Johann Joachim Becher, 1625-1685.

German alchemist/chemist, physician and inventor, best known for the development of the "phlogiston" theory of combustion.  Included here for his contributions to early German Cameralism.

Son of a Lutheran minister in Speyer, J.J. Becher was orphaned early and struggled to support his remaining family in the midst of the hardships of the Thirty Years' War. 

A voracious auto-dictat with wide-interests, J.J. Becher began publishing early and often. His publications earned him the counsel of powerful men and was briefly a professor of medicine at Mainz.  Despite the ridicule that often greeted his schemes and ideas that ranged from the bizarre (e.g. a perpetual motion machine, a 10,000 word "universal language", extracting gold from sand, phlogiston, etc.) to the visionary (e.g. a Rhine-Danube canal, a Guyanese colony, factory schemes and trading companies), Becher continued his frantic work pace.  His controversial ideas and frequently poor character traits - a short temper and penchant for embezzlement - often strained his connections, but he was perhaps one of the most brilliant of the early Cameralists.

Early on, Becher advised the Elector Palatine on factory schemes and then the Elector of Bavaria on administration.  His call for strict state controls on the flow of goods and services, the dismantling of the guilds and and establishment of chartered trading companies earned him the enmity of the merchant communities of Munich, and he was run out of the land as a result.  Becher subsequently made his way to Mainz, where he took up a position teaching medicine and as the personal physician of the Archbishop.  

But his ideas had gained interest elsewhere.  In 1666, Becher was invited to the court of Emperor Leopold I in Vienna, eager to resume reconstruction of the war-battered Hapsburg states. Envisioning that commerce and cities were going to drive the new Hapsburg state, Becher took up the position of Comercienrath and helped organize the central Kommerzkollegium (Commerce Commission).  Eager to apply the lessons of Anglo-Dutch Mercantilism, Becher was instrumental in the foundation of the Orientalische Handelskompanie (Oriental Trading Company) in 1667, which began the importation of the first coffee beans to Vienna from Constantinople. Becher also helped establish the first private silk manufactory in Austria at Walpersdorf in 1666 (failed 1682).

 It was around this time that Becher produced his principle Cameralistic works, the Regeln (1667) and the, especially, the Politischer Discurs (1668). Here Becher emphasized the importance of artisans and manufacturing, underlined the importance of consumption in sustaining an economy and the evil of foreign imports.  He also articulated Mercantilist ideas on charter trading companies that can avoid the errors of  'monopolium' and polypolium' (unrestricted competition).

Departing from Vienna soon after, Becher served as a physician to the Elector of Bavaria. In 1669, he interested the Count of Hanau in a scheme for a proposed colony Guinea (for which he secured hereditary title and proposed a High German Trading Company).

In 1670, he returned to Vienna, in the position of chemist and advisor to the Emperor Leopold I and to oversee the progress of his silk company.  In 1672, Becher set up a wool factory in Linz, in 1676 he founded the Manufacturhaus, a gigantic textile workhouse for vagabonds in Tabor (Bohemia), and founded the Kunst- und Werkhaus, a model workshop in Vienna, where foreign masters would be brought in to teach Austrian artisans. He eventually wore out his welcome in the Viennese court . Around 1678, made his way to Holland (c.1678), to promote a new silk manufacturing process and strange enterprise for creating gold from sea sand.  But, pursued by political enemies, in 1680, Becher abruptly sailed across to England, and then made his way up to Scotland to study mines.  He died in London in 1682.

Brecher's Oriental Trading Company and his Kunst- und Werkhaus were folded in 1683, with resumption of war and the Ottoman siege of Vienna.  Wilhelm von Schröder succeeded Becher as director of the Tabor Manufacturhaus.  J.J. Becher was the brother-in-law of Philipp von Hornick.

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