When nineteen years of age he went to Paris in order to increase his stock of knowledge. There, in that capital of the World a greater range of vision was opened to him and he beheld the operation of that restless spirit of enterprise, which so mightily stirs the heart of the country. For the first time the youth was brought face to face with the enormous business carried on both with France and foreign lands and of which Paris is the centre. He surveyed the fruits of a free, active industry, the great highroads, upon which commerce flows from the mother country to distant lands, the realisation of a colossal traffic, which allows no article to escape its observation and flows in an ever moving wave between purchasers and consumers. Then his thoughts were carried back to his distant native land with its industry so cramped and fettered as to be altogether estranged from the great markets of the world and the possibility flashed across his mind, that matters might be rendered very different at home and native industry not only reconquer its honour and the renown of its pristine good name, but that it might also be led forth from its narrow prison and enabled to compete with the vigour and intelligence of the markets of the world and that it would thus ensure obtaining an honourable position. At that time industrial life was in full activity at Paris, scarcely six years having elapsed since the revolution of July and Louis Philippe being firmly established on the constitutional citizen-throne. Thus great hopes filled the breast of the young man and impelled him to follow up the ideas and plans of life he had adopted with all his energy. After a sojourn of three years in Paris there fell upon him suddenly and unexpectedly, on the midst of his labours, the news of the death of his father and after first performing a previously contemplated journey to London, in order to enrich his store of knowledge and experience, he returned to his native land in August 1839. Now was the time to carry out and realise all the ideas he had imbibed. The condition of his father’s manufactory was, as before stated, extremely unsatisfactory. Scarcely twenty workmen were employed and the annual business done amounted only to about 12000 florins. If that glorious future, which the young man had assigned to the manufactory in his imagination at Paris was to become a fact, it would involve carrying on a conflict with all the old perverted notions, to break with the cumbersome progress of former times and upon the ruins of the Nürnberg trade, which beheld itself excluded from the world’s market, to lay the foundations of a new commerce, which alone would be able to reconquer for the venerable commercial city of Nürnberg her ancient renown. He was the man, who brought, in the first place certainly only the pencil manufacture, but therewith also native industry in general, into direct contact with the ideas of foreign countries.