The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  THE MOST SUCCESSFUL DRUG THE WORLD HAS KNOWN

  Conceptually, the drug was the work of three men—Heinrich Dreser, Arthur Eichengrün, and Felix Hoffmann, though it was Hoffmann who carried out the crucial experiments.

  In the course of his literature searches, as he later told the story, Hoffmann came across several references to the synthesis of acetylsalicylic acid, or ASA, which, it was claimed, reduced the unpleasant gastric side effects of salicylic acid, the traditional remedy for rheumatic fever and arthritis. Hoffmann then began to repeat some of these experiments, varying the substances. Thus it was that, according to a note in his laboratory journal, on August 10, 1897, he stumbled on a way to make ASA that removed virtually all its gastric side effects.32 As was now traditional, the pharmacology department tested the substance and Eichengrün found it effective. But Dreser objected, insisting that salicylic acid “enfeebles the heart” and ASA was rejected.

  Matters were complicated by the fact that, in the same fortnight in which he discovered ASA, Hoffmann discovered another substance that Dreser believed had much greater potential: heroin. Diacetylmorphine, the full chemical name of heroin, was not in itself new. It was discovered in 1874 by the Englishman C. R. Alder Wright, who had been investigating opium derivatives at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. Dreser had come across Alder Wright’s written report in the literature and, since morphine had traditionally been used as a painkiller and in the treatment of respiratory diseases like tuberculosis, and because another opium derivative, codeine, was also used as cough treatment, he charged Hoffmann with making more experiments. “Two weeks after he had formulated ASA, Hoffmann successfully synthesised diacetylmorphine, in the process earning the curious distinction of ‘discovering’ in the same fortnight one of the most useful substances known to medicine and one of the most deadly.”33

  Dreser began testing the new substance on everything from frogs to rabbits and then on himself and other human volunteers. These volunteers found that the drug made them feel so “heroic” that the substance’s brand name “suggested itself.” Following further clinical trials, Dreser told the Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians in 1898 that it was “ten times more effective as a cough remedy than codeine but with only one tenth of its toxic effects.” He added, for good measure, that it was “a completely non-habit-forming and safe family drug [and] would solve the problem of morphine addiction…”34 Dreser even had plans to promote the drug as a remedy for baby colic and influenza.

  Meanwhile Eichengrün went behind Dreser’s back. First, he tried ASA on himself. Discovering that it had no apparent effect on his heart, he sent off batches of the drug to Bayer’s representative in Berlin, who had good contacts with the general practitioners there, and arranged discreet trials. Within weeks, the doctors were returning “glowing assessments,” far better than anyone at Bayer dared hope: ASA had few unpleasant side effects, and on top of that it was discovered to be an analgesic. The drug was put into production.35

  Which meant there was the need for a name. Because salicylic acid could be derived from the meadowsweet plant, an abbreviation of the plant’s Latin genus, Spiraea, was suggested. Someone else suggested that the letter “a” should be added at the front, to acknowledge acetylation. Many drugs at the time ended with “in,” simply because it was easy to say. Which is how “aspirin” came to be.36

  THE RISE OF THE MICROSCOPE

  The rise of the laboratory would not have been possible without a parallel rise in that most useful of laboratory instruments—the microscope. Developments in optics took place in the nineteenth century in France, Holland, Britain, and the United States—but three of the leading figures were German: Carl Zeiss, Ernst Abbe, and Ernst Leitz.

  Carl Friedrich Zeiss was born in 1816 in Weimar and studied mathematics, physics, optics, and mineralogy at the University of Jena before going on to work under Professor Matthias Schleiden—the codiscoverer of the importance of the cell—at the Physiological Institute there. Zeiss opened his own shop in 1846 and did well, expanding steadily so that, in the first twenty years, the company produced 1,000 instruments. In the same year, recognizing that he needed to be more scientifically systematic if his business were to prosper, Zeiss engaged Ernst Abbe (1840–1905), at the time a young lecturer in physics and mathematics at Jena. The two men formed a partnership in which Abbe became director of research at the Zeiss Optical Works. It was Abbe who worked out the mathematical/ physical basis of what became computational optics, which would lead to many new devices. The first of these, introduced in 1869, was an illumination device, providing lighting for the objects under examination. Three years later, in 1872, Abbe (who was a great social reformer in the workplace) formulated his wave theory of microscopic imaging, the “Abbe Sine Condition.” This made possible a whole range of microscopic objectives all based on mathematical theory.37

