Felix Meyer (1875-1950) was a German industrialist of Jewish descent. Early years Felix Meyer came from a liberal Jewish family with roots traceable to sixteenth-century Westphalia. The brothers Elias and Moses (later Moritz) Meyer established themselves at Aachen, founding a successful textile factory. Moritz Meyer's son, Eduard, joined the firm and married Esther Pauline Salomon in 1874, and a daughter, Else, was born the same year, followed by five other children, of whom Felix, born in 1875, was the eldest, the others being Georg, Dora, Meta, and Erna. Eduard Meyer's family lived well, in a sixteen-room house, with servants, a large garden, and stables. While they were not religiously fervent, they did not convert to Christianity. In later reminiscences, Felix spoke of a happy, even boisterous, childhood, though the upbringing for the boys in the family was severe, involving regular corporal punishment, though he proved to be an indulgent father. In particular, he left his daughters free to choose their husbands. A rebel at school, he followed his father to the extent of undertaking several technical apprenticeships as a dyer, spinner, and weaver. He also took jobs in several different companies in Germany, but also in England, before joining his father's then-flagging business at the age of 22. New Energies The once flourishing firm had not found in Felix's father an entrepreneurial talent to equal the firm's founder, and as Felix put it, ‘...the money disappeared rapidly since nobody knew how to earn it, but only how to spend it’. Felix Meyer rose to the occasion with innovation. For one thing, he invented a twin loom, but the sale of the patent was insufficient to relaunch the factory's fortunes and in 1905 he convinced his father to sell the mill, taking on the remaining debts himself. In 1906, Felix married Marguerite Darmstaedter, a Belgian national, and they set up a home in the Kurs Brunnenstrasse, in Aachen. Though the dwelling was modest, it was near the Cologne-Liège railway and there was a shed that Felix used for developing his inventions, which were many and varied, including forays into mechanics, chemical processes, and even medical appliances. While the definitive number of patents registered under various names is uncertain, it probably reached several hundred, including new designs of a loom, and processes for manufacturing multi-colored yarns or fabrics. Particularly well-known is the instrument known as the Rotameter, a device that measures the