Johan Edvard Lundström (1815–1888) was a

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

industrialist and inventor who pioneered the commercial production of safety

match A match is a tool for starting a fire. Typically, matches are made of small wooden sticks or stiff paper. One end is coated with a material that can be ignited by friction generated by striking the match against a suitable surface. Wooden matc ...

es.

Biography

Lundström was born in 1815 in the town of

Jönköping Jönköping (, ) is a city in southern Sweden with 112,766 inhabitants (2022). Jönköping is situated on the southern shore of Sweden's second largest lake, Vättern, in the province of Småland. The city is the seat of Jönköping Municipa ...

, Sweden. In 1845 Lundström started to experiment with safety matches in a small workshop he had rented. The safety match had been invented by Gustaf Erik Pasch (1788–1862) in 1844, but was difficult to produce commercially. In 1846 his younger brother Carl Frans Lundström (1823–1917) joined his small workshop. In 1847 they were ready to set up a production plant and bought an estate on the coast of Lake

Vättern Vättern ( , ) is the second largest lake by surface area in Sweden, after Vänern, and the sixth largest lake in Europe. It is a long, finger-shaped body of fresh water in south central Sweden, to the southeast of Vänern, pointing at the tip ...

where they built a large match factory. Today, their original factory is a museum. The Lundström safety match got an award at the “World Exhibition” in Paris 1855. Alexander Lagerman (1836–1904), a Swedish engineer who was employed by the Lundström brothers, invented the first fully automatic match machine. The safety match combined with the advanced machines that the company developed themselves, soon made the company in Jönköping the largest match company in Scandinavia and one of the world's largest match production companies. Lundström left the match business in 1863. It was later renamed Jönköping, then in 1903 merged with other match companies to become Jönköpings Tändsticksfabriks AB, finally sold to

Ivar Kreuger Ivar Kreuger (; 2 March 1880 – 12 March 1932) was a Swedish civil engineer, financier, entrepreneur and industrialist. In 1908, he co-founded the construction company Kreuger & Toll Byggnads AB, which specialized in new building techniques. B ...

in 1917. Kreuger incorporated the business into the company Svenska Tändsticks AB, today known as Swedish Match. Lundström worked at his

cellulose Cellulose is an organic compound with the formula , a polysaccharide consisting of a linear chain of several hundred to many thousands of β(1→4) linked D-glucose units. Cellulose is an important structural component of the primary cell w ...

factory, Munksjö Cellulose, in Jönköping that he had founded in 1862 together with

Lars Johan Hierta Lars Johan Hierta (; 22 January 1801 – 20 November 1872) was a Swedish newspaper publisher, social critic, businessman and politician. He is best known as the founder of the newspaper '' Aftonbladet'' in 1830. Hierta was a leading agitator for ...

. In 1869 he left the Munksjö factory and founded Katrinefors cellulose industry in

Mariestad Mariestad () is a locality and the seat of Mariestad Municipality, Västra Götaland County, Sweden. It had 16,611 inhabitants in 2019. Until 1997 it was the capital of the former Skaraborg County and an episcopal see in the Church of Sweden be ...

, but left that business in 1875. He then worked as a government inspector in the match industry between 1875–77 in Sweden and was to a great extent involved in the work to prevent and forbid the use of the dangerous white

phosphorus Phosphorus is a chemical element with the symbol P and atomic number 15. Elemental phosphorus exists in two major forms, white phosphorus and red phosphorus, but because it is highly reactive, phosphorus is never found as a free element on Ear ...

. He died in 1888 at the age of 73, having never married.

Sources

sv: Nordisk familjebok, 1910. en: Nordic encyklopedia, 1910).

External links

, Sweden.] {{DEFAULTSORT:Lundstrom, John Edvard 1815 births 1888 deaths 19th-century Swedish engineers People from Jönköping 19th-century Swedish businesspeople