  Zeiss and Abbe were supplemented by Otto Schott (1851–1935). Brought up in Westphalia, Schott is now regarded as the father of modern glass science. His understanding of glass chemistry led to the introduction of more than one hundred new types of glass. The most important made possible the first “Apochromat” lens, in 1886. Apochromatic lenses have better color correction than achromatic lenses, making them particularly useful in astronomy.

  Zeiss also led the way in the production of binocular telescopes and prism binoculars, each of which gave improved depth perception.38 The invention of the motor car (see Chapter 19) was to open up a new area, with the need for ever more elaborate headlights.

  Just as famous was the work developed by Ernst Leitz. Born in the Black Forest in 1843, Leitz was six when the company that would eventually bear his name was founded by Carl Kellner, a twenty-three-year-old physicist, in Wetzlar. Kellner began making optics for microscopes and telescopes, in particular an orthoscopic eyepiece he himself invented (an orthoscopic eyepiece corrects for distortion and gives a very flat image). Rudolf Virchow and Justus von Liebig (see Chapter 20) were customers of Kellner’s.

  After Kellner died at the age of twenty-nine, a colleague, Charles Behltle, took over the company, and it was Behltle who recruited Leitz as a partner ten years later. From 1869 on, when Behltle died, Leitz became the sole proprietor of the company, which by then had developed the microscope side of the business much more than the telescope side. By 1889 it too was expanding into binoculars and also into still and cine projectors. Just before the First World War two men—Oscar Barnack and Max Berek—joined the company and moved it more in the direction of cameras. It was Berek who computed the dimensions of the first camera lens to bear the name of the company that was to become so famous in the twentieth century—Leica.39

  The microscope, more than anything else, is the symbol of the laboratory. Its rise also symbolized a change that took place in science as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. In the middle of the nineteenth century, chemistry and engineering had led the way—in the creation of electrical machines, dyes, and pharmaceuticals. These scientific industries continued to advance, but the microscope also enabled progress to be achieved in the biological sciences. In particular, it made practical the investigation of those microorganisms that caused disease.40

  19.

  Masters of Metal: Krupp, Benz, Diesel, Rathenau

  Alfred Krupp, the “cannon king,” was born in 1812. The firm that bore his name was only a year older than he. His father, Friedrich, was a not altogether successful businessman—when he died (Alfred was fourteen), the firm was close to bankruptcy, and Alfred had to be removed from school on financial grounds. He complained all his life that he got his education “at the anvil.”1 The son did not take after the father, however. Friedrich was a romantic and weak man, whereas Alfred was resolute, not at all sentimental. Those qualities were needed—it took two decades, half a working lifetime, for him to turn the firm around.2

  Even then it was achieved partly by accident. After Napoleon’s defeat, Prussia was awarded large parts of the Rhineland to c
ompensate for the loss of her Polish territories. At the time, the agricultural land to the east was much more valuable, but with the growth of industry in the nineteenth century, and the burgeoning needed for coal, the situation was reversed. This reversal caused Prussia to look west and forced her into a closer association with the states separating her from France, to protect her interests. These economic factors had political consequences, aiding the eventual formation of the Reich itself and these events in turn affected Krupp. The ever-closer economic ties among the various German states, reflected in the customs union or Zollverein of 1834, made interstate travel, and interstate business, much easier.3

  Krupp took advantage of these changed circumstances, traveling to the principal centers of Germany, securing orders for a variety of metal products, from coin dyes to cutlery. But the events of 1848 also played into his hands. He ordered his workers to have nothing to do with the revolutions across the country, and when these revolutions eventually collapsed, Prussia’s position within Germany was strengthened, since for the most part it was Prussian soldiers whom the German princes had called on to put down the disorders. “By and large the story of how Prussia came to swallow Germany between 1848 and 1871 is also the story of how Alfred Krupp came to dominate German industry.”4

  The firm moved into armaments in 1843, albeit on a modest scale. His brother Hermann had alerted Alfred to the fact that iron musket barrels—then the staple of nineteenth-century armies—were less than satisfactory, and he therefore began to manufacture “the first mild-steel musket-barrel ever produced.” This was the beginning of Germany’s steel age, but even so Krupp had to overcome the prejudices of the generals who had grown accustomed to bronze or iron guns.5 It was not until 1859 that he at last received a viable order—for 312 cannon—from the Prussian government.

