Company Foundation with an outlook:
The “Siegwerk-Industrie-Gesellschaft m.b.H:”
- Siegfeld – In the days of the “Siegwerk Industrie-Gesellschaft”, the site was a mixed industrial estate where other products were manufactured along with inks.
The First World War had paralysed business for Photogravur and Kattunfabrik. Only Siegwerk remained productive. But towards the end of the conflict, the situation got even worse. To give the companies a perspective, management decided to implement a plan from the early war days and merge Siegwerk with Kattunfabrik. On September 6, 1918 – two months before the end of the war – the “Siegwerk-Industrie-Gesellschaft m.b.H.” was launched. The core of the new company was the chemical department, but it also pursued other goals such as the production of imprinted cotton fabrics. In particular, it also controlled the substantial real estate of the former Kattunfabrik. The Rolffs family now ceased to be shareholders. Alfred Keller, his son Alfred Keller and Dr. Fritz Rung took over management.
Tasks were clearly defined. While the chemist Rung was responsible for the development and production of printing inks, Alfred Keller managed the new company business-wise. The chemical department only required a small share of the old Kattunfabrik’s facilities. For this reasons, further production branches were also to find a home there. A large part of the real estate was invested in the new “Siegburger Walzwerk Holzrichter, Rötzel & Co.” – thus in 1920, a cold plate roller mill was established and extended by a strip steel plant in 1921. Empty buildings werde leased out to other firms, including the harmonium factory ”Cantulia“ and a sausage factory. Additionally, an “Aktiengesellschaft für Kohlendestillation und chemische Industrie“ (public limited company for coal distillation and chemical industry) moved in, delivering tar distillates for ink production to Siegwerk.
Growth under tough circumstances
- Focus on colour – After WWI, sales of gravure inks were soon growing again and Siegwerk expanded production.
Founding the Siegwerk-Industrie-Gesellschaft was a courageous decision in difficult times. The defeat of the German Empire in 1918 led to domestic and foreign policy turmoil in society and the economy. Revolutionary rebellions in Berlin toppled Emperor Wilhelm II and sparked the declaration of a republic. The Rhine region was occupied by allied forces, who took over administration, controlled the postal, telephone and transport sectors, and banned sales of certain raw materials and products to unoccupied parts of Germany. All types of colorants were affected – a hard blow for Siegwerk.
The signing of the Versailles Treaty and the establishment of the Weimar Republic in the summer of 1919 only led to short-term easing of tension. The German economy was hit by loss of territory in the West and East, along with reparation demands, the young democracy was plagued by unrest and coup attempts. All the same, Siegwerk management was optimistic. An excerpt from Siegwerk’s business report on November 4, 1919: “Despite the great problems arising from the sudden end of the war, the revolution and the fact that our territory became occupied, business with ink has been totally satisfactory. Revenue reached last year’s volume and the forecast is quite satisfactory, despite supply problems for raw materials. Growing revenue is to be expected.”
And indeed, the company grew throughout the first post-war years, otherwise characterised by inflation and impoverishment of large segments of the population. Soon, it was employing 30 people. Even as inflation reached dizzy dimensions, Siegwerk trusted its own strength and employed a further chemist. Dr. Willy Hümmelchen was to support the work of the three specialists in the laboratory. His first task shows how Siegwerk approached the difficult supply situation of those days: Hümmelchen was to find ways of using the soluble colorants left over from Kattunfabrik days to produce gravure inks.
Success through export
During the 1920’s, gravure asserted itself in Germany and Europe. Siegwerk grabbed the opportunity and exported gravure inks to many European countries. In the mid-1920’s, inks were not only sold to Belgium and the Netherlands, which had traditional ties with the Rhine region, but all the way to Stockholm, Paris, Milan and Madrid. Many units were also delivered to Switzerland and the successor states of the Habsburg empire. Trade connections stretched from Cracow, Prague, Vienna and Budapest to Bucharest and Cairo. Siegwerk also sold inks “Made in Germany” across the Atlantic to the USA, Brazil and Argentina.
