François Ignace of Wendel

François Ignace de Wendel (* 23 September 1741 in Thionville, Lorraine, † May 2, 1795 in Ilmenau, Thuringia) was a French industrialist. Edit LifeQualtext

He came from the family de Wendel, who had been active in the Lorraine mining industry since 1704.

After visiting the artillery school in Metz, he became a French artillery officer.

In 1779 Wendel acquired the foundries of Indret near Nantes, which produced the cannons for the French navy. In 1781, together with William Wilkinson, he founded a foundry in Le Creusot (Burgundy), through which the small village developed into an industrial city. The foundry was taken over in 1836 by the Schneider Group, which still operates it today. With the help of royal funds, he and Gabriel Jars developed a casting process in which coal coke replaced the previously used charcoal. Up to now, only English industry has had this method.

On 12 May 1772 Wendel Cécile du Tertre, with whom he had three children, married. In 1793 he moved to Ilmenau in Thuringia with one of his sons because of developments in the French Revolution. During his Ilmenauer years, Johann Karl von Voigt and Ernst Christian Wilhelm Ackermann began to exchange letters with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who was at that time Bergbauminister in Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach) on the opening of a metallurgical plant at the Grenzhammer in the east of the city. This did not happen, however, since the opium-dependent Wendel 1795 suffered a nervous breakdown and committed suicide. Single-level Edit source text Standard data (person): LCCN: n84095429 VIAF: 55549695 | Wikipedia People Search

wiki