Wilhelm J.D. Keuffel

Introduction

Wilhelm Johann Diedrich Keuffel (born July 19, 1838 in Walbeck, Province of Saxony, Kingdom of Prussia; died October 1, 1908 in Hoboken, NJ) was one of the founding partners of Keuffel & Esser Company (K&E), a scientific instrument manufacturing firm founded in New York City in 1867. Best known for its popularization of the slide rule, Keuffel & Esser was the first American company to specialize in the manufacture and sale of drafting and surveying tools. By the early twentieth century, it was one of the largest manufacturers of scientific instruments in the world.[1] After Keuffel’s death in 1908, K&E remained a family owned and managed business until it was acquired by Kratos Corporation in 1981.

Family Background

Wilhelm Johann Diedrich Keuffel was born on July 19, 1838, to Gottfried C.A. Keuffel and Auguste (née Walter) Keuffel in Walbeck,[2] in the Prussian province of Saxony. He attended local schools before becoming an apprentice in a general store at the age of fifteen. In 1857, at the age of nineteen, he moved to Magdeburg and then to Hanover, working in hardware stores in both cities. After a period of work in Birmingham, England, Keuffel traveled to the United States in July 1866. He settled in Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan.[3] On December 26, 1871, he married Bertha Caroline Schneeberger (born 1853) of St. Louis, Missouri. She was the eldest child of John Schneeberger, a successful shoe and boot manufacturer from Hesse-Darmstadt, and his wife Margaret Louisa, who was from Schleswig-Holstein.[4] Together, Wilhelm and Bertha Keuffel had six children: Louise A. Keuffel Bergenau (1872-1960), William Gottfried (“Willy G.”) Keuffel (1875-1942), Martha Keuffel (1876-79), Ottilie Keuffel Busch (1880-1971), Margarethe Bertha (“Gretchen”) Keuffel Keller (1885-1974), and Hermann Keuffel (1886-87).[5] Wilhelm Keuffel died on October 1, 1908, at his home in Hoboken at the age of seventy.[6]

Keuffel’s partner, Hermann Esser, was born on December 30, 1845, in Elberfeld, in the Rhineland province of the Kingdom of Prussia. He emigrated to the U.S. in the fall of 1866 and settled in Hoboken.[7] On September 30, 1869, he married Bertha Michelmann of Hanover in St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Hoboken; the couple had two children: Otto Esser (born 1870) and Klara Esser (born 1875).[8] Esser retired from K&E in 1902, at which point he sold his share of the business to Keuffel. He returned to Germany that spring and died in Bad Godesberg am Rhein on April 16, 1908, at the age of sixty-two.[9]

Business Development

According to Keuffel family lore, Keuffel and Esser first met in Hanover, where both had worked for the Ravené Company, a Berlin-based iron manufacturer. Eventually, the company sent Keuffel to Birmingham, England, and then to the U.S. to sell its hardware products. After arriving in New York, however, Keuffel decided to part with the Ravené Company and go into business for himself, and he encouraged his former co-worker to immigrate and partner with him.[10] Esser arrived within a matter of months.

When Keuffel and Esser settled in Hoboken in the late 1860s, the town was still a rural village best known for its wooded picnic grounds, the Elysian Fields.[11] Hoboken had land available for development, but it was not a promising location for the kind of high-end, specialty retail business Keuffel and Esser envisioned, mostly because it lacked the retail and office space of New York City, but also because would-be customers would have to cross the Hudson River by ferry from Manhattan. Therefore, Keuffel and Esser chose to base their new business in Lower Manhattan, where customers, capital, and office space were easier to find. The Keuffel & Esser Company was established in New York City on July 19, 1867. The two partners rented office space downtown on the fourth floor of 79 Nassau Street for $5.50 per month ($83.60 per month in 2010[12]) and planned to sell drafting and surveying equipment imported from Europe, mainly the German states. The business remained a partnership until February 16, 1889, when Keuffel and Esser incorporated as Keuffel & Esser Co. (K&E) in New Jersey. Keuffel served as president and Esser as treasurer, first of the partnership and then of the corporation, during the thirty-five years that they worked together.[13]

To attract clients, Keuffel and Esser went door to door to architects’ and builders’ offices in Lower Manhattan, selling pencils and pens, rubber erasers, India ink, protractors, rulers, and compasses – anything and everything that an architect or an engineer needed to do his job. Although they imported much of their stock, the partners also did some of their own manufacturing, with Keuffel initially making some of their supplies by hand.[14] As the business grew, the partners hired craftsmen to do the manufacturing, while they alternated between extended buying trips to Europe and stints at home to oversee sales and domestic manufacturing. Between 1877 and 1907, Keuffel and Esser filed six passport applications each for travel to Europe; Keuffel’s third child, Ottilie, was even born in Germany in 1880 during an extended business trip.[15] In 1881, the partners assured their customers: “As one member of our firm is constantly residing in Europe, we are able to keep our stock always complete, shall have all the latest improvements and inventions relating to the articles of our business and offer [the] best facilities for importing goods to order, at the shortest notice and most reasonable price.”[16] By 1883, Keuffel and Esser had opened a buying office in Berlin, and K&E had started manufacturing instruments in Germany as well.[17]

In the 1860s and 1870s, as their business grew and as they began needing additional space for sales and manufacturing, Keuffel and Esser relocated several times in downtown Manhattan. In 1868, they moved from 79 Nassau Street to 71 Nassau Street, and in 1870, they moved to 116 Fulton Street. At the same time, they also rented space for manufacturing at 3 Dutch Street. By 1873, the company had moved to 111 Fulton Street and then to 119 Fulton Street, which had space for a large showroom. From 1874 to 1878, a K&E retail store occupied the entire ground floor between Fulton and Ann Streets.[18] Located in the neighborhood just south of New York’s City Hall, this store was close to the offices of many architects, civil engineers, and construction companies.[19]

