Abel, Willie

Willy Abel was born on September 23, 1875 in the west of Germany, in the small town of Dirdorf, then owned by Prussia, in the family of art dealer Karl Ludwig Rudolf Abel and his wife Anna Weber ^[2] . Later, he moved to Trier , where he graduated from high school and studied the profession of technical designer ^[3] . April 24, 1893 Abel, who at that time was not yet 18 years old, publishes his first patent for a gear cutting machine, which has found widespread application in mechanical engineering ^[1] . In 1893-1898 , Abel worked in the design bureau of the and studied at the Technical Institute of Charlottenburg (now Berlin Technical University ), and then became the chief engineer of one of the patent offices in Berlin ^[1] .

At the turn of the century, he devoted himself entirely to the development of a postal machine , which would allow, after throwing a coin into it, to completely automatically print a stamp, travel ticket or postcard and give it to the buyer ^[2] . As a result, the German imperial post acquires an automatic machine patented by him, which Abel has been continuously improving for eight years and who receives a gold medal at the Milan Exhibition in 1906 ^[1] . A year later, the inventor marries and establishes his own company, the financial success of which allows him to realize his other ideas ^[2] . The main area of ​​activity for the young entrepreneur is now the development and production of kitchen appliances (for example, slicers, stamped chops or heart-shaped waffle irons ), which, due to their quality, are known in many countries of the world and are successfully sold, despite the many competitors that have copied its products. ^[1] . Abel himself explained his interest in this segment of technology by the catastrophic condition of household appliances of those years and the desire to raise them to the level of private mechanical servants "to support a tormented housewife" ^[4] .

In the late 1930s, Abel became ill with diabetes, the development of which required even the amputation of a leg and a temporary relocation from Lichtenberg, where he lived for many years ^[1] . But despite his health problems, the wars and economic crises of the 20th century, he remains full of creative energy and new ideas until the end of his days, which only his death prevented, which made Abel one day before his 76th birthday.

Willy Abel was the owner of 63 patents and more than 100 inventions protected as a utility model ^[5] , including on ^{[2] [1]} :

• gear cutting machine for flywheels and pulleys
• muzzle for rifle Mauser 98
• automatic rotary printing machine for the sale of postage marks
• thread tolerance standard for screws
• device for optimizing a continuous rail track
• circular knife slicer
• device for mechanical raking of coal in the system of ship steam boilers
• die cutting machine with sliding drive tray for thin sheet metal stamping
• cylindrical knife sharpener and much more.

A mere listing of his inventions, as well as the countries in which his patents were sold - France , Great Britain , USA , Austria , Italy , Hungary , Sweden , Denmark , Norway , Switzerland , Belgium , Russia , Spain , Canada , Romania and Japan - allows evaluate the versatility of Abel’s creative talent and the value of his technical solutions ^[1] . Moreover, having declared himself as an inventor already at the age of 17, he remained active in this field even in his advanced years - for example, in a letter to the Berlin magistrate dated 1947 , Abel , who crossed the 70th anniversary, admits that he is busy with the problems of restoring urban infrastructure, within which he developed a rotating bit for the destruction of mortar ^[1] . And the application for, perhaps, his most famous invention - egg cutting - was submitted by him on November 3, 1911 ^[6] .

Since the postal machines developed by him (or, as they were called at first, “self-sellers of postage stamps”) at first did not provide the expected profit from them, Abel, then the technical director of the company for their sales ( Deutsche Abel-Postwertzeichen-Automaten GmbH ), reorganized several times the headed they company until he achieved the necessary commercial success ^[4] . With the money raised, in 1907, Abel founded his own company (named after the semi-legendary knight Harras ( German: Harras )) in the Berlin suburb of Lichtenberg ^[7] and in 1912 organized the first home appliance factory in Germany ^[8] . It was they who became the most successful in commercial terms: more than 10 million pieces were sold all over the world, and at that time, at the price of 30 pfennig, about one third remained in the company in the form of profit ^[9] . The proceeds allowed Abel to open branches in New York and London after the war , as well as two new factories in Ferdinandshof (producing metal and wood parts for the main production), which, despite the world-famous Harras brand, could not resist the difficult economic crisis of the 30s ^[1] .

The plant in Lichtenberg - the only Abel owned - was able to survive the next war without significant damage and was one of the few enterprises in East Germany that escaped expropriation , and only in 1960 - after Abel's death - was it included in one of “ people's enterprises ”of the GDR and lost its trademark ^[10] .

•  

  Egg slicer and slicer with Willy Abel disc knife

•  

  Willy Abel Knife Sharpener

•  

  Harras logo