Page 53 - ITAtube Journal 2 2022
P. 53

Review
  quarters in the Stahlhof in Breitestraße
in Düsseldorf. All steel pipes sold in the German Empire were calculated using
the Düsseldorf-Grafenberg freight base. Nowhere in the world has there ever been such a concentration of steel tube mills. In addition, there were the manufacturers of primary material, of pipe joints (Fittingw- erke Inden and Woeste), the machine facto- ries, the plant constructors, the installation trade as well as the trade.
For Mülheim and especially for Düsseldorf, the steel industry has been of extraordinary importance. In both cases, industrialisation had only begun with it. In Rath, the work- force initially consisted mainly of local resi- dents for whom the inherited piece of land was no longer enough to secure their own and their family’s existence. They found regular and better-paid employment in the steel tube factory, while continuing to farm as a sideline. Today’s Düsseldorf would be inconceivable without the steel pipe indus- try. The backward provincial town, which mourned long-gone times as a residence and could no longer even afford its beloved theatre, developed into a potent economic metropolis with high urban quality within
a few decades after the Poensgen-Werke relocated. Even its importance as a trade fair and exhibition city is largely due to this.
The important pioneers Poensgen, Thyssen, Ehrhardt and Mannesmann have left their mark on the development, as have the employees they have recruited, trained and formed into a team. These people - some- times in competition with each other - have also made great and unique achievements. Mülheim was once the largest gas tube plant in Germany; it was here that the first continuous production for longitudinally welded steel tubes according to the Fretz- Moon process went into operation in 1932 and a few years later two radial rolling mills according to Röckner for seamless large-di- ameter tubes. In the spring of 1966, the world’s first continuously operating rolling mill for seamless steel tubes was the Mecca not only of tube experts. The rolling mills were controlled with the help of room-fill- ing magnetic drum crushers (Siemens 3003 with punch card machine). In 1972, after
ITAtube Journal December 2023
Plug Mill Düsseldorf/Rath
the “wedding of the year” and the founding of the Mannesmannröhren-Werke (new),
a second tube continuous rolling mill was added. RK 1 ran its last rolling shift in the summer of 1992 and, fundamentally mod- ernised, went back into operation in 1995 in Belo Horizonte/Brazil - where Vallourec now concentrates oilfield tube production.
In 1926, Reisholz supplied a seamless rolled boiler shot for the large GESOLEI exhibition, which was transported to the exhibition
by a wagon pulled by four horses. Huge steam and oil pressure vessels as well as turbine shafts and bridge pylons weighing several tonnes were part of the production
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