- New design – Very much in the Photogravur tradition, Siegwerk letterheads relied on the power of pictures.
To meet growing demand for gravure inks and hold its own in international competition, Siegwerk expanded production facilities in Siegburg in the 1920’s. One obstacle were old operating licenses dating from the days of the Siegwerk Chemisches Laboratorium. An application to change the old fire-safety rules imposed in 1912 illustrates the problem inflexible regulations posed even in those days: “The size of our enterprise and our production,” says the document filed on November 29, 1930, “has grown from year to year – especially due to the fact that we have managed to find markets for our products abroad, which is important for the German economy. The regulation referred to above disturbs our production significantly, and more importantly, it makes production more expensive, so that we are hampered in competition – especially abroad.”
Crisis and consolidation
Despite bureaucratic hurdles, the 1930/1931 business year was the most successful since the war. Due to expansion of business abroad in the 1920’s and growing domestic sales, the production of gravure inks grew to a million kilograms a year. But in 1931, the world economic crisis that had begun on Black Monday at the New York stock exchange in 1929 put an end to this positive development.
Exports by German companies dropped from 13.5 billion marks in 1929 to 9.6 billion in 1931 and 5.7 billion in 1932 – a tremendous decline that also hit Siegwerk. In 1932, the unemployment figure reached more than six million. The economic crisis provided a boost for radical movements in German politics and significantly contributed to the rise of the National Socialists to power in January 1933.
By that time, however, the economic crisis had already been overcome, and measures to boost the German economy had begun. The National Socialists harvested the fruits of this policy and reinforced the growth that soon set in with debt-financed employment measures and armament spending. The “Farbenfabrik Siegburg”, as Siegwerk was now also named, benefited from the general recovery of the economy. In the mid-1930’s, the company was employing 100 people. Production was mainly focused on gravure inks for paper printing, but also on inks for rubber printing of packages. Additionally, there were accessory products like iron chloride, used to etch copper rollers, along with solvents and detergents.
But National Socialist economic policy also posed difficulties for Siegwerk. The armament campaign of the NS regime led to rationing of militarily important materials like iron and raw oil in 1936. That not only caused problems in ink production, but also regarding storage and transport, since cans and iron barrels were hard to come by. Devaluation in the Netherlands, Italy and France in October 1936 brought further difficulties, as Siegwerk’s export revenues were thus reduced.
Alfred Keller and Dr. Willy Hümmelchen
Alfred Keller – In the 1920´s, Alfred Keller guided Siegwerk through the difficult days of inflation and economic crisis.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the new generation of entrepreneurs brought fresh impetus into business. Alfred Keller recognised the opportunities in the new market for printing inks and kept his vision alive in the First World War and during the inflation years. From the 1920’s, he had a new creative and innovative person at his side in Dr. Willy Hümmelchen.
After studying chemistry at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Technical College, Alfred Keller (born on November 26, 1880) worked as an apprentice tradesman for Hardt und Co. in Berlin. In 1907, he became a registered manager at his father’s Kattunfabrik Siegfeld, and in 1909 he was made managing director alongside his father. On February 21, 1911 he founded the core of the future Siegwerk in the Siegwerk Chemisches Laboratorium GmbH, born out of the Kattunfabrik.
Dr. Willy Hümmelchen – The chemist joined the company in 1923 and developed many new technologies.Siegwerk grew fast and employed a number of excellent chemists after WWI. One of these was Dr. Willy Hümmelchen, born in 1899. He joined the company in early September, 1923, two weeks after receiving his doctorate at Bonn University. With his inventive and organisational talents, Hümmelchen secured Siegwerk’s survival in the difficult years after WWII.
