The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  However, Krupp, like many others in the Gründerzeit, had overreached himself, buying in just one year, 1872, more than 300 iron-ore mines and collieries and two entire ironworks; he also had commissioned four transport ships to bring to Germany the new iron-ore deposits acquired in Spain. And so, when the stock market crashed in 1873, hundreds of businesses went bankrupt, and Krupp was short by half a million pounds, more than £50 million at today’s levels. The banks moved in and their representative, Karl Meyer, took over day-to-day running of the firm. The company paid off the last mark of its debt fifteen years later, the year Krupp died.17

  Krupp’s personal lifestyle was not, however, curtailed in any significant way (Meyer was an old friend). Notably, his gunnery tests continued to be great social occasions. This was still the era of the great railway expansion in America, and huge numbers of steel rails were bought from Krupp by the American railroad companies. Nevertheless, Krupp’s last years were bleak. Since being sidelined by the banks, he had turned grumpy and spent his days lost in his great monstrosity of a house, the Villa Hügel, “where he hired a pianist to play to him during meals, but where no one would play dominoes or skat because he was such a bad loser.”18 When he died of a heart attack on July 14, 1887, at the age of seventy-five, only his valet was at hand. The year before he died, his first grandchild, Bertha, had been born. This was the Bertha after whom the huge gun that devastated the Belgian forts in 1914 was named. Krupp’s notoriety did not die with him.

  None of the other great steel giants of Germany—August Borsig (1804–54, locomotives), Hugo Stinnes (1870–1924, mining, shipping, newspapers), or August Thyssen (1842–1926, mining, steel), shared Krupp’s notoriety, though their wealth more than equaled his. Thyssen and Krupp merged in 1999.

  THE AGE OF THE AUTOMOBILE

  As early as the 1860s, in Switzerland, France, and Britain, several “horseless” vehicles were produced, though none of them went anywhere, so to speak. Only in 1885 did Karl Benz, in Mannheim, construct a machine that would lead to the automobile age.

  The son of an engine-driver and the grandson of a blacksmith from the Black Forest, Karl Benz had engineering in his blood.19 Born in 1844, by the time he was thirty he had his own small workshop where he built gas engines. His company started as the Mannheim Gas Engine Company but was changed to Benz and Company in 1883. A year later he constructed his first internal combustion engine, using a slide valve and an electric ignition. There were many possible uses for such an engine, and he had a number of flat disagreements with his partner, Emil Bühler, who would not permit any money to be spent on a “horseless carriage.” Benz therefore started out again with a new partner, Max Rose. He too was skeptical about horseless carriages, but he did earmark a small tranche of capital “for experiments.” It was this capital that allowed Benz to construct the vehicle from which the automobilism of the world has sprung. Benz knew that the weight of the engine was crucial to success and that it had to be a good deal lighter than any gas engine produced thus far. Until that point, his stationary engines had produced about 120 rpm (revolutions per minute), and he knew he had to more than double that. His other crucial early decision was to have four cylinders and not two, because road vehicles, he felt, would need to keep changing their speed. He situated his engine on its side, the flywheel running horizontally, so that gyroscopic action, when turning corners, would not interfere with the engine’s running. His instinct was to place the engine at the rear, over the two back wheels, using the front ones for steering, as happened with tricycles, then in common use. The power would be connected to the wheels by chains. The fuel used—benzene—was vaporized by a surface carburetor, patented on January 29, 1886. The coolant was water.

  According to St. John Nixon in his history of automobiles, it is “beyond doubt that the vehicle was ready for trial during the spring of 1885. It was driven by Benz around a cinder track which adjoined his workshop. His wife and children were present when this event took place.”20 The vehicle was probably first tried on public roads in October 1885. That, at least, was confirmed by an old employee in 1933. By the end of the year, Benz had clocked all of 1,000 meters, at a speed of around 12 kph. However, the vehicle suffered mechanical or electrical trouble each time it was taken out.

