This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Friedrich Krupp founded a small, struggling cast steel works in Essen in 1811 that nearly failed within his own lifetime; it was his son Alfred, who took over the firm at fourteen after his father's death and ran it for six decades, who built Krupp into an industrial empire, earning the nickname Kanonenkonig, the Cannon King, for the artillery that became the firm's signature product. Alfred Krupp pioneered the Bessemer-era mass production of cast steel in Germany and relentlessly pursued technical innovation, from seamless railway wheel tires to ever larger and more powerful guns, selling artillery to governments across Europe and beyond, including, at various points, more than one side of the same conflict. Encyclopaedia Britannica's account of the family and firm describes a business that fused industrial paternalism, extensive worker housing, health insurance and pensions decades before German state welfare programs required it, with an increasingly close relationship to the German state, particularly under Alfred's son and heirs, as Krupp steel and Krupp guns became central to German military power through unification, the World Wars and the arms buildups between them. What began as one family's small workshop became, within three generations, one of the largest industrial concerns in Europe and a name synonymous, for better and for worse, with German heavy industry itself.