In the 1950’s, Hümmelchen set the ink factory on the path to becoming the largest printing ink plant in the world due to close customer relations and a focus on technical service. He initiated the forerunner of the “technical bulletins”. He helped develop new printing inks, introduced new processes in gravure and inspired groundbreaking inventions in printing – for instance, ink cooling in illustration gravure and a screen printing technology for flexo printing. After 56 years, Dr. Hümmelchen retired from the company in 1979. He died on July 13, 1982.
Siegwerk on the path to modernisation
Despite difficulties due to the rationing policy of the National Socialists, the ink business on which the Siegwerk-Industrie-Gesellschaft was now fully focused thrived. In the light of this development, the owners decided to transform the company into a limited partnership on December 18, 1936 – the “Siegwerk Farbenfabrik Keller, Dr. Rung & Co.” Alfred Keller became a personally liable shareholder.
The company remained on an expansion course under its new name. In 1937, it bought a construction hall from the neighbouring steel mill, to house new solvent equipment and mixing machines with fast-moving rotors. The goal was to combine economic growth and technical modernisation. For instance, new machines were used as the solvent toluene was introduced in the production of liquid basic inks, leading to better results. The old funnel mills used for grinding were replaced by modern ball mills, which also led to an improved performance.
Serving the customers
Along with modernisation of production facilities, Siegwerk invested time and money in the improvement of printing technology. Since the days of Photogravur, such customer oriented development work had been part of the company’s special brand of competence. One of the problems that occupied staff intensely in the 1930’s was the emission of the solvent toluene during printing. Evaporation of the hydrocarbon did not only waste valuable material, but also caused smell irritations. Since there was no substitute for the solvent, printing firms had to invest in ventilation equipment to channel the vapours into the atmosphere or into solvent recovery facilities at their original low degree of ratunation.
- Depth of focus – Siegwerk´s advertising convinced printers with real-life case studies.
To avoid constructing such sophisticated equipment, the printing process needed to become a closed system. Dr. Fritz Rung favoured encapsulation of printing presses. With his staff, he developed a method that was patented on August 18, 1937. “It (encapsulation) consists of circulating the dry air current in a top-open casing around the whole machine until a predetermined degree of saturation with the solvent vapours is reached, and then replacing the dry air channelled into the solvent recovery facilities with fresh air entering the casing from above.”
Strong focus on customers’ needs was and remains one of the reasons for success. Siegwerk boosted its traditionally high competence in printing technology. And as gravure printing businesses expanded their machine inventory in the 1930’s, specialised Siegwerk staff were able to contribute more than ink for the new machines. They advised printers on cylinder preparation, rotogravure and other technological issues and developed innovative instrumentation for gravure printing and supported innovations in other technical areas.
The art of milling
In the course of modernisation of equipment, Siegwerk began to use ball mills to grind colour pigments. These machines mainly consisted of huge steel cylinders, whose inner walls were lined with a special abrasion-resistant material. The cylinders rotated on a horizontal axis and were filled with balls of special material. The colour pigments were put in the cylinder. When it rotated at the correct speed, the balls ground the pigments until desired dispersion was reached. This process was conducted in a closed container, so that loss of solvents via evaporation was prevented. The purchase of the new machines not only saved raw material, but also reduced staff costs. In Siegburg, the machines ran without supervision 24 hours a day.
New technology for packaging printing
Along with technological service in the printing segment, Siegwerk also involved itself in packaging printing. There, pressure for rationalisation had led to time-saving printing and punching automats. The models (and predecessors) for these were reel-fed machines for paper bags and sachets – which allowed multi-colour printing, folding and gluing on a single machine that then ejected the finished bag. Similarly, printing with the new gravure machines was a rotary process. Thus, several reel-fed printing processes could be run at high speed. The gravure inks dried fast and facilitated easy further processing of the printed packages. In the early years, these automats mainly produced mono-coloured or multi-coloured wrappings, which could immediately be cut to size. Later, high-quality materials used to package brand products followed.
