Robert Bosch
Robert Bosch made the spark that let the petrol engine run fast, paid his men for an eight-hour day when nobody in Germany did, and gave his company to a foundation so that it would go on doing what he had. He was born in 1861 at Albeck near Ulm, the eleventh of twelve children of a prosperous farmer and innkeeper who was a freemason and a liberal, trained as a precision mechanic, and spent a year in the United States working for Edison and another in England with Siemens Brothers before opening a workshop for precision mechanics and electrical engineering in a back court in Stuttgart in November 1886 with two employees. What made it was ignition. A stationary engine maker asked him for a copy of a magneto that fired a spark by a make-and-break contact; his foreman adapted it in 1897 to run on the fast engines Daimler was building across town, and in 1902 his engineer Gottlob Honold produced the high-tension magneto with a spark plug, which let an engine run at any speed and was fitted to nearly every car in the world by 1914. Half the output went abroad, mostly to America, and the war took the American factories. He rebuilt on lighting, horns, wipers, diesel injection and the power drill. The eight-hour day came in 1906, the free Saturday afternoon in 1910, and the Stuttgart employers called him the Red Bosch for it; he answered that he did not pay well because he was rich but was rich because he paid well. He gave the money away as fast as it came: a hospital in Stuttgart, the technical college, the river Neckar canal, and in the Weimar years the parties and papers of the liberal centre and of reconciliation with France. He despised the Nazis, kept the company out of the party, employed Carl Goerdeler as an adviser and paid for his resistance work, and used the firm to shelter Jews; the firm also made what the rearmament ordered and used forced labour after he died. He died in Stuttgart in March 1942, and the will that left the company to a charitable foundation was carried out in 1964. The Württemberg page names his workshop among the kingdom's engineers.
- Lived: 1861 CE – 1942 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: industrialist, engineer, philanthropist