  Benz’s immediate aim was to drive his vehicle twice around Mannheim without stopping. He was forced to do it after dark; otherwise his contraption attracted huge crowds, and he was worried that the police might forbid him access to the public highways. Night after night he put someone in the passenger seat, started the engine, and traveled farther and farther before the inevitable breakdown. Then, in a journey that St. John Nixon insists ranks with George Stephenson’s, he finally made the double circuit nonstop. It made news, the Neue Badische Landeszeitung reporting the events in its issue of June 4, 1886. This part of the story, however, does not have a happy ending. To begin with, Benz’s innovations were successful and, by 1900, he was building more than 600 automobiles a year. But he failed to develop what he had given to the world, and the improvements he made to his cars were little more than tinkerings so that others like Gottlieb Daimler overtook him.21

  Born in Schorndorf in 1834, Daimler was apprenticed to a gunmaker before becoming an engineer.22 In 1872, at the age of thirty-eight, he was made technical director of Otto and Langen, gas-engine manufacturers of Deutz. He worked there for just short of a decade and in that time he helped develop the internal combustion engine. In 1882, however, he fell out with his fellow engineers over the direction of research and bought himself a property at Cannstatt, where he could continue in the direction he wanted to go. His old colleague, Wilhelm Maybach, was with him.

  Daimler was convinced that the internal combustion engine had a spectacular future but only if two problems were solved. One, the engines constructed until that point turned over much too slowly. And two, if this were to be overcome, a different system of ignition was needed. At that stage the most commonly used ignition employed a slide valve which, for a moment, retreated and exposed the explosive mixture in the cylinder to a flame. Daimler’s instinct told him that any valve system would never be able to close quickly enough at high speeds to allow for the full effects of the explosion to be conserved. In 1879, Leo Funk patented a system in which an external burner kept a hollow tube at white heat, the mixture being forced into the tube by the ascending piston. Daimler realized this was the way forward.23

  The patent Daimler was awarded (No. 28022) on December 16, 1883, was for the first fast-running engine. Curiously, however, Daimler did not at first intend his engine to be used for anything other than stationary work. But when he and Maybach saw that this engine could run at 900 rpm, their thoughts turned toward a motorcycle. This was patented in August 1885—it had two speeds, was cooled by a fan, and had iron tires. The engine, of half a horsepower, was situated behind the seat. To start the engine, a burner was lit that heated the ignition tube and the engine was cranked in the usual manner. The power from the engine was conveyed to the rear wheel by a belt. During the winter of 1885–86, Daimler’s motorcycle was tested on a frozen lake in Cannstatt, a ski being used in place of the front wheel. He too undertook road trials after dark, in his case so that teething troubles could be ironed out in private. In November 1885 his eldest son, Paul, drove from their house to Untertürkheim, three kilometers away, and made it home.

  The first Daimler car took to the road in the autumn of 1886, between Esslingen and Cannstatt. In the archives of Daimler-Benz A.G., there is an account of these early-morning trials, written by Wilhelm Maybach and Paul Daimler.24 They say the vehicle ran “quite well” and that speeds of 18 kph were attained. Daimler put his engine in boats and even designed a railcar driven by a Daimler engine. In 1889 they moved decisively ahead with a vehicle with a tubular frame through which the coolant (water) circulated. Engines remained at the rear of cars until 1896 when they were placed under the hood (Daimler being much taken with the designs of the Frenchman Émile Levassor).
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br />   It was not all plain sailing, but Daimler prospered more than Benz. Paul Daimler, Maybach, and Emil Jellinek, a rich Austrian who was consul-general at Nice (where many early car trials and rallies were held), collaborated on a model that would put all rivals in the shade; it was more stylish and had many technical innovations, not the least of which was the relative silence of its engine.25 It was unveiled in final form in Nice in 1901 when, because there was such anti-German feeling in France in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war, it was named after Jellinek’s daughter, Mercedes.

