William Ralph Merton
Encyclopedia
Wilhelm Ralph Merton was a prominent and influential German
entrepreneur
, social democrat and philanthropist
. Among his most notable accomplishments, he was a founder of the University of Frankfurt and Metallgesellschaft AG, which became the largest non-ferrous mining company in the world and the second largest company in Germany.
in 1837. On 5 November 1855 Ralph Moses and his family gained citizenship of the free city of Frankfurt. On 27 November he was granted permission to call himself ‘Merton’ after claiming in his application for such (on 22 October 1856) that his brother Benjamin had already taken the family name ‘Merton’ in Manchester
as the name ‘Moses’ was not suitable to be used as a surname.
Wilhelm Merton studied at Frankfurt’s grammar school, thereafter in Munich
and he performed voluntary work at the Deutsche Bank
in Berlin
.
He married Emma Ladenburg
in 1877 (born 1859 in Frankfurt, died in 1939), who was a daughter of Eugenie Halphen (1829-1866) and the businessman Emil Ladenburg (1822 – 1902), co-owner of the famous Ladenburg banking house. The couple had five children: Adolf, Alfred, Walter Henry, Gerda and Richard.
Merton and his children converted to Protestantism
in 1899. The Mertons, who had been English citizens hitherto, naturalised as Germans in the same year and since then he bore the name Wilhelm Merton.
The Metallgesellschaft, with 40 employees and one telephone--the first telephones were installed in Frankfurt in 1881--at the outset traded in copper
, lead
, and zinc
, later diversifying into nickel
and aluminum. Over the next hundred years, it grew into a company of over 20,000 employees with $10 billion revenue. It had over 250 subsidiaries specializing in mining
, specialty chemicals (Chemetall), commodity trading, financial services
, and engineering
.
Initially in 1881, close business as well as personal ties had been formed with the firm of Henry R. Merton (HRM), the metals trading firm of the English branch of the family, named after another of Ralph's sons.
Since German mines could not satisfy the country's metal requirements, the company rapidly developed extensive relations abroad and within a short time Metallgesellschaft was represented in such cities as Basel
, Amsterdam
, Milan
, Brussels
, Stockholm
, St. Petersburg, Moscow
, Vienna
, and Paris
. Within a few years, therefore, a network of subsidiaries spanned the globe. In 1887, the American Metal Company was founded in New York
; in 1889, the Companhia de Minerales y Metales in Mexico
and the Australian Metal Co. The last was the result of an expedition the company organized together with HRM and Degussa into the ore-rich Broken Hill district, where lead and lead concentrates were produced in vast quantities. This constituted the start of Metallgesellschaft's trading in ore, which would assume greater and greater importance in the future.
Although Wilhelm Merton is recorded in autobiographical notes as saying of Metallgesellschaft that: "Our trading company will not be involved in any kind of advertising" and is credited with the remark that it would be far more pleasant "to be able to pursue one's business without the need of the stock exchange, the public or the press," he broke fundamentally with his principles in one important way--the publication Metallstatistik, which had appeared annually since 1892, giving an overview of metal production, consumption, and prices worldwide, made Metallgesellschaft's name, to quote Wilhelm Merton again, "known, and I might add, respected." In general, however, Wilhelm Merton strongly objected to any interest in the firm which he considered to be excessive.
The First World War hit Metallgesellschaft hard. The good relations established abroad were broken off, imports of raw material dried up, the sister company HRM fell under the British Non-Ferrous Metals Industry Bill of November 1917, designed to eliminate enemy influence and control over the British ore and metal trade, and the deliveries of Australian ore failed to appear. This meant Metallgesellschaft had to obtain its metal supplies from neutral countries for as long as possible and eventually to use up domestic sources or intensify their exploitation. Three aluminum works were built, in conjunction with the firm Griesheim Elektron: in Horrem, close to Cologne
; in Berlin-Rummelsburg; and in Bitterfeld
near Halle
.
Wilhelm Merton died suddenly of a heart attack on 15 December 1916 in Berlin after having already heart troubles for a long time prior. He was buried in the main graveyard in Frankfurt. His sons took over the control of Metallgesellschaft: Alfred Ralph Merton, the eldest son, was the chairman of the supervisory board, while Richard Ralph Merton, the second-born son, later became chief executive.
He founded the ‘Institute for Community Wellbeing’ in 1890 and in 1901 the ‘Academy for Social and Trade Sciences’, both in Frankfurt. He was the driving force, with Franz Adickes (then Mayor of Frankfurt), in founding the University of Frankfurt.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, as it was later called, became one of the most advanced universities of its time as a result of it adopting Merton’s idea of having a scientifically orientated university which was geared to the demands of modern economic society in terms both of education and of research.
