User:Afreebing

Carl Frans Lundström == Headline text ==

Johan Edvard and his younger brother Carl Frans Lundström (1823-1917) started a large scale match industry in Jönköping around 1847, but the improved safety match was not introduced until around 1850-55. Receiving a patent for the safety match, and receiving financing the brothers were able to build several matchbox factories in the Jönköping area. In 1858 their company produced around 12 million match boxes, exporting all over the world. The two brothers became very wealthy and large landowners.

Carl Frans Lundström married (???), and had only one daughter, Calla Lundström. She became the sole heir to both brothers' fortune, inheriting 5 or 6 estates and all the earnings from the match manufacturing.

Calla Lundström married two times. First, at a young age, she married Doctor Fries, but he died of illness in the first few years of marriage. Calla was enormously in love with Fries, being quite devastated when he died. Family conversations claims she had four children with Dr. Fries.

In her mid-twenties, Calla met another man, Carl Curman, whom she married (great, great, great grandparents of Camille Arnell, San Antonio, Texas). Carl Curman was also a pioneer of his time. He held two academic degrees, a professorship of Anthropology and another in Anatomy. He taught Anatomy to Swedish students at the University of Stockholm in the early 1900's. He was also a well-known architect, who advocated health, exercise, and a 'new idea' of bathing! In the early 1900's, none of the homes or buildings had baths.

In the early 1900's, Carl Curman designed and opened the first public bath houses and spas in Stockholm and Lysekil, in southern Sweden's west coast. The bath houses had spas and saunas, and massages by old ladies dressed in long dresses and white bonnets. Birch twigs were used for "pisking" after the saunas, to circulate the blood. At that time, early 1900's, the bathhouses were built primarily for the rich to come and "get good health," but on Thursdays, the poor could come and have a bath for one or two pennies (Swedish ore).

At first, the Swedish people did not like this new idea of taking baths because they thought that removing the dirt "that protected them from the Evil Spirits" was a dangerous occurrence. Carl Curman had to make several attempts and several architectural designs to gain Swedish approval from the King of Sweden to build the first public bathhouse in Stockholm. Carl created a bathhouse that emphasized the Roman style bathhouses and Gothic design, the Swedish king approved it. Sweden's first bathhouse was called Sture Badet, where there is a big mushroom in downtown Stockholm. Also, there's a statue of Professor Carl Curman. Today, the Sture Badet is a modern, private health spa with a large, beautiful Roman-style pool in the middle.