  Though Benz, Daimler, and Mercedes are the best-known names in automobile history, Rudolf Diesel is almost as important. Born in Paris in 1858 to parents who were Bavarian immigrants, he was educated at Munich Polytechnic. There he heard a lecture by Professor Carl von Linde on thermodynamics, in which Linde explained that the steam engines then so popular used only around 10 percent of their fuel to perform useful work, a shortcoming that stayed in Diesel’s mind.26 When he graduated from Augsberg Technical School, he was the youngest person ever to achieve that honor and he achieved the highest-ever marks. He impressed Linde so much that the professor got him a job at a factory in Switzerland selling the ice machines that Linde had helped develop.

  Obsessed with engines of one sort or another, Diesel soon invented a machine to make clear ice.27 The Swiss company was not interested, but French brewers were and he found a ready market for his machine back in Paris. His real breakthrough came in 1893, when he was thirty-five, at which point he took out a patent for a “Combustion Power Engine,” the engine we know today as the diesel engine.28 The difference between Diesel’s engine and the internal combustion engine is simple but profound. In the gasoline engine an air-fuel mixture is drawn into the cylinder, where it is ignited by a spark plug. In Diesel’s engine only air is drawn into the cylinder. With no fuel present it can be compressed about twice as much, driving the temperature much higher. At the right moment, fuel is injected into the cylinder, where it ignites spontaneously.

  It is a simpler system but, in the early days, the fact that the engine operated at very high temperatures and pressures meant that they were too much for the materials then available, making his engines unreliable. In 1897, however, the first Diesel engine factory was built at Augsberg and he prospered. Unfortunately, sloppy management of his money meant that almost all of it slipped away. In 1913 he was invited to London for the opening of a new Diesel factory. He took the channel steamer at Antwerp but disappeared during the night; his body was found in the North Sea about ten days later.

  In some areas of the world, Diesel engines now have a more than 50 percent market penetration and are much preferred for such outlets as submarines, mines, and in oil fields.

  Just as Daimler cars were the fruit of a father-and-son collaboration, so AEG, Germany’s other great engineering company, alongside Siemens, was developed by the father-and-son team of Emil and Walther Rathenau. In fact, Rathenau and Siemens, who at one stage were partners, form brackets to this section, emphasizing how intertwined German science, business, and politics were between the middle of the century and the First World War.29

  Emil, born in Berlin in 1838, into a wealthy Jewish family, had bought himself a successful machine factory in the north of the city two years before Walther’s birth. Thus he had made one fortune by the time of the Paris Exhibition of 1881 when he saw Edison’s electric lightbulb. He snapped up Edison’s patents and two years later founded the Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft (German Edison Company, or DEG). This seemed a clever move since he did so in collaboration with his greatest potential customer, Siemens. In fact, in its early years DEG was beset with technical and legal problems (over patents, mainly) and because of this the company was eventually transformed into the Allgemeine Elektrizitätgesellschaft (German General Electric Company, or AEG). The links with Siemens were dissolved and only in 1894 was Emil Rathenau able to begin to turn his firm into the biggest electrotechnical giant in Germany.30

  The Rathenau family was Jewish only in name. Mathilde Rathenau, the daughter of a Frankfurt banker, took care to give her children (two boys and a girl) a good education in music, painting, poetry, and the classics of literature. For her, business wasn’t everything.31 Walther never formally accepted Christianity, but he did acknowledge the divinity of Jesus and, in a magistrate’s court in Berlin in 1895, disassociated himself from his former “Mosaic belief.” All his life he was sensitive to the second-class status of Jews in Germany, yet at the same time he advocated assimilation and hoped for equality. Like many other Jews, he regarded himself as a German: everything else was of lesser significance.

