Fred Chase Koch

Early life and education Fred C. Koch was born in Quanah, Texas, the son of Mattie B. (née Mixson) and Harry Koch, a Dutch immigrant. Harry had begun working as a printer's apprentice in Workum, Netherlands. He worked over a year at printers' shops, in The Hague and in Germany, before coming to the U.S. in 1888, where he bought the Tribune-Chief newspaper. Fred attended Rice Institute in Houston from 1917 to 1919

Business career Koch started his career with the Texas Company in Port Arthur, Texas, the firm became Winkler-Koch Engineering Company. He invented this technology five years after he graduated from MIT. A consortium of large companies quickly sued in response, filing 44 different lawsuits against Koch, embroiling him in litigation for years. Koch prevailed in all but one suit (which would later be overturned, due to the judge having been bribed).

In 1925, Koch had entered into a partnership with Lewis Winkler, a former employee of Universal Oil Products (which is now UOP LLC). Winkler developed a cracking apparatus for heavy crude oil with, ostensibly, no patented difference in comparison to his former employer's intellectual property; thus, in 1929, UOP sued Winkler-Koch for patent infringement. Also that year, nearly three years before the patent case went to trial, Winkler-Koch signed contracts to build petroleum distillation plants in the Soviet Union, which did not recognize intellectual property rights.

This extended litigation blocked Winkler-Koch from selling the technology in the U.S. for several years. Between 1929 and 1932 Winkler-Koch supported the Kremlin and "trained Bolshevik engineers to help Stalin's regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries" in the Soviet Union during its first five-year plan. According to Mayer, "Over time ... Stalin brutally purged several of Koch's Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration." During the 21st century, when the political donations of Koch's descendants became a matter of controversy, Koch's work in Europe also entered public scrutiny. In 1934, Koch had partnered with William Rhodes Davis to build the Hamburg Oil Refinery, the third-largest oil refinery serving the Third Reich, a project which was personally approved by Adolf Hitler; contemporary critics claim this showed a direct tie between fascism and the modern conservative movement, notwithstanding Koch's much greater involvement in the Soviet Union. In response, Koch President and COO David L. Robertson acknowledged that Winkler-Koch provided the cracking unit for the 1934 Hamburg refinery, but said that it was but one of many "iconic" American companies doing business in Germany at the time. Robertson provided archival documents showing that from 1928 to 1934, Koch's company helped build 39 cracking units for heavy oil refineries, including ones located in England and France. In 1966, he turned over day-to-day management of the company to his son, Charles Koch.

Personal life and death In 1932, Koch married Mary Clementine Robinson in Kansas City, Missouri. Mary was the daughter of a prominent Kansas City physician, Ernest Franklin Robinson, who helped to found the University of Kansas School of Medicine, and Mary Burnet Kip, and that he toured the countryside and received what he wrote was a "liberal education in Communist techniques and methods." According to his son, Charles, "Many of the Soviet engineers he worked with were longtime Bolsheviks who had helped bring on the revolution." It deeply bothered Fred Koch that so many of those so committed to the Communist cause were later purged.

In 1958, Koch became a founding member of the John Birch Society, a right-wing American political advocacy group that opposes communist infiltration and supports limited government. Koch held John Birch Society chapter meetings in the basement of his family's home in Wichita, Kansas.

Also in 1958, Koch helped amend the constitution of the state of Kansas to make Kansas a right-to-work state.