In need of more manufacturing space, Keuffel and Esser leased a small loft building at the southwest corner of Third and Adams Streets in Hoboken in 1875 and transferred their manufacturing operations there.[20] In 1878, the partners leased a building at 127 Fulton Street (sometimes known as 42nd Ann Street), in New York City, to serve as their general office and retail showroom. In 1880, Keuffel and Esser expanded their factory space in Hoboken, building a large, three-story structure at the northeast corner of Third and Adams Streets. In 1887, they replaced this facility with a large plant that occupied most of Third Street between Grand and Adams Streets.[21] By this point, Keuffel & Esser had permanently divided its operations between manufacturing in Hoboken, where there was room to expand, and retail sales and general offices in New York City, where customers could be found.

In 1892-93, Keuffel and Esser built a new store at 127 Fulton Street to house the company’s primary retail salesrooms and general offices. The fireproof, eight-story Renaissance Revival-style building was designed by architects Theodore W. E. De Lemos and August W. Cordes, both of whom were German immigrants. In addition to being active in the local German-American community, the two were known for their designs for commercial and retail buildings. The building is now a New York City landmark. In 1907, K&E rebuilt its Hoboken factory and moved its management offices to Hoboken but kept its primary salesrooms at 127 Fulton Street.[22] Although Keuffel and Esser would open retail stores and manufacturing plants in several cities and states over the next century, 300 Adams Street, Hoboken, and 127 Fulton Street, New York City, functioned as the company’s two operations centers for ninety years.

Having a base of operations in New York City gave Keuffel and Esser easy access to skilled craftsmen, many of whom were from the German states. Heavy immigration from German-speaking Europe from the 1840s to the 1880s meant that New York City had one of the largest German populations in the world, and German immigrants and their children comprised one third of New York’s population in 1875. As late as 1910, Germans were still the second largest ethnic group in New York City (after Russians), and they accounted for nearly twenty percent of the city’s 4.7 million residents.[23] Hoboken was an extension of New York’s German-American community, and much of its growth in the mid to late nineteenth century was attributable to German immigration. Hoboken was the American base for the Hamburg-America Packet Company and the North German Lloyd Steamship Company, and German immigrants and their children comprised between 25 and 40 percent of its population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [24]

German immigrants in New York City and Hoboken could be found in nearly every strata of socioeconomic life – they worked as merchants and entrepreneurs but also as unskilled laborers, longshoremen, luggage porters, and domestic servants. In New York City in the 1850s, German immigrants dominated the needle, boot and shoe, woodworking, baking, and tobacco trades, and the majority of German-American businessmen were grocers and peddlers. In the 1880s, half of New York City’s German-Americans worked in manufacturing, while approximately twenty percent were business owners, most commonly wine and liquor dealers, saloon keepers, and dry goods and clothing storekeepers; nearly twenty-five percent of the city’s German-Americans were white-collar clerical workers.[25] In Hoboken in the 1850s, the most common occupations for German-Americans were merchant, cabinet maker, clerk, cane maker, carpenter, tailor, and barkeeper, but the city also boasted German-born portrait artists, painters of fine china, jewelers, and watchmakers. In the 1880s, German-Americans in Hoboken continued to predominate in the skilled trades, and to work as merchants, clerks, and retail store owners.[26] Thus, entrepreneurs like Keuffel and Esser could easily find men trained in fine metal, wood, and glass work on either side of the Hudson, and the frequent ferry service made commuting easy for workers, who were already accustomed to traveling between New York City and New Jersey.

In 1867, when Keuffel and Esser started their business, the American drafting and surveying industries were expanding dramatically to meet the demands of a rapidly growing and industrializing nation. Nonetheless, architects, civil and mechanical engineers, and draftsmen still tended to learn “on the job” through apprenticeships, and they frequently cobbled their equipment together from hardware and stationery stores and also made some of their tools themselves.

In the mid to late nineteenth century, architecture and engineering started to emerge as professions. In the United States, the American Institute of Architects was founded in 1857, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began offering the nation’s first university program in architecture in 1865. Associations related to the profession formed in relatively short order; they included: the American Society of Civil Engineers (1852), the American Institute of Mining Engineers (1871), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1880), and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (1884). Aside from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, which had opened back in 1825, most American engineering programs were established in the 1870s to 1890s and were modeled after European institutions. The Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, an institution with which the Keuffel family had a long-standing relationship, opened its doors in 1870.[27] Although most architects and engineers in the U.S. were Anglo-Americans, the profession included a number of prominent German immigrants – such as De Lemos and Cordes, and John A. Roebling, the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge – and many of these men were based in New York. An early and important customer of K&E was the New York Bridge Company, which built the Brooklyn Bridge.[28]

By the turn of the twentieth century, Keuffel and Esser had influenced the building and construction industries and the architecture and engineering professions in several ways: by introducing new tools, such as the slide rule, to the United States from Europe; by improving the design of existing tools and inventing new ones; and by helping budding architects, engineers, surveyors, and builders learn to use these new tools by selling to universities. Keuffel and Esser also helped advance the instrument manufacturing industry in the U.S. by pioneering new sales techniques and proving that a market did indeed exist for domestically-manufactured measuring tools.

