Robert Viktor Neher was born on February 2, 1886 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. He was the son of manufacturer and colonel Georg Robert Neher, who was a director of a wagon factory and the Gonzen iron mine. Georg was also instrumental in setting up the first European aluminum factor in Neuhausen and founding Aluminum Industrie AG.
Neher studied law and economics at the universities of Geneva, Zurich, and Berlin from 1906 to 1910. In 1909, the Gordon Bennett hot air balloon race took place in Zurich. A group of students agreed that success in such competitions depends largely on the balloons losing as little gas as possible. Neher, who was about to complete his doctoral exam at the time, had the idea of covering the silk balloon envelope with thin aluminum foil, and thereby sealing the envelope. Neher got aluminum foil from Heinrich Alfred Gautschi, who produced the foil by a process Gautschi had recently invented. Neher stuck the foil onto the balloon silk. Though the foil sheets failed to seal the balloon, Neher continued to pursue the idea because he was convinced that he could achieve his goal with “endless strips” made of aluminum foil.
In the spring of 1910, Neher sent his two confidants Erwin Lauber and Alfred Gmür to Düsseldorf to build a machine at the August Schmitz Rolling Machine Factory, which was constructed according to Neher’s designs. After initial attempts, Neher rented a small factory building in Emmishofen, where he installed a total of four rolling mills with which he tried to produce aluminum strips over the next few months.
After a few failures, Neher, together with Lauber and Gmür, filed a patent application in Switzerland on October 27, 1910, for the production of aluminum foil strips. Subsequently the inventors filed an application in Great Britain on September 15, 1911, for which a patent was issued on January 11, 1912. The foil strips produced according to the process were not suitable for sticking on the silk balloon covers. However, because large rolls were more efficient to produce than the films that had been produced using Gautschi’s process, Neher entered the market for packaging film.
With Neher’s process, packaging films of various thicknesses for foods such as chocolate, boxed cheese, and tobacco products could be produced much more efficiently. In addition to several chocolate factories, a large buyer of Neher’s films was the Maggi company, which used the aluminum foil to package Maggi’s ready-made soups and bouillon cubes.
Until Neher developed his rolling process, Neher’s customers had wrapped their products with tin foil. Customers saw several advantages in the new material. Aluminum foil was lighter and cheaper to produce. Further, unlike tin, aluminum was not traded on the stock exchange and therefore the price did not constantly fluctuate.
Initially, the switch from tin to aluminum foil was very difficult because food manufacturers wanted to continue using their wrapping machines. However, the properties of tin and aluminum are very different. Neher therefore hired a packaging machine specialist to carry out the necessary modifications to customers’ machines at Neher’s expense. At the same time, Neher put all his energy into developing new packaging systems and worked to ensure that packaging machine manufacturers changed their products to aluminum foil and optimized packaging systems.
After the aluminum foils could be delivered on rolls with a strip length of 6000 to 9000 meters and the suitable packaging machines were available, interest in the foils grew among chocolate and soup manufacturers, as well as among manufacturers of tea, chicory, biscuits, cheese, butter, margarine, soap, and ice cream. Aluminum foil was of great importance as a prerequisite for wound capacitors in the emerging future market of communications technology.
In 1915, Neher began to dye, emboss, and print aluminum foil in Emmishofen. This refinement had already exsited for several decades, first with tin foil and then also with aluminum foil sheets that were produced using the Gautschi process. Neher’s achievement is the construction of special machines with which the endless rolls that Neher produced could be refined.
Neher did not live to see the further development of his technology in his company, such as the laminating of aluminum foil on paper, cardboard, or fabrics. In 1917 Neher acquired the Plantberg Castle in Tägerwilen and was drafted into the Swiss Army at the beginning of the following year as a cavalry captain and commander of Dragoon Squadron 19. In November of the same year, Neher fell victim to the Spanish flu.
