Jakob Christof Rad (Anglicised Jacob Christoph Rad, ; 25 March 1799 – 13 October 1871) was a Swiss-born Austrian physician and industrial manager. He had many other professional activities, was a director of a sugar factory in

Dačice Dačice (; ) is a town in Jindřichův Hradec District in the South Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 7,200 inhabitants. It lies on the Moravian Thaya River. The historic town centre is well preserved and is protected as an Cultur ...

Bohemia Bohemia ( ; ; ) is the westernmost and largest historical region of the Czech Republic. In a narrow, geographic sense, it roughly encompasses the territories of present-day Czechia that fall within the Elbe River's drainage basin, but historic ...

, Austria-Hungary (now the

Czech Republic The Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, and historically known as Bohemia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the south ...

) in 1843, and invented the process and associated machinery for cutting large block sugar into manageable uniform pieces. Rad is credited with the invention of sugar cubes.

Biography

Rad was born on 25 March 1799 in Rheinfelden, Switzerland. He was the father of 16 children. He died in 1871 in

Vienna Vienna ( ; ; ) is the capital city, capital, List of largest cities in Austria, most populous city, and one of Federal states of Austria, nine federal states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. ...

Invention of the cube sugar

Rad is credited with the invention of sugar cubes. The idea to produce sugar in cube form came from his wife, who cut herself while paring down the standard large, commercial sugar loaf into smaller parts for use in the home. Rad had become involved with management of a sugar factory in 1840 in the South Bohemian town of

(present day

). He began work on a machine for transforming sugar into cube form, leading to a five-year

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

for the cube press he invented, granted on 23 January 1843. Rad had started a business producing the "tea sugar" that was ultimately unsuccessful. The factory set up in Dačice went into bankruptcy, Rad returned to Vienna in 1846, production stopped, the invention was forgotten. The sugar cubes were successfully mass-produced 30 years later using a different process.

Biography

Invention of the cube sugar

References

Further reading