Edison’s bulbs, Rathenau’s empire

AEG began with a light bulb. In 1881 Emil Rathenau saw Thomas Edison’s lamps at the Paris electricity exhibition, bought the German rights, and in 1883 founded the Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft in Berlin. Renamed Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft in 1887, it built power stations, motors and tramway equipment at a furious pace. By the 1930 Encyclopaedia Britannica’s reckoning it had been, before 1923, the largest electrical manufacturer in Germany and one of the most important industrial concerns in the world. It also gave the world modern corporate design, hiring the architect Peter Behrens in 1907.

Into the air at Hennigsdorf

Aircraft were a sideline that the war turned into a business. AEG opened an aircraft department at its Hennigsdorf works outside Berlin in 1910, and added the Nieder Neuendorf works airfield in 1912. Its first machine was an all-wood biplane on the Wright brothers’ pattern, with a 17.5-metre wingspan and a top speed of 65 km/h. Within months the engineers had moved to mixed construction of wood and steel tube, and steel tubing would become the house signature. According to German sources, AEG was Germany’s second-largest arms producer after Krupp during the First World War.

The steel-tube bomber

The firm’s best-known aircraft was the G.IV, a twin-engined Grossflugzeug that entered service in late 1916. Where Gotha and Friedrichshafen built in wood, the G.IV had a welded steel-tube frame, heavy but tough: photographs of crashes show wings crumpled while the crew compartment stayed intact. Some 320 were built. They bombed in France, Romania, Greece and Italy, increasingly at night, and crews of Kampfgeschwader 4 reputedly flew up to seven sorties a night on the Italian front. One G.IV pilot, Hermann Köhl, later flew the Bremen on the first east-to-west aeroplane crossing of the Atlantic in 1928.

Armour for the trenches

AEG’s other big seller was the C.IV reconnaissance two-seater, of which about 687 were built, some under licence by Fokker. From it came the J.I and J.II, armoured ground-attack aircraft with a steel bathtub around the crew and machine guns firing down into the trenches; about 609 were built in 1917 and 1918. Not every experiment worked. The R.I giant bomber first flew in June 1918, and on 3 September a propeller whose glue had not cured flew apart and the aircraft broke up, killing all seven aboard. The other seven ordered were scrapped.

After the Armistice

Peace ended AEG’s aircraft business but gave it one last first. On 5 February 1919 J.II aircraft of Deutsche Luft-Reederei opened the world’s first sustained daily passenger air service, between Berlin and Weimar. The parent company went on to build locomotives at Hennigsdorf, develop the Magnetophon tape recorder in 1935 and survive partition after 1945, before being wound up in 1996. The only surviving G.IV, number 574/18, has been in Canada since 1919 and is the only preserved German twin-engined combat aircraft of the First World War.

Factories

• Hennigsdorf works, aircraft department · Hennigsdorf, near Berlin — Aircraft built from 1910; works airfield at Nieder Neuendorf from 1912; later the LEW locomotive plant
• Original factory · Berlin, near the Stettiner Bahnhof — First AEG production site; company later moved to Gesundbrunnen

People

• Emil Rathenau · founder — Bought German rights to Edison’s lamp patents; died 1915
• Hermann Köhl · G.IV bomber pilot — Flew G.IVs against Padua; later piloted the Bremen across the Atlantic east to west, 1928
• Peter Behrens · architect and designer — Artistic consultant from 1907, creator of AEG’s corporate identity

Records and firsts

• G.IV number 574/18 is the only preserved German twin-engined combat aircraft of the First World War
• AEG J.IIs flew the world’s first sustained daily passenger aeroplane service, Berlin–Weimar, from 5 February 1919