page_title: Ábrahám Ganz
section_title: Ganz Works
hierarchical_section_title: Ábrahám Ganz / Life / Ganz Works
caption_attribution_description: Magyar: Az Első Magyar Vagongyár Rt. telepe, melyet a „Ganz és Társa Vasöntő és Gépgyár Rt." 1880-ban felvásárolt.
context_page_description: Ábrahám Ganz was a Swiss-born iron manufacturer, machine and technical engineer, entrepreneur, father of Ganz Works. He was the founder and the manager of the company that he made the flagship of the Hungarian economy in the 19th century. Despite his early death in 1867 the company remained one of the strongest manufacturing enterprise in Austria-Hungary. Many famous engineers worked at Ganz Works inter alia Károly Zipernowsky, Ottó Bláthy, Miksa Déri, András Mechwart, Kálmán Kandó, Donát Bánki, János Csonka and Theodore von Kármán and several world-famous inventions were done there, like the first railway electric traction, or the invention of the roller mill, the carburetor, the transformer and the Bánki-Csonka engine.
context_section_description: The management of the steam mill paid a share of the profit to Ganz. This enabled him to buy, in 1844, land and a house for 4500 Forints in Víziváros. He built his own foundry on this site and started to work there with seven assistants. They made mostly casting products for the needs of the people of the city. In 1845, he bought the neighbouring site and expanded his foundry with a cupola furnace. He gave his brother, Henrik a job as a clerk, because of the growing administration work. He made a profit in the first year, and his factory grew, even though he had not yet engaged in mass production. In 1846, at the third Hungarian Industrywork Exhibition (Magyar Iparmű Kiállítás), he introduced his stoves to the public. He won the silver medaille of the exhibition committee and the bronze medaille from Archduke Joseph, Palatine of Hungary.
  During the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 to 1849 the foundry made ten cannons and many cannonballs for the Hungarian army. Because of this, the Military Court of Austria impeached him. He got seven weeks in prison as penalty, but because of his Swiss citizenship he was acquitted of the charge.
  Ganz recognized that, to develop his factory, he had to make products that were mass-produced. In 1846 the Pest-Vác railway line was built. At that time, European foundries made wrought iron rims for spoked wagon wheels by pouring the casts in shapes in sand, and leaving them to cool down. Meanwhile, in the United States and England a better method was being used. This was chill casting, which was invented by the Englishman John Burn in 1812. The essence of this process is to cool the cast faster. The metal will then be harder, and have better wear-resistance. This is possible if the casting frame is made of a good heat conductor. Ganz made one for the first time in 1853 and he was able to improve the method further by using antimony. He got a patent for this invention in 1856.
  Ganz describes thus the essence of his process:
  "To get a hard cast, the so-called casting crust, as main equipment we use antimony. We grind it tiny and we make paint or dollop of it. We cover the walls of the casting shape with it, then we dry it and pull it together. Finally, we heat it to 100 degrees, and the liquid iron is poured into the mold. At the place where the mould walls are coated with said material, a glass hard crust is formed, which - depending on whether the wall of the cover is thinner or thicker - is two, three or four millimeters in thickness. That is why I have found antimony the best material for the production ..."
  — Ábrahám Ganz
  He used antimony for covering the inner surface of the mold casting to separate the fluid iron from the cooling iron. This was the source of his success. Between 1852 and 1862 he built and ran Europe's first, and for a long time only, crust wheel foundry. His customers were Austro-Hungarian, German, French and Russian railway companies. Because of the large number of orders his foundry proved to be too small, so he built a new factory in 1858.
  Between 1853 and 1866 his company delivered 86,074 wheels to 59 railway companies. Ganz also bought an English patent, the invention of Ransomes and Biddel, which concerned parts for rail switches. He improved this also, and got two patents in 1861 and in 1865. Between 1860 and 1866, his company delivered 6,293 crust cast rail switch parts to railway companies. The company did not only produce parts for railways. They also made parts for bridges (e.g. most of the Lánchíd's cast iron cross beams and the molding pieces of the Szeged Bridge in Szeged), as well as crust cast notched cylinders for the mill industry. Later the company achieved world-famous success with this product, under the leadership of András Mechwart.
  The number of employees at Ganz Works was 60 in 1854, 106 in 1857 and 371 in 1867. The daily production was 2-3 tonnes of casts (with 50-60 wheels). The products of the company obtained  international recognition: at the World's Fairs in Paris (three bronze medals Exposition Universelle (1855)), in London (bronze medaile 186
caption: The building of the foundry (today 20 Bem József Street, Budapest)
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