ERNST

See also:

• ERNST ENGEL (1821-1896)
• ENGEL, JOHANN JAKOB (1741-1802)

ENGEL (1821-1896)  , German political economist and statistician, was born in Dresden on the 21st of March 1821 . He studied at the famous mining academy of Freiberg, in Saxony, and on completing his curriculum travelled in Germany and France . Immediately after the revolution of 1848 he was attached to the royal commission in Saxony appointed to deter-mine the relations between trade and labour . In 185o he was directed by the government to assist in the organization of the German Industrial Exhibition of Leipzig (the first of its kind) . The success which crowned his efforts was so great that in 1854 he was induced to enter the government service, as chief of the newly instituted statistical department . He retired, however, from the office in 1858 . He founded at Dresden the first Mortgage Insurance Society (Hypotheken-Versicherungsgesellschaft), and as a result of the success of his work was summoned in 186o to Berlin as director of the statistical department, in succession to Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Dieterici (1790-1859) . In his new office he made himself a name of world-wide reputation . Raised to the rank of Geheimer Regierungsrat, he retired in 1882 and lived henceforward in Radebeul near Dresden, where he died on the 8th of December 1896 . Engel was a voluminous writer on the subjects with which his name is connected, but his statistical papers are mostly published in the periodicals which he himself established, viz . Preuss . Statistik (in 1861); Zeitschrift des Statistischen Bureaus, and Zeitschrift des Statistichen Bureaus des Konigreichs Sachsen .