Johann Zacherl

Biography

Johann Zacherl was born in Munich (Germany) in 1814 and died in Vienna (Austria) in 1888. After finishing his studies, he left Munich to visit successively Vienna, St Petersburg and Odessa down to Tiflis in the Caucasus. There, he discovered that local villagers used a natural insecticide, Pyrethrum, against vermin and began to develop its trade with Austria in 1842. This powder received different names: Lowizachek in Armenia, Bug Flower, Powder of Persia and Persian insect powder.

After a longer stay in Tiflis, he established in Vienna his company in 1855, the Mottenfraß-Versicherungsunternehmung Johann Zacherl, in the 19th district and started to sell the famous insect repellent Zacherlin. With the help of his skillful son Johann Evangelist Zacherl, he developed the Pyrethrum product line around the insecticide powder.

Insecticide Zacherlin

Zacherl developed an all-natural effective moth protection product made from Pyrethrum blossoms. He agreed with the chiefs of the villages to collect the flowers and to ship them to Tiflis. Zacherl then ground the dried Pyrethrum blossoms down to powder, filled bags with the powder and inserted these for transport to Europe in sheep leathers. He kept importing dried flower heads of Chrysanthenum Cinerariifolum and Chrysanthenum Coccineum directly from Tifflis, Georgia until 1870, when he started its production locally. His insecticidal powder was called Zacherlin. Other products were developed such as a carpet-cleaning machine "distributing over the cleansed carpet the insecticide to guard it against the attack of moth" in 1882, a Pyrethrum Soap and a tincture for destroying insects.

According to Hiscox, the insecticide was obtained as follows:

The powder is obtained by brushing the dried flowers of the pellitory (pyrethrum). The leaves, too, are often used. (...) The active principle is not a volatile oil, as stated by some writers, but a rosin, which can be dissolved out from the dry flowers by means of ether. The leaves also contain this rosin but in. smaller proportions than the flowers. Tincture of pyrethrum is made by infusing the dried flowers in five times their weight of rectified spirit of wine. Diluted with water it is used as a lotion. (...) The dust resulting from the use of insect powder sometimes proves irritating to the mucous membranes of the one applying the powder. This is best avoided by the use of a spray atomizer.

From the beginning, Zacherl adopted as successful branding strategy to associate in customers' minds the Zacherlin with a cossak with high cap and an atomizer in the hand.

According to Brigitte Hamann, Dr Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna and known for his public antisemitic statements, "once joked in a public meeting at Zacherlin squirts (Zacherlinspritzen in German) that one would have to invent against the Jews (Zacherlin was considered a powerful insect extermination mean)". Forty years later, another insecticide, the Zyklon B, was used against civilians (including many Jews) in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Majdanek during the Holocaust.

Architecture

The insecticide factory in Döbling was designed by the architect Hugo von Wiedenfeld and constructed by Karl Mayreder in 1888–1892. Explicitly oriental in style, the polychromed brick building with pointed arches, two minarets and a dome, place this building among the brightest industrial buildings of Vienna.

After the collapse of the Zacherl company, the building has been used as carpets, furs and textiles warehouse. Today, the Zacherl factory is used for art exhibitions and symposiums, in close link with the contemporary art exhibitions Position:Gegenwart held in the Jesuit's Church of Vienna.

His son Johann Evangelist Zacherl commissioned Jože Plečnik the office building Zacherlhaus in Vienna's Innere Stadt built in 1903–1905. The building includes a row of atlantes along the cornice line by sculptor Franz Metzner.