  Although Krupp is known to history for his guns, Peter Batty says that his real genius was probably his understanding of railways. Railways had started in Germany in 1835, in Bavaria, and by 1850 there were already 6,000 miles of track. That figure was to snowball ten times within the next half century, and Krupp was one of the first to see the opportunities for steel.6 He secured his first railway contract, for 500 steel springs and axles, in 1849. This sparked a series of experiments which eventually matured as the weldless steel railway tire, a brilliant innovation that almost certainly made Krupp more money than all his guns put together. An inherent weakness in the early railway tire was the point at which the outer wheel, which sat on the rail, was welded to the rim, which sank down below the rail on the inside to keep the locomotive and the carriages on the tracks. As trains got faster and heavier, this welding weakness became ever-more important. To overcome this, Krupp simply adapted the technique the firm had been using in their fork and spoon machines—namely rolling seamless steel tires on to the wheel rims while they were still hot. Instead of two pieces welded together, wheels were now one piece of metal with no join. Alfred had the part of the factory where the tires were assembled built so far from everywhere else that it was known to his employees as “Siberia.” The weldless wheel propelled Krupp to the front rank of industrialists.

  CHEAP STEEL AND THE FIRST ARMS RACE

  In the field of guns, Krupp began to realize that his future lay more with the military—the generals—than it did with the politicians.7 Peter Batty observes that “few bureaucrats in Berlin could stand Alfred—his high-handedness and overbearing manner had made him intensely disliked among his fellow industrialists too.” Krupp began to court the officers surrounding the crown prince and “Thus began the spinning of that web of close threads between Essen and Berlin that characterised the Krupp saga.” It paid off. In October 1861, Wilhelm, then the prince regent, visited the Krupp works to see for himself “Fritz, the biggest hammer in the world.” A few months later, on becoming king of Prussia, Wilhelm made Alfred a privy councillor, and shortly afterward awarded him the Order of the Red Eagle with Oak Leaves, an honor usually reserved for victorious Prussian generals. All this coincided with the growth of the Krupp gun business; Alfred was now selling cannon “by the score” to Belgium, Holland, Spain, Egypt, Turkey, Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina, Austria, Russia, even Britain. The first great arms race was beginning and in the process the German press dubbed Krupp “the cannon king,” a title he relished more than any other. It was an era symbolized by Bismarck’s observation in 1862, that “The solution of the great problems of these days is not to be found in speeches and revolutions—but in blood and iron.”8

  Otto von Bismarck, Prussia’s prime minister from 1862 on and Germany’s chancellor until 1890, was three years younger than Krupp and in many ways the “Iron Chancellor” and the “Cannon King” were very similar. Both were tyrannical, misanthropic, and incapable of intimacy, and both sought refuge in things—Bismarck in dogs and trees, Alfred in horses and guns. It was once said of Bismarck: “I have never known a man who experienced so little joy,” and it could equally have been said of Alfred. “No two Prussians have been so responsible for the image, in the Anglo-Saxon mind at least, of the Prussian as someone aggressive, belligerent and destructive.”9

  Bismarck, we should never forget, was a Junker—that class of “militaristic, predatory land-owners” who had won their great estates in the east by force and who, therefore, believed in force. To preserve this class, which was the chancellor’s lasting aim, he had to preserve Prussia, and that meant diminishing both Austria and France, destroying German liberalism, and replacing a primarily cultural German nationalism with a Prussian political nationalism. In doing these things, he came to be the “best hated man in Europe,” with Krupp a close second.10

  Bismarck first visited Essen in October 1864, en route from Paris to Berlin. Discovering that he and Krupp shared a passion for horses and big trees, he took Krupp into his confidence and during their rambles apparently disclosed some of his plans for Prussia. Bismarck well understood how Krupp’s guns could play a part in these plans and Krupp sensed big profits, not least from the chancellor’s intention to expand the navy.