Siegwerk produced gravure inks for the new printing automats and itself developed machines for aniline printing, which later gave rise to flexo printing. In 1939, Siegwerk and the machine factory “August Koebig & Co.” in Radebeul signed a contract to jointly use Siegwerk’s anilin-flexo process. Aniline printing was a rotary printing process using rubber printing plates and developed around 1890, but only matching the quality standards of the then dominating rotary press in the 1930’s. Finally, it was possible to combine several work steps with one machine. Additionally, ink producers like Siegwerk had found ways of making quality inks for aniline printing, the predecessor of flexo printing, with dissolved tar-based colorants.
Not just paper and cardboard – Extending the ink portfolio
At the end of the 1930’s, a new challenge arose – making conventional printing technologies viable for the newly emerging plastic packages, and producing the respective inks. Plastic foils already had very diverse properties, but they had one factor in common as far as printing was concerned: the ink cannot penetrate the smooth surface and set there. For this reason, the printing ink must be linked to the material in a different way, compared with paper printing. Siegwerk’s chemists rose to the challenge and developed inks for the plastic, metal and cellophane foils prevalent at the time – among them a system of special inks for three-coloured gravure, with a specially elastic ink film that made them kink-proof and thus excellently suitable for packages containing odour sensitive products. All inks, including those for paper printing, were subjected to strict controls before shipping to ensure consistently high quality. In a kind of evaluation laboratory, Siegwerk had built an entire printing shop with flat and roller presses to test inks for their suitability.
Lacquers for the “Wehrmacht”
In 1943, Siegwerk received an unusual order. The paint factory Herbig Haarhaus was commissioned to produce lacquers for the armed forces, which it could not manage on its own. Those responsible therefore asked Siegwerk to process part of the raw materials and semi-finished goods. On December 12, 1943, Siegwerk received a so-called “re-assignment notice” from the armaments ministry to produce 100,000 kilos of lacquer. To achieve especially good quality, the raw materials had to be ground very thoroughly. Siegwerk's technicians developed a method of producing 3,000 to 5,000 kilos of lacquer a day in three to five hours with just two workers. Further assignments followed so that the total volume of lacquer production rose to 783,000 kilograms in just a few months. Since the lacquers were produced efficiently, staff were able to handle the rapidly growing production volume.
No solvents – Economy of scarity in times of war
- Solvent tanks – During the war, oil-derivates like solvents were only issued to war-relevant companies. For that reason, Siegwerk produced water-based inks again.
Due to the guaranteed high quality of Siegwerk inks, customer-oriented innovation and the progressive modernisation of production facilities, sales of gravure inks rose from a million kilos in 1930 to almost 1.7 million kilos in 1939. But the onset of World War II put an end to this trend. Siegwerk now faced completly new challenges. Instead of working on improved production standards, staff were now concerned with the acquisition of raw materials.
Just a few months after the beginning of the war, tar hydrocarbons were lacking, since an ink factory would only receive oil-derivates like toluene and xylene if the inks produced were used to print war-relevant products. There were substitutes like synthetic resin, but they were very expensive and also rationed. On October 8, 1940, the interim depot at Berlin’s Lehrter railway station burned down after a bomb attack. The Siegwerk factory itself was hit by a bomb on October 15, 1942, and the raw materials warehouse was destroyed. In this situation, the company decided to tap old strengths and intensify production of water-based gravure inks. Sales of these rose from about 3,700 kilos in 1939 to almost 160,000 kilos in 1944, while production of oil-based inks and related products dropped from 1.4 million kilos to just over 478,000 in the same period.
Financially, the water-based inks could not compensate for the losses in oil-based ink business. The gap was bridged with ‘special products’ like paint for the German forces. The improvisational skills with which Siegwerk staff mastered this assignment would prove an especially valuable asset after the war. Following the occupation of Siegburg by allied forces in April 1945 and Germany’s capitulation of May 8, Siegwerk and many other firms had to start afresh under difficult circumstances. In that spring, the factory was shut down for two months – and it was uncertain if and when production could be resumed.
