Meyer Guggenheim

Meyer Guggenheim is an American industrialist , born the 1828 with Lengnau, in Suisse and dead the March 15th 1905 with Palm Springs, in California. It is the patriarch of famous the Famille Guggenheim.

Genealogy

Descendant of a family of Jewish S German, Meyer Guggenheim and his Barbara wife had eleven children, of which ten survived. Five of the seven boys worked in the businesses of the family:

Isaac (1854-1922)
Daniel (1856-1930), head of the household after the death of her father
Murry (1858-1939), worked initially in the importation of ribbons and laces, then, starting from 1881, in the mines and the foundries
Solomon Robert (1861-1949), amateur of Modern art which it helped thanks to the Fondation Solomon R. Guggenheim and of the gifts to the Museum off Modern Art
(John) Simon (1867-1941), was once senator of Colorado.

Among the other children, Benjamin (1865-1912) died in the Naufrage of Titanic.

Biography

Meyer Guggenheim emigrated in the United States in 1847. It started to work with Philadelphia as itinerant salesman of ribbons, laces and various other objects, before developing the formula of a paste with furnaces, for which it built a factory. The four elder ones of its sons passed their adolescence to learn manufacture from the embroidery and lace: it sent his Daniel son (followed his juniors Murry and Solomon) in Switzerland in order to learn there at the same time the German and lace. Isaac, when to him, was sent to New York to open an office there.

In 1881, the firm of the Guggenheim wire was founded. Meyer gave them the company without implying itself personally. It was satisfied to supervise them and to advise them.

With an aim of diversification, it bought: 2000 shares of Hannibal & St Joseph Railroad, of the Missouri, with 42 dollars the share, one moment when the company was in a difficult situation. It resold its shares with Jay Gould and withdrew some: 400000 dollars for a basic setting of: 84000 dollars.

In 1881 it went on a first journey in the Colorado and took a participation in two drowned mines. After having devoted sums important to drain them, it started to extract some from the Argent so pure which it could be struck without passing by a foundry.

It invests then in Fonderie S, in order to control the market, extraction with the cast iron and the sale. Philadelphia Smelting & Refining Company started to produce in 1889. Its capital was then of: 1500000 dollars and belonged completely to Guggenheim. It invests then in the Mexican mines and, to thwart the protectionist laws voted by the Congress, it made build with the Mexico, Monterrey, the treatment plants. Thus Great National Mexican Smelter Company was created in 1890 per daN & Murry, its two sons. They invested then in the mines of Cuivre, metal with which one will always associate the name of Guggenheim.

Meyer respectively sent its Benjamin sons as William to the school of the mines of Columbia and to the Université of Pennsylvania to study the metallurgy there. In 1894, with Perth Amboy (New Jersey), a refinery was built and started to treat the ores melted in the Guggenheim factories, then making it possible the family to control the complete cycle, since the mine to the finished metal, which it is of the money, copper or the Plomb.

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