Published on 16 September 2016
Possibly no other name of an industrial company became so entrenched in the vocabulary of Czech and Czechoslovak workers as Českomoravská-Kolben-Daněk (ČKD). The expression to go to “kolbenka” became synonymous with getting up for work in the morning.
The history of this company started in the 1850s, when Čeněk Daněk founded his engineering works. Six years later, the company Breifeld & Evans was created. These two engineering companies merged in 1872 and the Joint-stock engineering company, formerly Breitfeld, Daněk and Co., came into existence. A year earlier, the First Czech-Moravian Machine Factory in Prague Libeň was founded. Both companies focused on the production of machinery for the food industry, mostly sugar production. The Czech-Moravian company also had a bridgeworks and general engineering sections. It is important to mention that it was the first company to start to produce locomotives in Bohemia. The first manufactured locomotive left the factory in April 1900. The third predecessor of ČKD was Emil Kolbera's factory, entered in 1896 into the commercial register under the name Kolben a spol, elektrotechnická továrna v Praze-Vysočanech (Kolben & Comp., electrotechnical engineering factory in Prague-Vysočany). In 1898, the company was bought for 435,000 guldens by Živnostenská banka and renamed Elektrotechnická akciová společnost, dř. Kolben a spol. v Praze (Electrical engineering joint-stock company), and it was this change into a joint-stock company with the huge capital of two million guldens that gave the company the prerequisite for fast development.
Greater competitiveness and higher demands on production provided the reason for the merger of the Electrical Engineering joint-stock company with the First Czechoslovak Machine Factory in 1921, creating the concern Českomoravská-Kolben, akc. spol., and the fusion provided the logical connection of the engineering and electro-technical engineering industry. In the second half of the 1920s, the competition in older mechanical engineering fields got more fierce; in Prague, the main competitor was the factory of the Joint-stock company, formerly Breitfeld-Daněk and Co. Here, too, it ended up in a merger, and the new engineering and electro-engineering concern Českomoravská-Kolben-Daněk was born, in which Kolben was the chief executive. In the late 1920s the competition with another giant of the Czechoslovak economy, Škoda, got serious.
A dark period for the company and the person heading it – one of the best technical minds in Czech history, Emil Kolben - came in the period of the Protectorate. Kolben was considered a Jew, despite not adhering to Judaism since the early 1920s and being active in many German societies. His property was sequestered and subsequently Aryanised. On 6 June 1943 he was deported, despite his advanced age, to Terezin concentration camp, where he died less than a month later.
The war affected the company badly in many other respects. On 1 October 1940, the company’s name was changed to Českomoravské strojírny, akciová společnost. One of the reasons for the change of the name was Kolben’s Jewish ancestry; it was improper that one of the most important economic enterprises in the entire Protectorate would be associated with a Jew. In the late 1930s the concern gradually got involved in production for the arms industry, which continued during the war. During the war ČKD manufactured, among other things, Jagdpanzer 38 Hetzer tank destroyers, which became effective combat tools at the front. In 1944 alone, 1,200 were shipped from the factory. This is why, on 25 March 1945, Libeň and Vysočany became the target of American bombing.
The post-war period brought a great milestone to ČKD. By presidential decree no. 100/1945 Coll., the company was nationalized and state administration was introduced. The directed economic policy followed and the company was expanded with other production plants from property confiscated by presidential decree no. 108/1945 Coll. In this way the plants in Modřany, Děčín, Česká Lípa and Rokytnice were added, and after February 1948 other smaller companies were added to the individual plants – G. Neděla in Jihlava and Ignis, Beutelschmidt & Comp., A. J. Doseděl and A. Duda in Prague. This property seized in the post-war period did not in any way influence production; on the contrary, ČKD’s scope of production remained huge. The company produced electric rotating machines; transformers; welding transformers and rotary welding machines; low-voltage, high-voltage and extra-high-voltage devices; LV switchboars; HV substations and outdoor EHV substations; mercury arc rectifiers; traction equipment for railcars, trams and trolleybuses; railway signalling equipment; signalling devices for urban transport; magnets; annealing and hardening furnaces; electrical household appliances; electrical synchronous clocks; electrometers; secondary relays; dental equipment; neon lights; and military floodlights. In the field of machinery production, there were water turbines, centrifugal pumps, steam turbines and turbo-compressors. However, machine production was gradually eliminated from the company. Gradually, the scope of production was further reduced. After 1948, it was narrowed down to electric rotating machines, transformers, HV and EHV equipment, EHV substations, mercury arc rectifiers and traction substation equipment.
Although after the war ČKD returned to its original name, Českomoravská-Kolben-Daněk, a state entreprise, this change did not last long. Right at the beginning of the five-year plan period, the state entreprise ČKD was dissolved and the individual plants and sections were included in the newly established specialized companies. In Vysočany, the state entreprise ČKD Stalingrad was created, and in Libeň the national entreprise ČKD Sokolovo. However, even this organizational structure was not final. In April 1958, the specialized company ČKD Praha was created.
Since 1989, ČKD has been concentrating on projects in the fields of energy, gas and oil, including the infrastructure for these sectors.
The research into the reserve fonds has so far found six versions of ČKD stamps, of which five are with titles and only one of them is graphical, with the accompanying text saying: PROPERTY OF a. s. Českomoravská-Kolben-Daněk Libeň, PROPERTY OF ČKD-STALINGRAD NÁRODNÍ PODNIK, PROPERTY OF ČESKOMORAVSKÁ-KOLBEN-DANĚK NÁRODNÍ PODNIK, První českomoravské továrny na stroje v Praze VIII. Property of automotive department, and finally, PROPERTY OF a. s Českomoravská-Kolen-Daněk Central Library. If we look at the content of these fonds, the likely conclusion is that this was discarded literature that had no place in modern company management. Among these books are treatises on losses, corporate savings and industrial accounting; there is also a compilation on the issue of mechanical engineering from the international congress in Liège. The question remains of where the ČKD library was located, and possibly how many corporate libraries there were in ČKD. The majority of the titles seem to be hinting at the plant in Libeň. This plant became ČKD Sokolovo after the reorganization, yet no library is shown in any of the organization’s plans. However, its existence is shown by the library additions marked “ČKD SOKOLOVO LITERATURE SERVICE 1953” and “ČKD STALINGRAD, literature selection ČKD Sokolovo. 1954”, “ČKD Stalingrad Technical reports ČKD-Sokolovo 1957 7-12” and ČKD Stalingrad OVERVIEW ČKD SOKOLOVO 1956”. As in most cases of books stored in the reserve funds, within the unprocessed fond of the National and University Library stored in the Archives of the National Library of the Czech Republic, no protocol was found of the handover of the fragment of library of this original owner.