Heraeus
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| Industry | Technology |
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| Founded | 1851 |
| Headquarters | Hanau, Germany |
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Key people
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| Revenue | 15.589 Mrd. Euro (end 2014) |
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Number of employees
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12,600 (end 2014) |
| Website | http://www.heraeus.com |
Heraeus is a German technology group with a focus on precious and special metals, medical technology, quartz glass, sensors and specialty light sources. Founded in Hanau in 1851, the company is one of the largest family-owned companies in Germany in terms of revenue.[2]
According to company statements, Heraeus generates product revenues of €3.4 billion and precious metals trading revenue of €12.2 billion on the strength of approximately 12,600 employees in more than 100 companies.
In 1851, at the age of 24, the pharmacist and chemist Wilhelm Carl Heraeus took over his father’s "Einhorn Apothecary" in Hanau. The business had been in the ownership of the Heraeus family since 1660, acting as an official court apothecary to local counts. Wilhelm Carl Heraeus began laying the foundations for a global family business, which has now been headquartered in Hanau, east of Frankfurt, for more than 150 years. At the time, Hanau was a town of goldsmiths. Since the end of the 18th century, platinum had been processed in the town for the production of jewellery. Goldsmiths had extreme difficulty processing platinum due to its toughness and high melting point of 1770 degrees Celsius. Until a melting process was discovered, platinum could only be processed by using complex forging processes using the white-hot metal. Having studied chemistry and pharmacy, Wilhelm Carl Heraeus understood the problems faced by goldsmiths. After a series of experiments, he first succeeded in melting platinum in large volumes and producing pure metal in 1856, using his own specially developed oxyhydrogen blowpipe. It was already known at the time that platinum could be melted using oxyhydrogen, a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gas – but until then, only small quantities had been melted in a laboratory. With his gas blowpipe, Heraeus could produce enough oxyhydrogen and a large enough flame front to melt several kilograms of platinum-containing materials. This pioneering achievement enabled Heraeus to found the "W.C. Heraeus First German Platinum Smelters", supplying a variety of customers such as goldsmith workshops and jewellery factories throughout the world, as well as dental manufacturers, chemistry laboratories and other branches of industry. In 1857, W.C. Heraeus succeeded in producing around 30 kilograms of pure platinum. By 1896, he was melting and processing more than 1000 kilograms of pure platinum.
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