Neither Keuffel nor Esser had trained in architecture or engineering, but their work in the hardware supply industry in Germany had given them a good understanding of the needs of the profession. After immigrating to the U.S., they saw that no one business specialized in architectural and engineering equipment, which meant that members of the profession had to shop at multiple stores, an often frustrating and always time-consuming task.

Keuffel and Esser’s first important innovation was specializing in the sale and manufacture of measuring instruments. By offering everything that a would-be customer needed under one roof (and then by mail order catalog, as well), K&E quickly became the store for drafting and surveying supplies in New York City and then in the whole United States. K&E’s “one-stop shopping” appealed to efficiency-minded architects, builders, and engineers who subscribed to the American capitalist mantra, “time is money.” Keuffel and Esser also allowed their customers to try out tools at their Fulton Street showroom, a very important option for any architect or engineer who was buying expensive equipment.[29] At the same time that K&E was developing its specialization model, the department store, as a retail institution, was emerging from the dry goods business in the U.S. Although Keuffel & Esser and department stores such as Macy’s sold different products in different ways, both shared a business model that was based on envisioning a customer’s needs and trying to meet them, as opposed to requiring the customer to adapt to the convenience of the business owner.[30]

By the early twentieth century, K&E had become one of the largest manufacturers of precision scientific instruments in the world. While the company surely benefitted from good timing, its success was primarily attributable to its innovative sales and marketing techniques, and its reputation for high-quality products. The company gradually developed products that fell into two broad categories: expensive one-time purchase items, such as surveying equipment and slide rules, and less-expensive repeat purchase items, such as pencils, ink, and paper of various sorts.[31]

Initially, Keuffel & Esser sold drafting equipment, especially pencils, rulers, protractors, and compasses. Hermann Esser even published a book, “Draughtsman's Alphabets, A Series of Plain and Ornamental Alphabets Designed Especially for Engineers, Architects, Draughtsmen, Engravers, Painters, Etc.,” in 1869.[32] Some of the first patents filed by Keuffel and Esser in the 1870s were for improvements to draftsmen’s tools.[33]

In the early 1870s, K&E began selling surveying equipment, focusing on compasses, transits, levels, and theodolites. The company also started selling continuous steel tape, which was an improvement on the Gunter’s chain used by surveyors to measure distances.[34] As with its drafting products, K&E made its own surveying tools but also sold those made by others. By the 1890s, K&E’s surveying equipment was so well regarded that it was used by Robert E. Peary and his team on their Arctic explorations.[35]

Keuffel and Esser had been in business for thirteen years when they began selling the item that became most firmly associated with their company, the slide rule. The slide rule had been invented by English mathematician William Oughtred (1575-1660) in the mid seventeenth century on the basis of innovations by John Napier (the inventor of logarithms) and Edmund Gunter (the creator of logarithmic scales).[36] The rule is a mechanical analog computing tool used to do multiplication, division, roots, logarithms, and trigonometry calculations. A rule can be either linear or circular – most engineers learned to use the linear type, but circular slide rules were more common in aviation (and are still used in that industry today). Before the invention of the pocket calculator in the early 1970s, the slide rule was the most useful tool for doing large numerical calculations. Despite their acknowledged utility, these devices were rarely seen in the U.S. before the 1880s.[37]

The story of how K&E came to sell its most famous product became part of company lore, but it also said something about the two partners’ personalities and how they envisioned a market for their products.

Hermann Esser, who was prone to see gloomy possibilities where his partner was all cheer and ebullience, often found his patience sorely tried. He would never forget the day the slide rules arrived….

“After the first factory was safely launched in 1880, William Keuffel made a trip to Europe to select instruments and materials from manufacturers in Switzerland, Germany, and England. Hermann Esser remained at home to guide the firm’s growing activities. The first shipments of William Keuffel’s selections began to arrive at 127 Fulton Street in New York – fine drawing tools, precisely divided protractors and measuring scales, brushes, pens, special draftsmen’s pencils. One shipment gave Herman Esser an unpleasant surprise. It contained, to all appearances, a set of engineers’ scales, or “rulers,” but they were like none ever seen before in the K&E showroom. The central section of each rule slid back and forth between the two outer sections. What good was that arrangement for laying off lengths on a drawing? Even worse, the graduations were not equal. This was too much. His partner had completely lost his judgment![38]

With this first shipment, Keuffel and Esser began selling imported slide rules based on an 1859 design by French artillery officer Amédée Mannheim. The first K&E slide rules were made of boxwood and cost $3.50 ($77.00 in 2010).[39] K&E also began marketing and then manufacturing cylindrical calculators with extra-long logarithmic scales based on an 1881 design by New York civil engineer Edwin Thacher, who sold or assigned his patent rights to Keuffel & Esser.[40] After instrument designer William Cox invented the duplex slide rule (which placed scales on both faces of the rule and had a dual indicator with a glass-enclosed hairline on each face, thus allowing for all of the scales to be used together) in 1891, K&E patented the Cox improvements.[41] For a period in the 1890s, Dennert & Pape of Altona, Germany, produced the Cox model slide rule for K&E, but around 1899, Keuffel & Esser started manufacturing its own rules.[42] To make the duplex slide rule – which was made of mahogany and white celluloid – K&E began importing large quantities of mahogany from the West Indies. They stored the logs in a lumber yard at the Hoboken factory, where they were seasoned for five years before being cut and finished into slide rules.[43]

