industrialist in several sectors during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the time of the First World War he employed some 30,000 people, principally in manufacturing armaments. Weiss came from [...] take over his father’s grain-trading company. In 1883, he and his brother Berthold established the first canning factory in Hungary with large buildings on Lövölde Square. It produced canned meat under the [...] Two years later he opened a textile factory at Ružomberok (now in Slovakia). By 1890, the arms industry was the most important branch of Weiss’s activities. He opened a subsidiary in Berlin to produce

companies suffered severe losses in the years after the First World War, and he did not live to see the subsequent prosperity of Czech industry. [...] well as in finance. His father was the geologist Johann Baptist Čžjžek (1806-55), who compiled the first geological map of Bohemia. He studied chemistry at Horni Slavkov (Schlaggerwald) in western Bohemia [...] Tatra motor vehicle firm, but was chiefly notable for building what is generally recognised as the first multiple unit passenger train (Triebwagenzug) to run on a European railway. Čžjžek was involved in

made by Francis Lea (1866-1940) of Shrewsbury. Armstrong`s first experimental hydraulic machine is displayed in the Museum of Science and Industry at Newcastle.

Göran Fredrik Göransson was one of Europe’s first industrialists who had a truly international perspective on industry, technology and business. Born at Gävle in Sweden, as a young man he spent 18 months [...] construction. The invention transformed the iron and steel industries world-wide. Göransson was the first manufacturer to demonstrate the successful application of the Bessemer converter, in July 1858, and

The career of Coco Chanel exemplifies the power of brands in twentieth-century industry and the extension of the market for luxury goods from limited circles of rich people to a much wider public. She [...] was involved with the English polo player Arthur Edward ‘Boy’ Capel (1881-1919) who financed her first shops, at Deauville in 1913 and opposite the casino at Biarritz in 1915. She was subsequently mistress [...] accommodation for the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and gave financial guarantees for the first production of his Sacré de Printemps (Rite of Spring). She circulated in high society and in 1922

studying minerals. He drew the first geological map of Bohemia. By 1824 he began consulting for governments and entrepreneurs. He was influential in the revival of the iron industry at Erzberg, west of Graz [...] Rudolph Ironworks at Ostrava, financed by Archbishop Rudolf of Olomouc, with the first coke-fired blast furnaces and first puddling furnaces in the Habsburg monarchy. This later became the Vitkovice steelworks [...] steelworks. Riepl showed exceptional insight into the potential for railways. In 1829 he proposed the first modern railway of the Habsburg monarchy in the visionary form of a complete network of 2,200 km from

locomotive, steam engines, machine tools and equipment for the textile industry. His ‘Salamanca’ of 1812 has been called the first commercially successful locomotive. He was born in north-east England in [...] at Leeds. Murray patented inventions for spinning wet flax that were a breakthrough for the linen industry. When Marshall installed a Boulton and Watt steam engine at his factory in 1793, Murray was put

ter’ and moderniser who managed enterprises in all sectors of Spanish industry. As president of the national institute of industry in the 1970s he led more than 200,000 employees. His family ran a hardware [...] graduating from the school of industrial engineers in the city in 1946 his first job was as an engineer in the textile industry at Tarrasa in Catalunya. He then moved to the Spanish Protecorate in Morocco [...] engineer for Transportes Eléctricos Hispano-Marroquíes de Tetuán. He rose to senior management for the first time in the motor manufacturing company Pegaso and its parent company Enasa (Empresa Nacional de

campaigned for shared distribution, a trade association and high import duties. During the First World War, the industry was highly profitable. At this time Urgoiti developed his interests in publishing - to [...] Nicolás María de Urgoiti y Achúcarro was a leader of the Spanish paper manufacturing industry who became an important figure in publishing. After beginning as an engineer he merged several paper mills [...] Europe examining new practices. In 1901 he designed a merger to reduce competition and strengthen the industry. Eleven factories united in a new company, La Papelera Española, which produced 68% of Spanish paper

In eighteenth-century Portugal, Guilherme (originally William) Stephens developed the glass industry and gained a national monopoly, with his brother João Diogo (originally John James, 1747–1826). Stephens [...] over the failed royal glass works at Marinha Grande, north of Lisbon. The works had been established first at Coina south of Lisbon in 1719 and was relocated to Marinha Grande in around 1747 by the Irish [...] leading centre for glassmaking in Portugal. The mansion Palácio Stephens is a museum of the glass industry.

which became the dominant method for reproducing images in the printing industry from the early nineteenth century. It was the first radical development in printing since the invention of moveable type.