  The first major battle in which Krupp guns took part (on both sides, it should be said), was at Königgrätz on July 3, 1866, between Prussia and Austria. Though less than perfect, another 700 Krupp guns were ordered inside four months. And though this Austro-Prussian war of 1866 was one of the shortest of wars, it had far-reaching consequences in that, as a result, Prussia grabbed the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein and annexed the states that had not sided with her before Königgrätz—Hanover, Hesse, Nassau, and Frankfurt. With Austria soundly defeated, Bismarck’s strategy to make Prussia a world power was set in motion.11

  Two years later Prussia announced it was intending to start a navy. At first the admirals intended to buy British guns, but Krupp, backed up by the king, prevailed in his argument that German guns should be used, and in September 1868 the new navy ordered forty-one heavy guns for their three new ironclads—from Krupp. This in itself shaped German naval policy for decades.12

  In 1870, as cleverly as he had baited Austria four years earlier, Bismarck followed the same maneuver with France, luring Napoleon III to declare war on Prussia to restore to France those parts of the country that Napoleon I had lost. On the day Prussia mobilized, Krupp offered a consignment of guns to the armed forces as his contribution to the war. The gift was declined, but the army increased its orders for Krupp armaments to the point where Prussia for the first time was buying more guns from Krupp than from anyone else.13

  Equipped with old-fashioned bronze muzzle-loaders, Napoleon III ’s troops were nowhere near equal to the Prussians. “The new Krupp steel breech-loaders and the new Krupp steel heavy mortars pulverised the forts of Metz and Sedan in no time at all and blasted a hole through the outskirts of Paris itself.” This encounter was revealing about both Krupp and Bismarck. Most Prussian generals were opposed to the shelling of Paris, which had just been rebuilt by Georges-Eugène Haussmann. (The beautiful city that we know as Paris was brand new then.) However, both
Krupp and Bismarck were very much in favor of attacking the capital, Krupp so much that he offered the army his 2,000-pounder. He also began to devise a giant siege gun capable of bombarding 1,000-pound shells from great distances right into the heart of Paris. They could not be built in time, but eventually they became the World War I weapons that “horrified the world.” As a result, Krupp joined Bismarck and the Kaiser in the trinity of the most hated men in all France. His name “came to signify purely and simply a particular implement of destruction. From being hated by just one nation in 1871, Krupps over the next seventy-four years were to become an object of loathing on an international scale such as perhaps no other industrial organisation has ever attracted.”14

  For Krupp, Prussia’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War, whatever the underlying reason for it, was wonderful publicity. Orders came flooding in. He turned down an honor, saying he preferred to be the first among industrialists than the last among knights.15

  What emerged from the victory of 1871 was the Prussian Empire. Wilhelm, the Prussian king, now became the German emperor; Bismarck, the Prussian prime minister, became the German chancellor. Prussia took over all of Germany except for Austria, and part of France too: Alsace and Lorraine, rich in coal and iron ore. Though there were still other kingdoms (Bavaria, Saxony), Prussia was now the most powerful state on the Continent. Moreover, she had a convenient, just-defeated neighbor. Both Bismarck and Krupp were to trade on the anxiety that France would always hanker after a war of revenge.

  The Prussian victors imposed on France an indemnity of five milliards of francs.* This payment, and the speed with which it was paid off (just thirty months), produced an extraordinary boom in Germany—the so-called Gründerzeit. The new Imperial German Government spent these francs on two things—on armaments and on repaying their debts to individual Germans who had helped fund hostilities with war loans. These individuals suddenly found themselves awash in great swaths of capital, which they promptly reinvested. Some twenty new companies had been registered each year during the two decades before the war, but in 1871 alone there were over 200 such registrations and in 1872 more than 500.16 The boom benefited Krupp as it did every other manufacturer in Germany. As many new iron works, blast furnaces, and machine-manufacturing factories were built during the three years after 1871 as had come into being during the previous seventy.