In 1893, K&E ran an advertisement for the new Cox model duplex slide rule in Scientific American. The advertisement carefully explained the new features of the rule, described how it worked, and noted how it differed from the Mannheim style rule. It featured an illustration of both the front and back of the slide rule, along with an explanation of how it was supposed to be used.[44] With the emergence of new fields requiring calculations, such as electrical engineering and aviation, K&E developed new slide rules, frequently providing instruction manuals for their use.[45]

In the early twentieth century, K&E began selling materials for making blueprints, just in time for the boom in skyscraper construction in major American cities.[46] The development of this new product line was an extension of the company’s focus on drafting tools. The blueprint paper line continued to be refined in the 1920s and 1930s, and it led the company into more applied scientific research and development and, eventually, to the creation of a research and development (R&D) department. The reproduction of tracing paper and blueprint paper was first done with direct sunlight, then electric arc lighting. In order to improve production, K&E began experimenting with the chemical coatings used for blueprint and tracing paper as well as with the manufacture of new types of paper.[47]

As Keuffel and Esser became more deeply involved in manufacturing, they moved to patent their refinements to established drafting and surveying tools.[48] Both founders held patents in their own names (Keuffel had four and Esser had seven) and in the name of Keuffel & Esser; innovations developed by K&E employees were patented in the name of the company.[49] In the 1890s and early 1900s, the partners applied for several patents on improvements to various surveying tools, including transits, levels, and surveying rods, and they also exhibited an improved steel tape at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.[50] John Paoli, an Italian-born mechanic who worked for K&E for several years in the 1890s and early 1900s, filed several patents on behalf of the company, particularly for improvements to surveyor’s transits.[51] Keuffel’s second cousin, Wilhelm (“Willie”) L.E. Keuffel, who joined the company in the early 1880s, filed for ten patents in K&E’s name between 1900 and 1911, while Wilhelm J.D. Keuffel’s son-in-law, Carl M. Bernegau, held two patents, both for improvements to surveying equipment.[52]

As Keuffel and Esser became more successful, and as their products became more popular, the two partners became more aggressive in defending K&E’s patents. In 1916, eight years after Keuffel’s death, the company sued former employee Eugene Dietzgen, the founder of Eugene Dietzgen Company of Chicago, for infringing on their design for a fountain pen.[53] In 1887, Keuffel and Esser even began copyrighting product descriptions and illustrations in their catalog. In 1901, they informed their customers:

We beg to call to attention the fact that we have copyrighted this entire book, and have also separately copyrighted about four hundred of the illustrations contained in it, and much of the descriptive and explanatory matter concerning different instruments and appliances, although the general copyright of the book covers all of its contents. We have done this at considerable expense, for the purpose of protecting our patrons and the public generally from imposition at the hands of those unscrupulous dealers, who have reproduced our superior cuts and closely copied our descriptions for the purpose of making inferior articles appear to be ours or the same as ours.[54]

Copyrighting and patent defense became increasingly common in the late nineteenth century as companies sought to protect their property rights from competitors. In 1891, Keuffel was sued by Brooklyn ink manufacturer Charles M. Higgins, who claimed that K&E had violated his copyright of the phrase “waterproof drawing ink.” Keuffel & Esser sold Higgins drawing inks (in twelve different colors, including “Black, waterproof”) and glues, but argued that copyright law did not protect labels because labels simply identified the articles on which they were placed. The U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York ruled in Keuffel’s favor, stating that “A label placed upon a bottle to designate its contents is not a subject for copyright,” and that “In order to maintain an action for an infringement of the ownership of a label … it is necessary that public notice of the registration should be given by affixing the word ‘copyright’ upon every copy of it.”[55]

Keuffel and Esser sold their products in several ways: through in-house sales, mail order catalogs, regional salesmen, branch stores, and licensed dealers. They started with door-to-door sales, in-house sales, and mail order. They published their first catalog, a twenty-four-page booklet, in 1868. Five years later, the catalog was 123 pages long and included both surveying and drafting equipment. By the 1910s, the catalog was more than 500 pages long and listed more than 5,000 items.[56]

Keuffel and Esser probably wrote the copy for the first few editions of the K&E catalog, and Esser, who had some drafting experience, may have done the illustrations. The large number of printers in New York City made publishing catalogs, instructional manuals, and other promotional materials relatively easy. Later catalog text was probably written by a hired copy editor.

After several years of relying on walk-in customers at the Fulton Street store and mail order sales, Keuffel and Esser began using regional salesmen in the 1880s. These men visited architectural firms, construction companies, and universities around the country, demonstrating and selling K&E products.[57]

The two partners also opened retail stores around the country: Chicago (1891), St. Louis (1894), and San Francisco (1901). In 1908, they expanded into Canada, opening a store in Montreal. Each K&E store had a workshop, where craftsmen could make minor repairs, thus eliminating the need for customers to ship broken items back to the New York store. Like the Fulton Street flagship store, the branch stores allowed customers to test equipment before buying. Branch stores were also able to make blueprint paper in house so that, as the company promised, stock was always fresh and orders could be filled immediately.[58] The branch stores were responsible for selling to dealers within a particular geographic region, such as stationery stores, hardware stores, and college bookstores. Distributors connected to the branch stores reported to the branch managers and did the actual selling and distribution of items.[59]

Networking with both established and potential customers and sellers was also an important part of their business. Keuffel and Esser regularly attended trade shows, scientific and technical conferences, fairs, and expositions to meet with customers and demonstrate their products.[60] For example, in 1904, K&E proudly announced in The Electrical Age that it had won the only grand prize for “instruments of precision, philosophical apparatus, etc” (philosophical apparatus were tools used in scientific research) at the St. Louis Exposition that year; it also won a gold medal for instruments and equipments for underground surveying.[61] Keuffel and Esser were also members of the New York Stationers’ Board of Trade and attended annual meetings.[62]

