Gerard Philips

Gerard Philips, full name Gerard Leonard Frederik Philips, was born in 1858 in Zaltbommel, the Netherlands, into a wealthy banking family.⁠[1][2]

He was the eldest son of Frederik Philips (1830–1900). Frederik, the seventh child of Lion Philips and Sophie Pressburg, married a non-Jewish woman, traded successfully in tobacco and coffee in Zaltbommel with a partner, G.R. Peletier, and later, together with one of his sons, built the business into an independently operating bank. His mother was Maria Heyligers. Gerard’s brother Anton PhilipsAnton PhilipsAnton Philips (1874–1951) was a Dutch entrepreneur who joined Philips & Co, founded by his elder brother Gerard Philips and their father, in 1895 to run its sales, led the company alone from 1922 and built it into an international electronics business.Open the full entry was the youngest son.⁠[3][4]

His grandmother Sophie Pressburg’s sister Henriëtte married the German jurist Heinrich Marx and became the mother of Karl Marx; his grandfather Lion Philips corresponded with his nephew Karl Marx.⁠[3]

At eighteen he enrolled at the Polytechnic School in Delft (Polytechnische School Delft) to study mechanical engineering and graduated as a mechanical engineer. He then took a course in electric lighting and power transmission in Glasgow and was offered a position at the University of Glasgow, working in 1886–1887 in a research group supervised by William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin.⁠[2][5]

Gerard was initially a practically minded mechanical engineer who realized in Glasgow how little he knew about electricity and physics, and found his true calling there. He then worked in London and in Berlin, where he was employed by the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG). In 1889 Emil Rathenau asked him to run one of his companies in Amsterdam.⁠[3][5][6]

Having drawn up a business plan with his father, Frederik, he founded Philips & Co in Eindhoven on May 15, 1891. Father and son bought an empty former buckskin factory on the Emmasingel in Eindhoven for 12,150 guilders; his father provided the capital and became the first director, and the firm began making incandescent light bulbs and other electrical products.⁠[5][6][3][1]

Gerard had no experience yet in running a factory day to day, but was known as a hard-working and highly competent manufacturer whose obsession with lamp making was known even outside Philips.⁠[3]

In January 1895 his brother Anton Philips, sixteen years his junior, came to Eindhoven at their father’s request to handle the commercial side of the family business. Gerard concentrated on manufacturing technology while Anton handled sales, and the brothers established an autocratic management style in the company.⁠[7][1][8]

He married Johanna van der Willigen on March 19, 1896. He had no children.⁠[4][3][9]

By 1900 Philips was the third-largest supplier of light bulbs in Europe. His father, Frederik, died that year. During the 1900s Philips became the largest private employer in the Netherlands, with more than 2,000 employees, and Gerard and Anton invested in housing, sports and healthcare for employees.⁠[1][3][10]

On December 7, 1905, the Kaiserliches Patentamt in Berlin granted Philips its first patent, covering an invention by Gerard Philips to extend the lifetime of carbon filament lamps.⁠[11]

Gerard recognized that the company needed its own research laboratory and reached agreement with Gilles Holst after recruiting for a physicist. Holst began work in Eindhoven on January 2, 1914, marking the establishment of the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium (Philips NatLab, later Philips Research). Much of the company’s subsequent success was based on this laboratory.⁠[3][5][10][1]

In 1922 Gerard formally stepped down as director and retired; Anton, who had already taken over many of his duties, then led the company alone. After retiring he left Eindhoven, lived in France for a time and returned to the Netherlands in 1931.⁠[5][7][6][9]

Gerard Philips died in 1942.⁠[12][13][3]

In May 2021, on the eve of the company’s 130th anniversary, Philips announced that it would give Eindhoven a statue of Gerard Philips; the city already had statues of his brother Anton and his nephew Frits. The design presented that December, by the Nijmegen artist Andreas Hetfeld, forms a bust from about 500 stacked rust-colored steel rings and measures 8 meters wide and 7 meters high.⁠[9][14]

In 2023 the Philips Museum staged an exhibition devoted to Gerard Philips, officially opened by Eindhoven mayor Jeroen Dijsselbloem. In May of that year the statue, weighing about 23,000 kilograms, was brought from Zaltbommel to Eindhoven in three parts; it was scheduled to be unveiled on May 15 at the Gloeilampplantsoen near Strijp-T and to move to the planned Victoriapark in the city center within a few years.⁠[12][15]

Philips: Official website: https://www.philips.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[10]