Emil Rathenau was a German entrepreneur who built the company that became Germany's dominant electrical manufacturer and helped introduce Edison's electric lighting system to Europe. After seeing exhibits at the 1881 International Exposition of Electricity in Paris, he acquired the German rights to Thomas Edison's electric lighting patents and in 1883 founded the German Edison Company for Applied Electricity, renamed Allgemeine Elektricitats-Gesellschaft, AEG, in 1887; by 1907 AEG had grown into one of the largest companies in the world. In 1884 Rathenau negotiated an agreement with the city of Berlin to build and operate its electricity supply, one of the first public-private partnerships of its kind in Germany, a model that spread to other German cities as AEG built power stations and laid cable networks nationwide.
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