The Wilhelm Merton Professorship and the Wilhelm Merton Centre for European Integration and International Economic System at the Frankfurt Goethe-University, the Wilhelm Merton Scholarship and Mertonviertel ("Merton District") in Frankfurt, on the former work site of the ‘Unified Germany Metal Works’ (a subsidiary of Metallgesellschaft), are all named after him.
Additionally, a vocational business school and a street in Bockenheim are named after him.
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
entrepreneur
Entrepreneur
An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...
, social democrat and philanthropist
Philanthropist
A philanthropist is someone who engages in philanthropy; that is, someone who donates his or her time, money, and/or reputation to charitable causes...
. Among his most notable accomplishments, he was a founder of the University of Frankfurt and Metallgesellschaft AG, which became the largest non-ferrous mining company in the world and the second largest company in Germany.
Early life and education
Wilhelm was the eighth of nine children of Ralph Merton (until 1856: Raphael Lyon Moses) and his wife Sara Amelie Cohen, who immigrated to Frankfurt from EnglandEngland
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
in 1837. On 5 November 1855 Ralph Moses and his family gained citizenship of the free city of Frankfurt. On 27 November he was granted permission to call himself ‘Merton’ after claiming in his application for such (on 22 October 1856) that his brother Benjamin had already taken the family name ‘Merton’ in Manchester
Manchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...
as the name ‘Moses’ was not suitable to be used as a surname.
Wilhelm Merton studied at Frankfurt’s grammar school, thereafter in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
and he performed voluntary work at the Deutsche Bank
Deutsche Bank
Deutsche Bank AG is a global financial service company with its headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. It employs more than 100,000 people in over 70 countries, and has a large presence in Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific and the emerging markets...
in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
.
He married Emma Ladenburg
Ladenburg
Ladenburg is a town in the district of Rhein-Neckar-Kreis, in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated on the right bank of the Neckar, 10 km east of Mannheim, and 10 km northwest of Heidelberg.It has an old town from the Late Middle Ages...
in 1877 (born 1859 in Frankfurt, died in 1939), who was a daughter of Eugenie Halphen (1829-1866) and the businessman Emil Ladenburg (1822 – 1902), co-owner of the famous Ladenburg banking house. The couple had five children: Adolf, Alfred, Walter Henry, Gerda and Richard.
Merton and his children converted to Protestantism
Protestantism
Protestantism is one of the three major groupings within Christianity. It is a movement that began in Germany in the early 16th century as a reaction against medieval Roman Catholic doctrines and practices, especially in regards to salvation, justification, and ecclesiology.The doctrines of the...
in 1899. The Mertons, who had been English citizens hitherto, naturalised as Germans in the same year and since then he bore the name Wilhelm Merton.
Metallgesellschaft AG
In 1881, Merton founded Metallgesellschaft AG together with Leo Ellinger and Zacharias Hochschild.The Metallgesellschaft, with 40 employees and one telephone--the first telephones were installed in Frankfurt in 1881--at the outset traded in copper
Copper
Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu and atomic number 29. It is a ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. Pure copper is soft and malleable; an exposed surface has a reddish-orange tarnish...
, lead
Lead
Lead is a main-group element in the carbon group with the symbol Pb and atomic number 82. Lead is a soft, malleable poor metal. It is also counted as one of the heavy metals. Metallic lead has a bluish-white color after being freshly cut, but it soon tarnishes to a dull grayish color when exposed...
, and zinc
Zinc
Zinc , or spelter , is a metallic chemical element; it has the symbol Zn and atomic number 30. It is the first element in group 12 of the periodic table. Zinc is, in some respects, chemically similar to magnesium, because its ion is of similar size and its only common oxidation state is +2...
, later diversifying into nickel
Nickel
Nickel is a chemical element with the chemical symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel belongs to the transition metals and is hard and ductile...
and aluminum. Over the next hundred years, it grew into a company of over 20,000 employees with $10 billion revenue. It had over 250 subsidiaries specializing in mining
Mining
Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the earth, from an ore body, vein or seam. The term also includes the removal of soil. Materials recovered by mining include base metals, precious metals, iron, uranium, coal, diamonds, limestone, oil shale, rock...
