Daniel Webster Heineman was an American engineer and industrialist. He worked with firms associated with General Electric Co. , and joined a managing director of Belgian company of SOHINA.
Background
Heineman was born on November 23, 1872 in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States. He was the son of James Heineman, who was in the chewing-tobacco business, and of Minna Hertz, who had been born in Germany. In 1880, after his father's death, he moved with his mother to Germany.
Education
In Germany Heineman studied electrical engineering--then a new subject--at the Technical College of Hannover. He graduated in 1895.
Career
Heineman joined the Union-Elektrizitats-Gesellschaft, a Berlin company affiliated with General Electric. For the next ten years he directed the conversion from horse to electric power of the tramways of Naples, Koblenz, Liege, and Brussels, and from hydraulic to electric power of the funicular on Mt. Vesuvius. In 1905, Heineman became managing director of the Belgian firm Societe Financiere de Transports et d'Enterprises Industrielle (SOFINA). He remained its chief executive for fifty years.
When Heineman joined SOFINA, it had only two other employees; by the beginning of World War II it had either built or taken over the tramways and electrical systems of Bilbao, Buenos Aires, Constantinople, Bangkok, Barcelona, and Lisbon, among other places, and with its subsidiaries employed 40, 000 people. SOFINA was recognized as one of the corporate giants of electrical equipment, and Heineman as one of the human giants in that field.
During World War I he helped found the Commission for Belgian Relief, which was later headed by Herbert Hoover.
Heineman's book and manuscript collection, begun about 1905, has been described by Frederick B. Adams, Jr. , former director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (where the collection is now housed), as "not large, but a well-chosen cabinet. It is especially strong in French and German literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in musical manuscripts, and his collections of Mozart, Goethe, Heine, Rousseau, Napoleon, and Maupassant would hold the status of national treasures in Germany or France. "
Heineman returned to the United States as a refugee during World War II and continued to direct the operations of SOFINA from New York City. After 1945 he divided his time between Europe and the United States. At this time he bore.
It is ironic, in light of the generally nonpredatory character of Heineman's business career, that the last important episode in it should have been a decades-long battle with the Spaniard Juan March, a onetime tobacco smuggler and financial freebooter. In 1948, March--with significant help from the Franco government, which owed him favors for huge financial advances made early in the Spanish Civil War--undertook to seize control, by fraudulent means, of Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company, a leading SOFINA holding that supplied most of the electric power of Catalonia. Through a series of Machiavellian maneuvers aided by complaisant decisions of the Spanish courts, March, by the time of Heineman's retirement in 1955, had drawn a net around the company. Heineman's successors at SOFINA carried the matter to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, which heard pleadings for eleven years and in 1970--eight years after the death of both of the original principals in the dispute--decided that it lacked jurisdiction and thus let Barcelona Traction go to March's successors by default. It was a real-life international thriller, a legal-financial war in the grand style, into which Heineman had been forced against his will and temperament. He died in New York City.
Heineman was a businessman in the high European style. He was generally acknowledged to be basically a builder rather than a financial manipulator, and some of his former colleagues have even insisted that he was uninterested in money.
He had a fairly striking physical resemblance to J. Pierpont Morgan.
According to his son James, Heineman was "in awe of men who could create. "
Interests
Heineman liked to discuss politics, writing, or music in his office before getting down to work. Outside his office he was known as a humanitarian and collector of rare books and manuscripts.
Connections
Heineman was married to Hettie Meyer. They had three children.