From the beginning, K&E advertised regularly in a wide range of trade and technical publications, including The American Book Seller; Scientific American; American Artisan (“a Weekly Journal of Arts, Mechanics, Manufacturers, Engineering, Chemistry, Inventions, and Patents”); The Technologist (“Industrial Monthly: a Practical Journal for Manufacturers, Mechanics, Builders, Inventors, Engineers, Architects”); The Manufacturer & Builder (“A Practical Journal of Industrial Progress”); The American Architect and Building News; Brick, Pottery and Glass Journal; A.H. Van Nostrand’s Engineering Magazine; Architectural and Building Monthly; Electrical Age; Stone; Marine Engineering; The Railway Age; Railroad Gazette; The National Builder; and Hardware Dealers’ Magazine. Keuffel & Esser also advertised in Puck, an English- and German-language satirical magazine published and illustrated by Austrian immigrant Joseph F. Keppler, who, like Keuffel and Esser, belonged to the Elka Park Association of the New York Liederkranz.[63] Their presence in New York City also allowed Keuffel and Esser to network with scientific publishers, editors, and writers.

K&E’s advertisements ranged from simple statements about their location and the nature of their business to announcements for new products. In product-release advertisements, K&E usually described the product and discussed its purpose and use. Additionally, company advertisements often included a detailed drawing of the item.[64] In some instances, the product description was copy written by K&E; in other instances, the advertisement featured a product review.

Draftsmen, surveyors, architects, building engineers, and later mechanical, electrical, and other engineers all used K&E’s products. In the decades after the founders’ deaths, numerous technical and engineering schools started buying K&E instruments for their students to use during instruction, and industrial laboratories and the federal government – especially the military – contracted with Keuffel & Esser on a regular basis from the 1910s to the 1960s.[65] City governments frequently bought K&E equipment for public works projects, especially road-building.[66]

Because K&E manufactured such a wide range of products, the company had many competitors over the course of a century in business. K&E had competitors in the slide rule market, in drafting and survey equipment, in blueprinting paper, and later, during the twentieth century, in optics manufacturing.[67]

Initially, the main producers of scientific and mathematical instruments, including slide rules, were European. In 1862, five years before Keuffel and Esser launched their business, Dennert & Pape (“D&P,” later called Aristo after 1936) started producing slide rules and other measuring instruments in Germany.[68] German pencil manufacturer A.W. Faber Castell started making drafting equipment in the 1860s and slide rules in 1884. By 1900, Faber was selling German-manufactured slide rules in the U.S. Another important German instrument manufacturer was Beck & Nestler (later called Nestler), founded in 1878; Beck & Nestler made other drafting equipment in addition to slide rules. In 1891, Reiss, Inc., began making surveying equipment as well as slide rules in Liebenwerda, Prussia. In the early 1910s, Harold Fowler, the son of Mechanical Engineer publisher William Henry Fowler, founded the English company, Fowler, and started making circular slide rules.[69]

In the U.S., much of Keuffel and Esser’s competition came from other German immigrant entrepreneurs. One of their main competitors was Luhring & Dietzgen (later Eugene Dietzgen Company), founded in Chicago in 1885 by former K&E Midwestern sales representative and fellow German immigrant Eugene Dietzgen. Dietzgen’s rules were similar to K&E’s in design and quality, and the company was one of the largest in the U.S. after K&E.[70] Another competitor in both the slide rule and blueprint paper businesses was Frederick Post, a German immigrant who started the Post Company in 1890 to manufacture and sell drafting, surveying, and engineering supplies after learning the business from Dietzgen. Although Post Co. sold slide rules, the firm never manufactured its own, preferring instead to import rules made by Dennert & Pape, Nestler, and Faber, and then after 1932, by Hemmi Keisanjaku of Japan. Post and his cousins Charles and Jacob Bruning also started a blueprint paper company, Post, Jacobi, & Bruning, in 1893. From the early 1890s to the 1920s, the Brunings, who were Danish immigrants, started several blueprint companies that competed with K&E in the blueprint business.[71]

Although K&E enjoyed steady success in its first decades, the company remained relatively small until the 1890s. In 1870, Bradstreet’s Commercial Reports rated K&E as “DD,” meaning somewhere between D (“Doing business with small capital; generally meets engagements; doing well in a small way, and thought to be good for small lines”) and DE (“Not to be refused credit in all cases but caution is advised in selling”). Nine years later, in 1879, Bradstreet rated K&E “F 2 ½,” with F equaling “worth between $10,000-$20,000 estimated pecuniary strength,” and 2 ½ equaling good credit risk.[72] By 1908, the year in which both Keuffel and Esser died, K&E had 450 employees. Nearly all of them were employed at the Hoboken factory, though a small minority worked in the branch stores and as traveling salesmen.[73]

In 1905, K&E’s Hoboken factory was seriously damaged in a fire. Keuffel rebuilt and modernized the factory, which reopened in July 1907, just in time for the company’s fortieth anniversary. The new building on the west side of Adams covered the length of Third Street to Jefferson Street. It was made of fireproof concrete and, at 152,500 square feet, was the largest facility of its kind in the world.[74] The new factory was Keuffel’s last major project on behalf of K&E; fifteen months later, he died at his home in Hoboken.

