Philips was founded by the family that kept Karl Marx afloat.
Karl Marx’s aunt married Lion Philips, a tobacco merchant in Zaltbommel, whose family gave Marx money and a room to work on Das Kapital. “I squeezed £160 out of my uncle,” Marx told Engels in 1861. Thirty years later Lion’s son Frederik, Marx’s first cousin, put up the capital for his own son Gerard’s light-bulb factory in Eindhoven.
Philips on Brandseum