On 7 July 1880, Konrad Duden, the head of a Gymnasium in Hersfeld, published his complete spelling dictionary of the German language in Leipzig. In June 1901, a conference in Berlin agreed on uniform spelling rules, and in 1902 the German Bundesrat, Austria and Switzerland put them into effect. It gave written German uniform rules across the three countries. In November 1955, the education ministers of the West German states declared the Duden binding in allen orthografischen Zweifelsfällen, in all doubtful cases of spelling. A private publisher’s dictionary had become the official order of the language. It stayed that way for four decades, until the reform of 1996 broke what Germans called the Duden monopoly.