By the time of Keuffel’s and Esser’s deaths in 1908, their sons, Willy G. Keuffel and Otto Esser; Keuffel’s second cousin, Willie L.E. Keuffel; Willie L.E.’s son Carl W. Keuffel; and Wilhelm J.D. Keuffel’s sons-in-law, Carl M. Bergenau, Eugen Busch, and Karl Keller, had joined the family business, working their way up from salesmen and clerks to various supervisory and managerial positions.[75] These men owned and managed K&E until its sale to Kratos Corporation in 1981.

While K&E’s success in the nineteenth century came from sales to both private and public builders, much of the company’s growth in the twentieth century was tied to government-funded projects. Keuffel & Esser did extensive work for the U.S. Army and Navy during the First and Second World Wars; they also manufactured precision measuring, sighting, and optical tools, as well as surveying and drafting equipment for New Deal-era public works projects during the Great Depression. K&E’s growth in the 1930s to 1960s paralleled the growth and development of the “military-industrial complex.” By 1965, when K&E became a publicly-traded company, it had more than 2,200 employees working in twenty-nine sales offices in sixteen states and ten factories in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, California, Texas, Michigan, Maine, and Quebec, Canada.[76] Yet, by the mid-1970s, the product most closely associated with the firm, the slide rule, had been rendered obsolete by the pocket calculator, and K&E stopped manufacturing rules altogether in 1975. The company donated the machine used to engrave precise lines on its mahogany slide rules to the Smithsonian Institution.[77]

After considering – and rejecting – a series of acquisition offers in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Keuffel family, which retained ownership of seventy percent of K&E’s stock, accepted a 1981 buy-out offer from Kratos Corporation, a manufacturer of analytic devices, aircraft instruments, and computer display equipment based in La Jolla, California, for $55 million ($132 million in 2010), or $31 per share. The acquisition was poorly leveraged, and by 1984 the debt had forced Kratos into bankruptcy.[78] InteliCoat, which manufactures coated papers, films, and specialty substrates, acquired the remaining assets of Keuffel & Esser through a series of mergers and acquisitions in the 1990s.[79]

Immigrant Entrepreneurship

Keuffel & Esser was very much a “German” business. As German immigrants, the partners spoke German and most likely did so with each other and their families. Both partners spent considerable time in Germany on business and thus maintained a connection to German business practices and German culture. In 1902, after retiring from Keuffel & Esser and selling his stake in the business to Keuffel, Hermann Esser returned to Germany, where he died six years later. K&E had a tradition of hiring German craftsmen, and Hoboken’s location within the Port of New York helped guarantee a steady supply of German workers. But K&E’s “Germanness” did not prevent it from doing substantial business with the U.S. government during both World Wars. And English was probably the primary language spoken in the New York showroom, in regional retail stores, and by regional salesmen.

It is unclear how many German-born or German-speaking workers were employed at K&E, but one cannot fail to notice that many of the employees listed in the company’s in-house newsletter, the Kecoscope (keco for K’euffel & ’E’sser ’Co.), had German-sounding surnames.[80] In 1892, when the company celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary with a company picnic at a local park, it printed the program in both English and German – a decision that suggested that at least some of K&E’s employees (and their family members) were more comfortable reading German than English.[81] Additionally, all of the K&E employees implicated in a handful of unusual incidents over the years were German born: for example, in 1895, K&E was embezzled by two young German-American employees, Albert Hohmann, age 24, and Harris Paulis, age 30, who stole plans, castings, telescopes, and other equipment with the intention of setting up their own rival business.[82] In 1915, K&E was indirectly involved in a passport fraud case in which a former employee, Richard Peter Stegler, was convicted of buying an American’s birth certificate and applying for a U.S. passport in order to return to Germany under the guise of an American citizen.[83] And Conrad Leiptau, “a German who is secretary for W. G. Keuffel, President of Keuffel & Esser, makers of mathematical instruments in Hoboken, now engaged in manufacturing range finders and periscopes for the navy,” was arrested for shouting “Hurrah for the Kaiser” in the streets of Hoboken during World War I.[84]

Both Wilhelm J.D. Keuffel and Hermann Esser were active members of New York City’s German community, the largest in America. But they certainly did not have to cross the Hudson to be surrounded by German culture. When Keuffel and Esser arrived in the U.S. in 1867, Hoboken was already on its way to becoming one of the most “German” communities in America. In 1870, Hoboken had 20,297 residents, 10,334 of whom were foreign born; and of those immigrants, more than 5,000 came from German-speaking states, mainly Prussia, but also Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, Hesse, and the Palatinate.[85] By 1890, Germans and their American-born children comprised 41 percent of the city’s 43,648 residents. Twenty years later, in 1910, 26 percent of Hoboken’s 70,324 residents were either German immigrants or the American children of German-born parents.[86]

This large German immigration was facilitated by the German shipping lines, Hamburg-America Packet Company and the North German Lloyd Steamship Company, which built piers in Hoboken in 1863 and 1864, respectively.[87] In fact, when Hermann Esser arrived in New York on the Hamburg Brazilian Steamship Company’s ship, the S.S. Teutonia, on September 26, 1866, his ship probably docked at Hoboken.[88] (Keuffel sailed to the U.S. on an English ship from Glasgow, Scotland, and most likely docked on the Manhattan side of the Hudson, but he would have gone through Castle Garden just as Esser did.)

