Erich Franke in his element: At the point where design meets realisation.
The life of company founder Erich Franke was unique in many respects. How he worked his way up to become a leading design engineer at the global company Zeiss without any higher education, how he was uprooted from his home town after the Second World War and shortly afterwards took the plunge into entrepreneurship, how he advanced his company with visionary drive on the one hand and a great sense of responsibility for the people in his “work family” on the other: All of this is remarkable – and at the same time a reflection of the history of the 20th century.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the ingenious design engineer Erich Franke is that he was not a qualified engineer. In his birthplace of Katzhütte in the Thuringian Forest (Germany), he completed an apprenticeship and also training in a machine factory after leaving school. He then worked as a technical draughtsman in Helmstedt. Ambitious and eager to learn, he attended evening classes and educated himself by diligently reading specialised literature. It was not an engineering degree but his skill that led him to Jena in 1922 as a design engineer for the renowned company Zeiss.
Erich Franke was more of a practically minded man than an academic theorist and this characterised many of his designs from then on: These impressed with an almost ingenious simplicity, and were practical and functional. This was particularly true of the wire race ball bearing, which he developed at Zeiss in 1934. Although he was non-political, he joined the Nazi Party in 1942 – though without holding an office and, as he later credibly proved, only so that his son could pursue the military career he wanted. In 1946, he was therefore categorised as a “fellow traveller”.
After moving from Jena to Heidenheim, the wire race ball bearing fundamentally changed Erich Franke’s life. With an almost missionary belief in the outstanding constructive added value of his invention, at the age of 48, he gave up a secure existence and embarked on an uncertain professional future with tenacity, courage and diligence. He was so passionate about “his” warehouse and his company, which was always a “work family” to him, that he hardly ever took holidays, lived modestly and only allowed himself personal time off to enjoy his beloved hunting. But his enormous workload was not without consequences. He suffered several heart attacks, and failed to take things easy afterwards. He never recovered from his third heart attack in December 1965 and Erich Franke died at the age of 65. //