Anker Steinbaukästen, Friedrich A. Richter

Anker Stones are some sort of brick, first invented by Jan Daniel Georgens in 1863. Due to the many different brick shapes, many different buildings could be created. Lateron Friedrich A. Richter bought the patents and started manufacturing of even more boxes & brick shapes.

History

Quoted from clubvanankervrienden.nl:

"The birth of miniature building bricks, later called 'Ankerstones', took place in 1863 when the pedagogue Jan Daniel Georgens (1823 - 1886), a pupil of Friedrich Fröbel, marketed brick-building boxes developed by him. The stones were cast from a kind of cement. Sample books appeared with stone shapes such as the cube and an elongated stone. 10 years later, these were already extended to (Romanesque) arches, roof stones and spires."

"In 1878, Gustav and Otto Lilienthal developed a greatly improved recipe. The stones were now made from a mixture of silver sand, chalk and raw linseed oil and then pressed together in a mould of the right shape. The stones are then 'baked' for several hours at a temperature of 150 - 200 ºC, causing the linseed oil to harden by polymerisation. With the colours sandstone yellow, brick red and slate grey, the look and feel of real natural or brick is achieved."

"Forced by poor sales, Gustav Lilienthal sold the manufacturing tools of the Georgens building sets including the patents in 1882 to shrewd businessman Friedrich A. Richter, who had already built up an empire in Rudolstadt (Thuringia) with the production of medicine. - Later, Lilienthal was nevertheless granted permission by Richter to continue brick sales on a limited scale -. The name 'Anker' was introduced by Richter. The system of 'Anker' construction boxes grew into an intricate set of some 400 boxes of different series and was very popular around 1900, despite its high price."

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There are many different sources for more information:

• ankerstein.center → "AnkerPlan2", software to build virtual with Anker Stones and many info.
• clubvanankervrienden.nl → The page of the CVA (Club van Ankervrienden)

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Patented

One of the first patents about this building block:

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Stone types

I'm still trying to understand, which stone series were sold (and by whom).

An old Anker-series: NF (~1900), is still sold today. A basic brick blok is 25x25x25 [mm].

Example building

Library information

Well, I did create a small library, specific for my No. 04 box. So now we can play both in real & virtual.

But I've to say, that building with AnkerPlan2 is more easy, then 'this' LeoCAD version.

Building in LeoCAD

It's not fun playing with AnkerStones in LeoCAD. Especially the flat stones need to be re-orientated a lot, which is not extremely handy to do.

Building with AnkerPlan2

I would recommend using the awesome AnkerPlan2. This software is specialist using many many different shapes of AnkerStones. There are also many different hany options, like adding your own boxes, so you could easily see, which design could be build etc.

An example of buildings, which could be downloaded and opened in AnkerPlan2. Also building plans could be created and lists of needed parts.

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