Max Fremery
| Max Fremery | |
|---|---|
Fremery in 1906
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| Born |
29 March 1859 Cologne, Germany |
| Died | 1 March 1932 (aged 72) Baden-Baden, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Occupation |
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| Known for | Founder of Vereinigte Glanzstoff-Fabriken (VGF) |
Max Fremery (29 March 1859 – 1 March 1932) was a German chemist and industrialist. He was one of the founders of the Vereinigte Glanzstoff-Fabriken (VGF) in 1899. VGF became a major manufacturer of artificial fibers.
Fremery was born in Cologne on 29 March 1859. His parents were Christian Fremery (1816–63), a wine and textile merchant, and Julie Vinman (1816–89). He worked in the workshops of the Rhenish Railway Company (Rheinische Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft) in Cologne, and then in the blast furnace and steelworks of Hörder Vereins.
He studied chemistry, graduating in Freiburg im Breisgau, then worked as a chemist, including working in England for a period. In 1883 he was employed with the Electriciteits Maatschappij in Rotterdam in developing a light filament. In the mid-1880s Fremery and the Austrian engineer Johann Urban (1863–1940), whom he had met in Amsterdam, took over the technical management of a light bulb factory in Gelnhausen.
In 1885 Fremery married Margarete Alder. She died in 1892, and in 1897 he married Clara Lürmann (1871–1924), daughter of a Swedish industrialist.
The Swiss chemist Matthias Eduard Schweizer (1818–60) had found in 1857 that cotton could be dissolved in a solution of copper salts and ammonia and then regenerated. In 1890 the French chemist Louis Henri Despeissis invented the cuprammonium process for spinning fibers from cotton dissolved in Schweizer's reagent. Despeissis died in 1892 and his patent was not renewed. In 1891 Fremery and Urban adapted the Despaissis process to make electric lamp filaments from carbon fiber. In 1892 they founded an incandescent electric lamp manufacturing company, Rheinische Glühlampenfabrik in Oberbruch, in the Heinsberg district. The Solingen merchant Hermann Heuser and Fremery's family subscribed the initial capital of 300,000 marks. Fremery and Urban manufactured their lamp filaments using cotton and Schweizer's reagent.
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