RHEINISCH-WESTFALISCHE ELEKTRIZITATS WERK A.G., THE, is the largest electricity supply con cern in Germany. It supplies with its combined undertakings 2.1 milliards of kilowatt hours yearly in its net-work in 115 towns and districts, distributes over 42,000 sq. kilometres in round figures, which are supplied wholly or partly with current. The power works connected by means of high tension lines produce, in round figures, 540,000 kw. or 750,000 h.p. The large power works, Goldenberg-Werk, lying in the Cologne peat coal district, the larg est steam-power works in Germany, produce about 290,000 kw. Arrangements have been made to increase this to 390,000 kw.; 2,040 km. high tension lines are working and executed, to which belong 41 high tension stations. Among these there is the first installation in Europe for 220,000 volts, connecting the power works of north-western Germany and the Alps, covering about Soo km. at the utmost. The line is already working from the Rhine up to Stuttgart. The further distribution is obtained by means of medium-tension and lower-tension nets on a total length of 23,000 km. in round figures. This corresponds to about half the circumference of the equator.
The whole territory including the 15 daughter companies is marked off by contracts with the Government electro works and the Prussian State as. actual spheres of interest as compared with the State undertakings from the sea coast on the Weser extending up to Frankfort on Main and thereby recognized as a natural electric exploitation district. (E. HK.)
RHENANUS, BEATUS German humanist, was born in 1485 at Schlettstadt in Alsace, where his father, a native of Rheinau (hence the surname Rhenanus), was a butcher. He was educated at the famous Latin school of Schlettstadt, and afterwards (1503) went to Paris. In 1511 he removed to Basel, where he became intimate with Erasmus, and took an active share in the publishing enterprises of Joannes Froben (q.v.). In 1526 he returned to Schlettstadt, and devoted himself to a life of learned leisure, enlivened with epistolary and personal inter course with Erasmus (the printing of whose more important works he personally superintended) and many other scholars of his time. He died at Strassburg on July 20, His earliest publication was a biography of Geiler of Kaisers berg (151o). Of his subsequent works the principal are Rerum Germanicarum Libri III. (1531), and editions of V elleius Pater culus (ed. princeps, from a MS. discovered by himself, 1522) ; Tacitus (1519, exclusive of the Histories) ; Livius (1535); and Erasmus (with a life, 9 vols. fol., 154o-41).
See A. Horawitz, Beatus Rhenanus (1872), and by the same, Des Beatus Rhenanus literarische Tiitigkeit (2 vols., 1872) ; also the notice by R. Hartfelder in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.