmen (now the city of Wuppertal), Leverkus returned to Wermelskirchen in 1833 and, at great financial expense, built a factory building with its own laboratory in 1834. While the "Chemische Fabrik Dr. Carl Leverkus" produced chemicals for various applications, Leverkus developed a modified and improved process for the synthesis of ultramarine based on Guimet's research. In 1838 he succeeded in obtaining a ten-year patent for the Kingdom of Prussia.

International recognition was not long in coming. At the first World Exhibition in London in 1851, ultramarine was praised as the most outstanding product of German industry, and in 1855 Leverkus received the silver medal at the Paris World Exhibition. However, by this time, fierce competition had already developed on the ultramarine market. A letter draft from Leverkus from 1856 has been handed down in which the entrepreneur considers expanding and relocating the factory: "The facility for this cannot, however, be set up in Wermelsk[irchen], as the distance to the navigable waterway and the railway is too great for delivery and shipping, but only in the Cologne area. In fact, only a great facility can be set up to ensure profitability."

The municipality of Wiesdorf offered these location advantages. It was not only located on the Rhine, but also had a connection to the Cologne-Minden railway with the Küppersteg station from 1845. Leverkus acquired the first plots of land in the Kahlberg area of ​​the municipality of Wiesdorf in July 1860. He named the factory settlement that was built there from 1861 onwards "Leverkusen" after his family's ancestral home. The name soon became official. From 1862 onwards the factory was known as the "Rheinische Ultramarin - Fabrik von Dr. C. Leverkus, Leverkusen bei Coeln a/Rhein" (Rhineland Ultramarine Factory of Dr. C. Leverkus, Leverkusen near Cologne on the Rhine), and the plant was colloquially known as the "Bläu".

The new factory began operations in the spring of 1862. Leverkus employed 78 workers, many of whom had come from Wermelskirchen to the Rhine and lived in the workers' houses built on the Kahlberg. This first factory-owned workers' settlement in the Leverkusen urban area comprised more than 30 apartments. In 1872, 162 people worked in the "Bläu". The isolated location of the factory settlement, which built up its own infrastructure with a consumer institution, a Protestant private school and a factory fire brigade with a band that probably also served as a social venue, led to it being referred to as the "State of Leverkusen".

In view of the price war on the ultramarine market, Leverkus applied for a license for a second factory, where he began producing the chemical compound alizarin in 1874. Demand for the new dye, which made textile dyeing independent of natural madder imported mainly from France, was enormous. Between 1871 and 1874, German alizarin production rose from 15,000 to 400,000 kilograms per year. The company, which had been operating as the "Rheinische Ultramarin- und Alizarin-Fabrik von Dr. C. Leverkus & Söhne" since 1874, employed 276 workers in 1891.

Leverkus was married to Juliane Auguste Küpper from Wermelskirchen in 1838. The couple had eleven children. The company founder's children-in-law almost all came from Bergisch and Rhenish entrepreneurial families. Three of the four sons became partners in the company in 1869 and 1874 respectively. Carl Leverkus was appointed commercial councillor in 1873, and on the occasion of the company's 50th anniversary and his 80th birthday in 1884 he was appointed privy commercial councillor. His hometown of Wermelskirchen made him an honorary citizen in 1884. Leverkus had already received the Prussian Order of the Crown, Third Class, in 1876. According to family tradition, he declined the ennoblement.

Throughout his life, Leverkus was committed to his workers and the community. Among other things, he was an unpaid councilor in Wermelskirchen and a member of the Chamber of Commerce in Lennep (now the city of Remscheid). His son Carl continued this tradition and took on public offices in the community of Wiesdorf and in the district of Solingen-Land.

Carl Leverkus died on February 1, 1889 in Leverkusen. He was buried in Wermelskirchen.

In 1890 there were major changes in German ultramarine production. Price and production agreements from 1872 onwards had not been able to "calm down" the market. Under the leadership of the three "big ones" (Leverkus, Zeltner in Nuremberg and Curtius in Duisburg) , 14 of the 19 German ultramarine factories with a market share of 95 percent merged to form "Vereinigte Ultramarinfabriken AG formerly Leverkus, Zeltner & Consorten" (VU). The company was initially based in Nuremberg, and from 1899 in Cologne , and Carl Leverkus Jr. took over the chairmanship of the board when the company moved. The Leverkus Alizarin Factory was not included in the merger. Instead, the family decided to offer it for sale to the Elberfelder Farbenfabriken formerly Friedr. Bayer & Co., which was looking for a suitable location on the Rhine. The first purchase contract was signed on December 5, 1891. It did not stop there: By 1924, the Farbenfabriken gradually took over not only the other land holdings with factory facilities, factory owners' villas and workers' houses, but also the place name "Leverkusen".