  Having a PhD (from Strasbourg), Rathenau kept up with scientific developments—the behavior of metals, electrolysis, hydroelectric power—but he was always more interested in industrial organization, business strategy, and its links to politics, rather than the day-to-day running of companies like AEG. This made him ideal board material, and Rathenau’s real significance is that he formed part of that generation of industrialists—Krupp, Stinnes, and Thyssen were others—who began to rival the army officers, diplomats, and professors at the top of the status ladder, though the rising prestige of the industrialists was opposed by a fierce anticapitalist and anti-industrial feeling in some quarters, who saw industrial power as the main cause of human misery. Although many realized that the Industriestaat was replacing the Agrarstaat, industrialists still found it difficult to progress politically and Rathenau in particular found this frustrating. Yet Germany did change fundamentally from the 1890s onward, when industry replaced agriculture, forestry, and fishing as the mainstay of the country’s GDP and when more workers were employed in industry than in agriculture, and more people lived in cities than in small towns and villages.32

  Unlike his critics, Rathenau was convinced that industrialization and capitalism were the only secure foundations for a powerful modern state, and he also felt that the German Empire had the long-term edge over Britain, because it also had a strong agricultural sector.33 He was similarly convinced of Britain’s industrial decline, for which he blamed the trade unions, the poor level of training for engineers, and weak management. He did not believe, however, that the industrial state was an end in itself. “He saw industrial domination as a transitory phase to achieve a greater ‘spiritualised’ period in human history.”34 He was led in this way to a relatively crude social Darwinism allied with some of Gobineau’s racial beliefs. Rathenau felt that, eventually, the northern European middle classes—people like himself—would come to dominate the world.35 Educated businessmen were the new aristocracy, who would know where to lead their fellow citizens to the higher, post-material spiritual level. Continuous industrialization, he was convinced, must be accompanied “by ethical achievement.” He was therefore in favor of heavy taxes for the rich both in life and in death—he wanted to see an “uncompromising” inheritance tax and he went so far as to advocate the “abolition of luxury.” “Distribution of property,” he wrote, “is not a private affair, any more than is the right to consume.”36 And he argued that “richness should be replaced by prosperity which in turn is based on creativity and responsibility for one’s work or one’s own society.” Workers should have a say in management. However, as Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann has pointed out, “there is no evidence to suggest that Rathenau pursued a markedly different line towards his own AEG employees from that of other industrialists towards theirs.” He thought that better working conditions would increase productivity.

  His importance lay in the clarity with which he saw—and described—what was happening in Germany, how the dynamics of modern prosperity were shaped by science and industry and how the country’s traditional elite was failing to adapt. If there was a whiff of sanctimony about his stance, that too was revealing. He was better at identifying problems than at finding solutions.37

  20.

  The Dynamics of Disease: Virchow, Koch, Mendel, Freud

  Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) was the m
ost successful German physician of the nineteenth century. Besides his clinical and theoretical achievements, his work on the social aspects of medicine mean that he had an impact much wider than the purely medical field. His long career epitomized the rise of German medicine after 1840, an ascendancy that transformed a discipline that was still largely clinical and prescientific.1

  Born in a small market town in Pomerania, Virchow was educated privately in the classical languages, but he preferred the natural sciences. Because of his abilities, he received in 1839 a military fellowship to study medicine at the Friedrich-Wilhelms Institut in Berlin. This institution was specifically designed to provide an education for those who would not normally be able to afford one, in return for which they joined the army medical service for a specified time. Virchow studied under Johannes Müller and Johann L. Schönlein, who introduced him to the experimental laboratory and modern diagnostics and epidemiological studies, all relatively new.

  Virchow graduated in 1843, his first field job being medical house officer at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, where he made microscopic investigations of vascular inflammation and the problems of thrombosis and embolism.

  Always outspoken, in 1845 he delivered two speeches before an influential audience at the Friedrich-Wilhelms Institut in which he dispensed with all transcendental influences in medicine and argued that progress would only come from three main directions: clinical observations, “including the examination of the patient with the aid of physico-chemical methods” animal experimentation “to test specific aetiologies and study certain drug effects” and pathological anatomy, especially at the microscopic level. “Life,” he insisted, “was merely the sum of physical and chemical actions and essentially the expression of cell activity.”2 While still in his twenties, in 1847 he was appointed an instructor at the University of Berlin under Müller.