Heinrich Ehrhardt

EN Texto em inglês Ainda não há artigo no teu idioma: trecho em inglês.

Heinrich Ehrhardt (17 November 1840 in Zella St. Blasius – 20 November 1928 in Zella-Mehlis) was a German inventor, industrialist and entrepreneur. Ehrhardt's uncle was the successful locomotive manufacturer and inventor Johann Heinrich Ehrhardt. Around 1864, he studied and worked at the company Richard Hartmann in Chemnitz, which was the largest Saxon company. He registered 128 patents in the German Empire. In 1891 he patented the process that became known as the "Ehrhardt's pressing and drawing method" for the manufacture of seamless tubes and used the process to manufacture shrapnel and shell casings from steel instead of cast iron, an innovative at the time. He founded in 1878, among other things, a metal and arms factory in Zella St. Blasius, in 1889, the Rheinische Metallwaren- und Maschinenfabrik AG in Düsseldorf, in 1896, the Automobilwerk Eisenach and the Blasius 1903 Ehrhardt Automobil AG. He tended to conduct R&D at a small factory in Zella fully controlled by him, personally own the patents and license them to public companies he managed/co-owned, and the firms he was affiliated with made a very loose conglomerate; this fact negated the consequences of a hostile takeover of Rheinmetall by Krupp in 1913. In 1895, he was contacted former Krupp engineer Konrad Haussner, who patented the idea of an innovative quick-firing gun and wanted to continue designing a real one. Ehrhardt recognized the prospectives of the design, and Haussner's far-reaching hiring in 1896 turned Rheinmetall from an unexceptional ammunition manufacturer (which did not even make the fuses for shell) to a leading European arms manufacturer in a decade. Despite the fact that the 1896 prototype was turned down by the German Artillery Testing Commission as not yet usable in the war (a simpler 7.7 cm FK 96 was adopted instead), in 1900 Great Britain adopted Haussner's design as the QF 15-pounder gun (even though just as a stopgap measure), to be followed by Norway a year later with a gun which will participate in WWII.