When Wilhelm J.D. Keuffel died, his life was celebrated as an immigrant success story of upward mobility – a story that could “only happen in America.” As the local newspaper commented, “He came to this country a poor man and it was not until he had labored for years that he attained his success.” The newspaper also noted that Keuffel’s funeral, which was held at Hoboken’s prestigious Deutscher Club (German Club), was “largely attended as he was one of the most prominent members of the German colony in the country.”[89]

It is unclear how much capital Keuffel and Esser brought with them to America. What is clear, however, is that they quickly ascended into the middle and professional classes of the German-American community in both New York City and Hoboken. The Keuffel and Esser families first lived in middle-class and then upper-middle-class neighborhoods in Hoboken, and the partners were active in mostly German civic, cultural, and educational organizations in both New Jersey and New York. When the Keuffels and Essers sailed to and from Europe, they traveled cabin class, not steerage.

The Essers were first listed in the local city directory in 1871, when they lived in downtown Jersey City; by 1874, the family had moved to the Jersey City Heights, a nicer neighborhood on the cliffs overlooking the Hudson River. They then moved to 56 Eighth Street in Hoboken near the newly-founded Stevens Institute of Technology.[90]

Almost immediately after settling in Hoboken, Keuffel and Esser lived in the Second Ward, Hoboken’s upper-class district. (As bachelors, Esser and Keuffel had lived together briefly at 113 Garden Street in 1868.)[91] The Keuffel and Esser families lived near one another, often next door or across the street, for many years, at 24, 56, and 31 Tenth Street in the late 1870s; at 188 and 190 Hudson Street in the 1880s and early 1890s, and then at 510 and 512 Hudson Street in the mid-1890s.[92]

The Second Ward, and especially the blocks closest to the Stevens Institute, where the Keuffels and Essers lived, consisted of single-family brownstones and Victorian mansions. In a city of tenements and factories, the Second Ward stood out. It also had the fewest immigrants, including Germans, of any Hoboken neighborhood. By comparison, Keuffel and Esser’s factory was located in the heavily foreign Fourth Ward, which was populated by Irish, Italian, and Russian immigrants.[93]

But living in the Second Ward did not necessarily mean assimilation into Anglo-American culture. Social life in Hoboken in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was dominated by German immigrants. From the 1880s until 1917, the year in which the U.S. entered World War I, the city’s public schools were bilingual in German and English from kindergarten (pioneered in Hoboken by German immigrants) through Grade 12. Additionally, the city had two German-language private schools. By 1900, Hoboken had five German-language churches and one German-language synagogue, as well as dozens of German fraternal, social, cultural, homeland, and athletic organizations. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hoboken, as a port city, had more than twenty hotels, several of which were owned by Germans and catered to German-speaking travelers.[94] Both Keuffel and Esser were actively involved in two of the more important German institutions in Hoboken, the Hoboken Deutscher Club (German Club) and the Hoboken Academy, a private German school.

Founded in 1857, the Hoboken Deutscher Club was one of the city’s premier social organizations. A local booster wrote of the club in 1884: “its members are composed of the very best citizens of Hoboken, with some from New York. The individual wealth of the members of this club is, in the aggregate, probably more than that of any other German club in the United States.”[95] Its members included Dr. Hans Kudlich, an Austrian who had been a leader in the Vienna Parliament during the Revolution of 1848, Carl Christian Schurz, a Civil War general and U.S. Senator from Missouri, and William Steinway of Steinway & Sons piano company of New York.[96]

Keuffel joined this exclusive fraternity in 1869, and Hermann Esser sat on the club’s board of trustees in the mid-1880s. Keuffel’s funeral was held at the Deutscher Club, which was located at 600 Hudson Street, one block from the Keuffel family’s home.[97]

Recognizing the importance of education – especially engineering and technical training – to their business, Keuffel and Esser also supported several schools in Hoboken and New York City. Although it is unclear which schools the Keuffel and Esser children attended, upwardly mobile Protestant German immigrants such as Keuffel and Esser probably sent their children to the Hoboken Academy, which had been founded by Saxon immigrant Adolf Douai in 1860.[98] Keuffel also served as president of the Academy and as trustee of the Hoboken Manual Training School, a public institution. He also sat on the advisory board of the German Hospital and Dispensary (now Lenox Hill Hospital) in New York City.[99]

The German Hospital and Dispensary was founded by German immigrants in 1857 to serve New York City’s growing German community. Originally located on Canal Street in Kleindeutschland on the Lower East Side, the hospital moved to Second Avenue at Eighth Street in 1884, and then to Park Avenue and 77^th Street in 1905, where it is presently located. As late as World War I, when the hospital’s name was changed to Lenox Hill Hospital to escape association with Germany, an estimated 95 percent of the doctors, nurses, and other staff members spoke German.[100]

St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church, a German church established in Hoboken in 1858, was one important local German institution with which the Esser family was associated.[101] The Keuffels were also Lutheran, but it unclear whether they attended St. Matthew’s or St. John the Baptist (later the Evangelical Lutheran St. John’s Church), which was established in 1889.[102]

The Keuffel and Esser families were also active in the Elka Park Association resort in Greene County, New York, in the Catskills. A collection of twenty-one vacation homes, Elka Park was developed by the New York Liederkranz in 1890.[103] Keuffel built a two-and-a-half story Queen Anne Victorian- style house for his family there in 1893, and Esser built a two-and-a-half story Colonial Revival bungalow for his family in 1894. An additional Elka Park house associated with the Keuffel family was built in 1896.[104]

The Liederkranz had been founded in 1847 by twenty-five German immigrants interested in promoting and preserving German culture through music. By the 1890s, it had grown to more than 1,500 members, most of whom were successful businessmen and professionals. Active members paid $24 in annual dues and sang in the men’s choir, while passive members paid $40 per year in dues and used the club primarily as a socializing and networking arena. Piano manufacturer William Steinway was president from 1867 until 1896. Chemist Jacob Hasslacher, chemist Frederick W. Fink, and Puck owner and illustrator Joseph Keppler were among those club members with summer homes at Elka Park.[105]

Keuffel also belonged to several non-German associations, including the Hoboken Board of Trade (equivalent to the Chamber of Commerce), the Stationer’s Board of Trade of New York, and the Technical Society of New York.[106]

Both Keuffel and Esser were active in civic life, but neither was involved in local politics in Hoboken. Most middle- and upper-class Germans in Hoboken were Republican, and it is likely that they were as well.