Coalbrookdale, the ironmaster who, in the 1750s, established a pattern of management in the iron industry that was followed in other parts of Britain and in other European countries. Her diaries provide [...] was born Abiah Maude, daughter of a wealthy family of Quakers at Bishopswearmouth, Sunderland. Her first marriage, to John Sinclair, ended with the death of her husband in 1737. She met Abraham Darby in [...] remainder of her life to journeys as a Quaker minister. At Coalbrookdale she and her husband lived first at Dale House, which is now conserved, and from 1750 at a new, larger house in a park, called Sunniside

British iron industry for nearly two centuries, and were responsible for innovations that profoundly changed the nature of ironmaking throughout the world. Abraham Darby I (1678-1717) The first Abraham Darby [...] copper and brass workers from the area around La Vielle Montagne (Altenberg) near Aachen. During the first decade of the eighteenth century he developed links with Shropshire. He established a copper smelter [...] letter to the ironmaster John Wilkinson (1728-1808). Darby took responsibility for construction at the first meeting of subscribers in 1775. An Act of Parliament was obtained the following year and construction

Domestic cleaning products are some of the least romantic products of twentieth- and twenty-first-century industry, and their historical development is not widely understood. Friedrich Karl Henkel contributed

Josep Antoni Muntadas y Campeny was one of the leaders of the large-scale cotton industry in Spain. He founded the company known as La España Industrial with his brothers in 1847 at Sants in Catalunya [...] at Sants where they planned to build a large new factory. Josep Antoni went to England to buy the first steam engine and cotton machinery. He and Isidre became joint managing directors. A few years later [...] Sants, living inside the compound and providing health care for the workers. However, the cotton industry depended on cotton imported from the slave-worked plantations in Cuba and in 1869 he helped to raise

The brothers Norbert and August Metz were entrepreneurs and politicians who developed the iron industry in Luxembourg from around the middle of the nineteenth century. By the 1860s, the southern part of [...] Their older brother Charles (1799-1853) became one of the leading politicians in Luxembourg and the first President of the Chamber of Deputies. They studied engineering and law in Paris. In 1838 they formed [...] Norbert.he brothers Norbert and August Metz were entrepreneurs and politicians who developed the iron industry in Luxembourg from around the middle of the nineteenth century. By the 1860s, the southern part

Nicolas Leblanc had a formative influence on the early chemical industry. In 1787 he devised the process for making alkali that dominated production in the nineteenth century. Alkali was used in manufacturing [...] He was granted a patent but was never paid the prize money. The process involved two stages. The first was to treat common salt with sulphuric acid in a cast-iron pot to form sodium sulphate (NA 2 SO 4 [...] 63, he shot himself. From 1807, the process was copied by industrialists in the north of England, first near Newcastle and later near Liverpool: regions where sea salt and coal were readily available. By

factory built in 1907 that processed the by-products of the company’s coking plant for the chemical industry. Despite his father’s protests, he encourages the technical development of a smelting furnace for [...] advocate of German national interests. During World War I he provides the electric steel for the first German steel helmet and produces shells made from scrapped industrial plants in the occupied parts [...] sführer" (heads of war economy) and becomes part of the top-level management of the German arms industry by his appointment as chairman of the Reich Iron Association (RVE). For the production of gun barrels

sons trained in engineering and technology. The oldest was Robert, who was the first to see the opportunities of the oil industry. He bought oil wells and a refinery at Baku in Azerbaijan around 1873. His [...] many innovations. They developed the use of pipelines and rail cars to carry oil. They designed the first modern oil tanker ship, the Zoroaster , built at Gothenburg in 1878. They also created the Petrolea

in 1800. His father was a teacher but Carl Heinrich trained as a merchant. After the death of his first wife, Knorr met Amalie Henriette Caroline Seyffardt on a visit to Heilbronn in Baden-Württemberg, [...] produced some of the earliest commercial dried soups, laying the foundation for the convenience food industry. Knorr died in Heilbronn in 1875, shortly after launching his dried soup line. His sons continued