Franz Ernst Schütte (21 November 1836 - 1 February 1911) was a German entrepreneur-businessman who during his lifetime became celebrated for the extent of his wealth. Although his business activities extended across several different sectors, including shipbuilding and land reclamation-development, it was on account of his oil importing activities, which included the establishment of the "Deutsch-Amerikanische Petroleum Gesellschaft" (DAPG / "German-American Petroleum Company") in 1890, that Schütte acquired the popular soubriquet "The Petroleum King". (The DAPG company was renamed "Esso AG" in 1950.) In his home city Schütte is also remembered as a massively effective Bremen benefactor, both through his own donations and through his effectiveness as a fund raiser among fellow members of the city's business elite, during what was a period of unprecedented commercial expansion. The city owes its "new" city hall and its Botanical Gardens to his philanthropy, along with the rebuilding between 1888 and 1901 of the west end of Bremen Cathedral in the confident "Gothic revival" style favoured for prestigious public buildings in central and western Europe during this period.
Biography
Provenance and early years
Franz Schütte was born in Bremen, the son of businessman Albrecht Nicolaus Schütte (1799–1862) by his marriage to the lawyer's daughter Louise Regine Walte (1812–69). Franz was the eldest of his parents' five recorded children. He completed a commercial apprenticeship with the tobacco company Lüttge und Horst, and then, accompanied by his younger brother Carl, undertook a length stay in the United States in order further to expand his and his brother's business knowledge and understanding.
His father died in March 1862, by which time Franz and Carl Schütte were back in Germany. Franz Schütte had been a part-owner of the family business since January 1861. The brothers now took over at "Handelshaus Albt. Nic. Schütte & Sohn". At this stage the company's principal activity involved the importation to northern Europe of tobacco, but there were already growing quantities of other US imports traded, as the rapid development of rail transport and the increasing reliability of transatlantic shipping opened up world commodity markets to US agriculture.
The rise of "The Petroleum King" The company had made its first foray into importing and marketing petroleum - at that time principally used as a lighting fuel and lubricant - from Pennsylvania in 1858. During 1863/64 the focus of the entire business switched to petroleum importation. The market grew rapidly: within it "Handelshaus Albt. Nic. Schütte & Sohn" also grew, becoming, the most important petroleum trading company in Germany by the end of the century. The nature of the business involved working closely with the shipping magnate Wilhelm Anton Riedemann (1832–1919). During the earlier 1880s the petroleum was transported in barrels on steam freighters. In 1886, for the first time, a consignment of petroleum destined for distribution by Schütte crossed the Atlantic in the "Glückauf", the first German-owned (although it had to be "converted in England") ocean going oil tanker. The "Glückauf", considered by German ship builders to be based on a fatally flawed concept, given the combination in close proximity of a cargo of combustible oil with a "fire powered" propulsion system, turned out to be the prototype for several generations of oil tankers and "super tankers" that would ply the world's oceans through the twentieth century and beyond its end. By 1889 there were fifteen oil tankers, and the traditional practice of storing petroleum in barrels in warehouses had been superseded by the use of large purpose-built oil-reservoirs. Over time competitors would adopt similar practices, but throughout the 1890s (and in many respects for much longer) the business retained a massive competitive advantage over putative competitors. The capital investment necessary was massive, but once the investment had been made, the company seems to have been extraordinarily lucrative for its owners, both in Germany and internationally.