Friedrich Harkort (February 22, 1793,

Hagen Hagen () is the 41st-largest city in Germany. The municipality is located in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It is located on the south eastern edge of the Ruhr area, 15 km south of Dortmund, where the rivers Lenne and Volme (me ...

- March 6, 1880), known as the "Father of the

Ruhr The Ruhr ( ; german: Ruhrgebiet , also ''Ruhrpott'' ), also referred to as the Ruhr area, sometimes Ruhr district, Ruhr region, or Ruhr valley, is a polycentric urban area in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With a population density of 2,800/km ...

," was an early prominent German industrialist and pioneer of industrial development in the Ruhr region.(29 December 2009)
Friedrich Harkort - Vorbild und Vordenker
''Derwesten.de'' (in German) In 1819, he founded the first industrial workshop at Castle Wetter. An early proponent of railroads, he proposed the construction of a railway line from

Cologne Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 million inhabitants in the city proper and 3.6 millio ...

Minden Minden () is a middle-sized town in the very north-east of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, the greatest town between Bielefeld and Hanover. It is the capital of the district (''Kreis'') of Minden-Lübbecke, which is part of the region of De ...

in 1825, which eventuated as the

Cologne-Minden trunk line {{unreferenced, date=January 2014 The Cologne-Minden trunk line is a railway built by the Cologne-Minden Railway Company (''Cöln-Mindener Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft'', CME). The line is the westernmost part of the railway line from Berlin to the Rhin ...

, completed in 1847. In 1826 he built a small test track, as a

monorail A monorail (from "mono", meaning "one", and " rail") is a railway in which the track consists of a single rail or a beam. Colloquially, the term "monorail" is often used to describe any form of elevated rail or people mover. More accurat ...

following a design of the Englishman

Henry Robinson Palmer Henry Robinson Palmer (1795–1844) was a British civil engineer who designed the world's second monorail and the first elevated railway. He is also credited as the inventor of corrugated metal roofing, still one of the world's major building m ...

References

Further reading