Dortmund
The Hörder Bergwerks- und Hütten-Verein, or Hörder Verein (Association), is a former mining company in Dortmund.
After the Hörder Association was founded in 1852, construction of the first blast furnace plant began west of the city of Hörde (the part of the plant later called Phoenix-West). The Hörder Verein is one of the first smelting companies in the Ruhr area in which, in addition to steel production and further processing, the upstream production stages of pig iron production were also realized. The first blast furnace was blown in 1854. Three more soon followed, so that in 1855/1856 around 1,200 workers in the blast furnace were able to produce 22,750 tons of pig iron annually - a total of around 2,100 workers worked at the Hörder Verein. By 1870, the amount of pig iron increased to 58,000 tons annually. Some of the ore was mined in a separate ironstone mine.
In 1879, Gustave Léon Pastors , technical director of the Rheinische Stahlwerke (RSW) , and Josef Massenez , director of the Hörder mining and smelting association, succeeded both for the RSW and for the Hörder association, which had been using the Bessemer process since 1864 worked to be the first in German customs to acquire a license from Sidney Gilchrist Thomas for the new Thomas process. The Thomas steelworks, built in 1880 with four 8t converters, was able to blow 30,000 tons/month (in 1902) by using an elongated casting pit (instead of the usual round arrangement). The Thomas steel production itself, but also the distribution of sublicenses, led to rapid company growth over the next 15 years during the term of the patent protection.
In 1882, a Martin steelworks with three 10 t furnaces was built, a new rolling mill for rails, sleepers and semi-finished products as well as a bandage rolling mill was built and the blast furnace system was expanded so that pig iron output could be increased to 106,500 tons in 1885/1886. The first pig iron mixer in Europe, which was built in Hörde in 1890, made it possible to further process the pig iron from the blast furnace plant directly in the converters without remelting, which was previously hardly possible due to the spatial separation of the blast furnace plant (west) and steelworks (east).
At the turn of the century, the blast furnace plant was modernized again, so that an annual output of 330,000 tons of pig iron was achieved - now with 5,000 workers and 1,800 miners at the company's own Schleswig and Holstein mines .
In 1906, annual production was already 500,000 tons with 6,200 employees. The Hörder association merged with Phoenix AG for mining and smelting operations , which was founded in the 1850s and was one of the largest German mining companies at the time.
The development of the blast furnace plant during this time was characterized by pioneering technological developments: In addition to the pig iron mixer introduced in 1890, the world's first large gas machine was used in 1898 for the direct energetic utilization of the blast furnace gas produced during the blast furnace process.
In the following years and decades, the division of labor between neighboring industrial locations was further expanded. While Phoenix-West served as the home of blast furnaces as well as coking plants and secondary extraction plants, on Phoenix-East the pig iron was further processed into marketable products in steel and rolling mills. The two industrial locations were connected by the Eliasbahn , a factory railway line through the middle of the Hörde district. The liquid pig iron was transported between the two locations in torpedo cars .
Up until the Second World War, up to seven blast furnaces were in production in parallel.
In 1926, the Hörder mining and smelting association, which had previously operated the two Phoenix West and East locations, was merged with other mining companies into the Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG, which existed until the end of the Second World War.
In 1992, a hostile takeover by Krupp AG followed, which initiated the decline of the steel era in Dortmund. The merger of Krupp and Thyssen AG in 1999 sealed the end with the decision in favor of the location near the Rhine in Duisburg and against the one in Dortmund.
As part of the general decline of the steel industry in the locations further away from the Rhine in the Ruhr area, blast furnace operations were reduced to three in the 1980s and to just one in the 1990s - before the Phoenix West site was finally abandoned (1998).
After the Second World War, the number of blast furnaces in operation was still five. Before it was shut down, Phoenix-West was considered the fastest ironworks in Europe, counting from tap to tap.
