American Enka Company

The American Enka Company, founded in 1928, would become the United States' largest rayon manufacturer. Its research division developed such things as Tyrex (for the tire cord market), improved rayon and nylon, and by-products for detergent makers and paper mills. It helped bolster the economies of Western North Carolina, West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee, Northern Georgia and Northern Alabama during the Great Depression and thereafter; its founding in 1928 by Dutch capital led the way for German, Swiss, and British investments in the American South, and it was one of the companies on the original Fortune 500 list.

The American Enka Company was established outside of Asheville, North Carolina in late September 1928 by a Dutch firm, the Nederlandse Kunstzijdefabriek () (Netherlands Artificial Silk Company). The sound of the initial letters, N - K in Dutch of the parent firm's name is how Enka is derived.

The Netherlands' Nederlandse Kunstzijdefabriek was founded by shortly before World War I. By 1928, it had merged with several other Dutch and German firms, so that Business Week would subsequently describe it as a "giant international textile combine". Already in 1924, it looked toward expanding into the American marketplace. Simultaneously, it and other like manufacturers worldwide were experiencing difficulties with the manufacturing devices to make synthetic fibers because they easily and continually broke down.

The Nederlandse Kunstzijdefabriek (ENKA) was a member of the Dutch Chamber of Commerce's heavy industry division whose president at the time was , the Dutch electrical pioneer who already had founded several companies. Hartogs and Hofstede Crull had become friends over the years; and Hartogs turned to him about the problem with the spinning devices. By May 1925, Hofstede Crull already had formulated a solution for the problem – Driving Device For A Centrifugal Spinning Machine and filed for patents in the Netherlands on May 6, 1925 and in the United States on May 3, 1926; thereafter it became fully patented in the United States on March 31, 1931 by the United States Patent office, (Patent No: 1,798,312; inventor R.W.H.H. Crull; by his international law firm, Marks & Clerk-Electric motor-INT SPINPOT EXPLOITATIE MIJ NV) Thereafter, one of Hofstede Crull's companies, De Vijf and the Nederlandse Kunstzijdefabriek formed a joint venture, De Internationale Spinpot Exploitatie Maatschappij(ISEM) to manufacture and market Hofstede Crull's machines. This solution in the mid twenties for the rayon manufacturing problem was the means for the Nederlandse Kunstzijdefabriek to enter the American market with its subsidiary, the American Enka Company in 1928 and with its creation thereby simultaneously circumventing trade protectism (See AkzoNobel). Two years later, the American Enka Company would become a free standing one. With the death of Hofstede Crull in 1938, the ISEM was fully integrated with the AKU, the Algemene Kunstzijde Unie which had resulted when the German Vereinigte Glanzstoff-Fabriken merged with the Nederlandse Kunstzijdefabriek in 1929.

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