Although Keuffel and Esser married and raised their families in the U.S., both made sure that their children grew up with close ties to Germany. The partners took their wives and children with them on extended business trips, and their children spoke German.[107] Two of Keuffel’s daughters married German men: Louise Keuffel’s husband, Carl M. Bernegau, was born in Rheinberg, Rhineland Province, Prussia, in 1866; and Ottilie Keuffel’s husband, Eugen Busch, was born in Remscheid, Rhineland Province, Prussia, in 1867. A third Keuffel daughter, Margarethe, married a man from German-speaking Switzerland; her husband, Karl Keller, was born in Zurich in 1880. Willy G. Keuffel’s wife, Ida, was born in New York in 1878 to German immigrant parents.[108]

Other members of the Keuffel family maintained close ties to Germany and were active members of the German-American community in both New York City and Hoboken, even after World War I. Carl M. Bernegau, president and treasurer of K&E in the 1940s, was a member of the Hoboken German Club and the Hexamer Riding Academy, a local German equestrian club. He was also a trustee of the Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, just as his father-in-law had been. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Bernegaus visited Germany approximately every other year.[109] Keuffel’s wife Bertha continued to make frequent trips to Germany after his death.[110] Moreover, Ottilie and Eugen Busch lived in Europe for many years: in Riga, Latvia, and in Russia in the 1900s; in Königsburg, East Prussia, in the 1910s and 1920s; and in Merano, Italy, in the 1930s.[111]

The Stevens Institute of Technology was one non-German institution with which the Keuffels maintained close ties. W.L.E. Keuffel’s sons, Carl and Adolph William, attended Stevens, with Carl graduating in 1911 and Adolph in 1914. Both worked at K&E for most of their careers: Carl served as president from 1950 until 1961 and Adolph oversaw slide rule production from 1920 until 1940.[112] Carl Bernegau was a trustee of Stevens for many years, and, after moving to Orange, New Jersey, he donated the family’s home at 809 Castle Point Terrace to the college for use as a dormitory. Carl W. Keuffel, president of K&E in the 1950s, received an honorary degree from Stevens in 1958.[113]

Keuffel & Esser was a German-American business in the fullest sense of the term. German immigrants Wilhelm J. D. Keuffel and Hermann Esser built a lasting business in the United States but always maintained close ties to Germany, mainly for business reasons but also for personal ones as well. Ultimately, near the end of his life, Hermann Esser chose to return to Germany, where he died. The two founders had arrived in the U.S. at a time of high German immigration and they settled in a community, Hoboken, that was dominated by German immigrants and German immigrant culture. During the forty-plus years that Keuffel lived in Hoboken, the number of German immigrants never dropped below 25 percent of the city’s population (and sometimes it even reached as high as 41 percent). The city’s schools were bilingual in German and English, and the community had several German language churches, as well as many German-owned businesses and social organizations. It was possible for a German immigrant to live and work in Hoboken and rarely (if ever) need to speak English.

In terms of business practices, Wilhelm Keuffel and Hermann Esser certainly spoke English (Keuffel probably learned it in Manchester, if he hadn’t already studied it in school in Germany) in order to sell to their customers. Going door-to-door to architects’ and builders’ offices in Manhattan in the late 1860s required a good command of English, and it is probable that English was the primary language of business at K&E early on. Still, the large number of German craftsmen in the New York City area may have meant that some parts of the Hoboken factory were either German-speaking or bilingual.[114] K&E also advertised extensively in English, and published numerous instructional manuals in English. Although the founders were German, they did not limit themselves to selling just to Germans.

Conclusion

Keuffel and Esser succeeded as entrepreneurs because they saw a demand for high-quality scientific instruments and responded with high-quality products, first through imports and then through domestic manufacture. Between 1867 and 1908, Keuffel and Esser built one of the largest instrument manufacturing firms in the world and introduced the slide rule to the United States. The founders also improved on the design of numerous drafting and surveying tools, and encouraged their successors to emphasize the research and development of new products.

For many years, Keuffel & Esser was one of the largest producers of slide rules in the world, and their rules were cherished as the expensive and essential tools of thousands of architects and engineers. Traditionally, an engineer would buy a K&E slide rule in college or soon thereafter and use it for the duration of his career. As slide rules were replaced by electronic pocket calculators in the 1970s, a handful of engineers who had come of age using slide rules began collecting them. The Oughtred Society, an association of slide rule collectors, was formed in 1991 and is based in Emeryville, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area.[115] In 2005, the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was given InteliCoat Technologies’ unparalleled collection of 600 K&E slide rules. K&E instruments are also found in other museums, including the Smithsonian Institution.[116]

The end of the slide rule did not have to spell the end of Keuffel & Esser; yet, by the late 1970s, K&E’s most visible product had been rendered obsolete by new technologies, and the company faced stiff competition in the specialty paper market. Given the opportunity to sell out, the Keuffel family did, ending more than a century of family ownership and control. Now, this once successful German-American business is known primarily to collectors and an aging generation of engineers.

Notes