Jakub Kryštof Rad

Who was Jakub Kryštof Rad?

Jacob Christoph Rad, in Czech Jakub Kryštof Rad, was a Swiss-born Czech entrepreneur who invented the sugar cubes in 1843 as a director of a sugar factory in Dačice in Moravia.

The idea to produce sugar cube came from his wife, who got injured when she was cutting sugar loaf into smaller parts. She asked her husband to do something about it and she got the sugar cubes during the same year.

In 1840, Jacob Christoph Rad became involved with the management of the sugar factory in the Moravian province of Datschitz, a place that belonged to the Habsburg monarchy at the time. He then began working on a machine for cane sugar refining and transforming sugar into cube form. On January 23, 1843 he was granted a five-year patent for the sugar cube press he invented, so that he could commercially exploit his invention.

As a father of 15 children, he died in 1871 in Vienna.