Emil Rathenau

Origins and early life

Emil Rathenau was born in Berlin on 11 December 1838, the son of Moritz Rathenau, a Jewish grain merchant, and of Therese Liebermann, of the family of the painter Max Liebermann, in the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie of the Prussian capital, and he never left the Jewish community into which he was born.

Work and career

Trained as a mechanical engineer at Hanover and Zurich and in the workshops of England, he ran a small machine factory in Berlin from 1865 until the crash of 1873, and was a man without a business when, at the Paris electrical exhibition of 1881, he saw Edison's incandescent lamp and understood what it meant. He bought the German rights to Edison's patents, founded in 1883 the Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft, which in 1887 became the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft, AEG, and in 1884 built Berlin's first public power station, the beginning of the Berliner Elektricitäts-Werke that lit the city; with Oskar von Miller he demonstrated in 1891 the long-distance transmission of alternating current from Lauffen to Frankfurt, one hundred and seventy-five kilometers away, which decided the future of electricity.

Under his direction AEG grew, alongside Siemens, into one of the two largest electrical concerns in the world — generators, motors, cables, turbines, lamps, the first electric railways, and, from 1907, the industrial design of Peter Behrens, whose turbine hall in Berlin became a monument of modern architecture; with Siemens he founded Telefunken in 1903. He died in Berlin on 20 June 1915; his son Walther Rathenau, who succeeded him, would be murdered as foreign minister of the Republic in 1922.