, specialty chemicals (Chemetall), commodity trading, financial services
Financial services
Financial services refer to services provided by the finance industry. The finance industry encompasses a broad range of organizations that deal with the management of money. Among these organizations are credit unions, banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, consumer finance companies,...
, and engineering
Engineering
Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...
.
Initially in 1881, close business as well as personal ties had been formed with the firm of Henry R. Merton (HRM), the metals trading firm of the English branch of the family, named after another of Ralph's sons.
Since German mines could not satisfy the country's metal requirements, the company rapidly developed extensive relations abroad and within a short time Metallgesellschaft was represented in such cities as Basel
Basel
Basel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...
, Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
, Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
, Brussels
Brussels
Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
, Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...
, St. Petersburg, Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
, and Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. Within a few years, therefore, a network of subsidiaries spanned the globe. In 1887, the American Metal Company was founded in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
; in 1889, the Companhia de Minerales y Metales in Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
and the Australian Metal Co. The last was the result of an expedition the company organized together with HRM and Degussa into the ore-rich Broken Hill district, where lead and lead concentrates were produced in vast quantities. This constituted the start of Metallgesellschaft's trading in ore, which would assume greater and greater importance in the future.
Although Wilhelm Merton is recorded in autobiographical notes as saying of Metallgesellschaft that: "Our trading company will not be involved in any kind of advertising" and is credited with the remark that it would be far more pleasant "to be able to pursue one's business without the need of the stock exchange, the public or the press," he broke fundamentally with his principles in one important way--the publication Metallstatistik, which had appeared annually since 1892, giving an overview of metal production, consumption, and prices worldwide, made Metallgesellschaft's name, to quote Wilhelm Merton again, "known, and I might add, respected." In general, however, Wilhelm Merton strongly objected to any interest in the firm which he considered to be excessive.
The First World War hit Metallgesellschaft hard. The good relations established abroad were broken off, imports of raw material dried up, the sister company HRM fell under the British Non-Ferrous Metals Industry Bill of November 1917, designed to eliminate enemy influence and control over the British ore and metal trade, and the deliveries of Australian ore failed to appear. This meant Metallgesellschaft had to obtain its metal supplies from neutral countries for as long as possible and eventually to use up domestic sources or intensify their exploitation. Three aluminum works were built, in conjunction with the firm Griesheim Elektron: in Horrem, close to Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
; in Berlin-Rummelsburg; and in Bitterfeld
Bitterfeld
Bitterfeld is a town in the district Anhalt-Bitterfeld, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Since 1 July 2007 it has been part of the town Bitterfeld-Wolfen. It is situated approx. 25 km south of Dessau, and 30 km northeast of Halle...
near Halle
Halle, Saxony-Anhalt
Halle is the largest city in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. It is also called Halle an der Saale in order to distinguish it from the town of Halle in North Rhine-Westphalia...
.
Wilhelm Merton died suddenly of a heart attack on 15 December 1916 in Berlin after having already heart troubles for a long time prior. He was buried in the main graveyard in Frankfurt. His sons took over the control of Metallgesellschaft: Alfred Ralph Merton, the eldest son, was the chairman of the supervisory board, while Richard Ralph Merton, the second-born son, later became chief executive.
Achievements
On account of his socio-political endeavours primarily, Wilhelm Merton is regarded as one of the most prominent German entrepreneurs in the Wilhelmenian period. He proved himself to no lesser degree in the financial world, in the period up until the beginning of the First World War, as the founder of initiatives aimed at humanising the economic world through scientific means.He founded the ‘Institute for Community Wellbeing’ in 1890 and in 1901 the ‘Academy for Social and Trade Sciences’, both in Frankfurt. He was the driving force, with Franz Adickes (then Mayor of Frankfurt), in founding the University of Frankfurt.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, as it was later called, became one of the most advanced universities of its time as a result of it adopting Merton’s idea of having a scientifically orientated university which was geared to the demands of modern economic society in terms both of education and of research.
The Wilhelm Merton Professorship and the Wilhelm Merton Centre for European Integration and International Economic System at the Frankfurt Goethe-University, the Wilhelm Merton Scholarship and Mertonviertel ("Merton District") in Frankfurt, on the former work site of the ‘Unified Germany Metal Works’ (a subsidiary of Metallgesellschaft), are all named after him.
Additionally, a vocational business school and a street in Bockenheim are named after him.
Literature
- Hans Achinger: Wilhelm Merton in seiner Zeit. Frankfurt am Main 1965
- Wolfgang Klötzer (Hrg.), Frankfurter Biographie. Zweiter Band M-Z. Verlag Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-7829-0459-1