1896

THE COMMERCIAL WAR BETWEEN

GERMANY AND ENGLAND

SOME few years ago the author was rather roughly handled by a portion of the Midland press because he foreshadowed the growing importance of German competition and what this meant to Staffordshire. Recent statistics have demonstrated beyond a doubt that, supreme as Germany proved herself to be in the battlefield when facing France, her victory in the arts of peace is likely to be more far-reaching and complete, and the vanquished in this second combat will not be France but England.

In the war against France the Teutonic legions gathered under the flag of Prussia were splendidly equipped for the campaign, but not more so than are her soldiers of industry to-day.

The main secret of Germany's great industrial progress may be summed up in the words, polytechnic education and philosophic training. The profundity of Germanic philosophy has for long been accepted as an associate of German character.

But this philosophic attribute has generally been considered to be too academic to become of any substantial value to the practical arts and to science involved in the great industrial operations. This impression has proved to be erroneous, for we find that the mental training associated with philosophic study has helped to bring about the formation of the practical philosopher, which more or less perfectly describes the modern German manufacturer, whilst he owes his high theoretic and technical training to the polytechnic curricula which are the envy and the admiration of educational experts.

The training of our Oxford and Cambridge Universities, up to within say twenty-five years ago, was too academic to be of much practical value for the development of the practical art and science. It is not strange therefore that very few of the great advances made in the technical arts by Englishmen were produced by men who had obtained their degrees at our Universities; whereas most of the advances in technical science traceable to a German origin have been produced by Polytechnic and University men.

The famous Siemens brothers are a characteristic example of the beneficent advantages that the splendid polytechnic training of Germany gives to students who desire or are compelled to prepare for the arena of industrial or commercial combat, and there is little doubt that the offsprings of ingenuity from the inventive brains of the Siemens family would never have reached the eventually perfect maturity they did but for the scientific and practical training the brothers Siemens had received from their polytechnic Alma Mater. To Germans the delights from that heavenly art, music, have not been merely sensuous; in the early part of this century their organ construction was unrivalled, and this industry was a profitable one. So to-day their pianos are for general excellence most remarkable, and their piano manufacturers contribute a massive quota towards the material returns that ever follow the well-directed, competent, and sustained efforts of a rational industry. A nation or race that can produce the galaxy of musicians beginning with Haydn, Handel, and Beethoven, and ending with glorious Wagner, is one to be both feared and respected, and it is not surprising that in the making of the piano for the mass and for the virtuoso the Berlin piano-makers, measured by actual output, are facile princeps. The ability of the Germans as woodcutters has been recognised for centuries, and this ability, which has become almost a generic trait, has enabled them to produce fancy articles of wood that are conqueringly seductive. In fine-art pottery-work the German artist workmen have turned out from the Dresden kilns objects of art that are unsurpassable in beauty of design, form, and colour, and as in the industrial arts associated with musical-instrument-making, generations of practical exponents of a craft have produced men of unrivalled talent, so the wood-carving and pottery art is still held in all its highest perfection by the German artist workmen. In the mechanical arts this hereditary talent is held in the highest degree by the English mechanic, and consequently our English mechanical industries, if properly guided and encouraged, will at least for some time to come be easily able to maintain their position of unrivalled superiority (references in proof of this will be given further on); but, handicapped in the mechanical arts as the Germans undoubtedly are, nevertheless their birthright to a polytechnic training has almost counterbalanced their general disadvantages when compared with English mechanics-a proof of this is found in the inventive creations that are essentially mechanical, and which are of undoubtedly German origin. Instance the Otto Cycle Gas-Engine of Dr. Otto, an invention that almost deserves to rank alongside Watt and Papin's inventions.

The Mannesmann weldless tube, a comparatively recent mechanical and metallurgical invention, is an astonishing example of highly trained German ingenuity.

The Siemens Recuperative Gas Fired Furnace for melting glass

and steel is well known throughout the industrial world, and many other inventions of Werner, Carl, and Frederick Siemens have embellished and increased the earning capacities of metallurgic and electric industrial arts.

The renowned Krupp has demonstrated that the metallurgical science of steel has been acquired in its most matured excellence by German workmen.

Herr Grüson has brought highly trained intelligence to bear on the production of hardened cast iron known as Grüson-work, and has overcome technical difficulties that were considered almost insurmountable.

The refined precision and the advanced scientific attainments of the controllers of German metallurgical processes have enabled the day-by-day production of finished metal in sheets, the thinness, pliability, and evenness of structure of which are admittedly impossible of attainment in Staffordshire.

Here in England, we have a technical science in iron-making and rolling-mill practice, and by the environment and the hereditary transmission of the experience of over a century we should be almost unassailable by our rivals, and yet we are compelled to admit an inferiority in the quality of production. Our easy laissez-faire policy, and reliance on an assumed superiority-because our fathers succeeded we ought to succeed-will not do, that is unless we are to be satisfied amongst industrial nations with an inferior position of rapidly increasing proportion. Not only does the result of polytechnic and philosophic training command a perhaps unwilling admiration, but we are compelled to admit that it is accompanied with a marvellous, if sometimes unscrupulous, energy of enterprise, instances of which will be referred to further on.

The trained mental equipment of the German manufacturer enables him to quickly seize upon a process, an idea, or a formula that will be an advantage to him, and not satisfied with what his contemporaries are doing (and in his survey he includes the whole world of industry), he establishes research laboratories of his own; we see the result of this policy (of ever searching for light and leading) in the magnificent development of the chemical industries of Germany.

What she has done for music, Germany has done for chemical science-she has enriched this portal in the great monument that represents man's intellectual triumph of mind over matter by the inscriptions of the names of Bunsen, Helmholtz, Hoffmann, Liebig, and Nobel. Is it surprising that a race capable of producing such intellectual giants should take an easy first in chemical industrial work? German chemical establishments are so well equipped both in personnel and in apparatus that even if a discovery, such as that by Perkins relating to aniline dyes, is effected by an Englishman, they, the German chemists, are the first to draw the honey of material

wealth from it, whilst English manufacturers, uncertain of their own knowledge, are afraid to take the financial plunge necessary to make the newly discovered process a marketable one.

Instance again the discovery by British chemists of the value of dilute solutions of potassium cyanide for the recovery of gold, which called for a large quantity of this chemical agent. Again the demand for the agent found the German chemists ready to take advantage of the outcome of British inventors, and by their ability in reducing the cost of the agent they have amplified the demand, and the material results arising from the demand for this agent in the Transvaal alone have recompensed the German chemist for his enterprise.

Here is another example of the rapidity with which they absorb and utilise an improvement-again an English invention.

The basic steel process initiated by Thomas was accepted at once as chemically correct, and whilst English metallurgists were considering whether they should accept it or not, German metallurgists had applied the principle in many of their works. They further rapidly realised that the basic slag residue from this process was amenable to treatment for conversion into a valuable agricultural fertiliser, and they have brought this process into a high state of perfection.

One of the results accruing from the Franco-Prussian War was the annexation of the wonderful industrial area of Mulhausen and its districts. This war gift gave the Germans a nucleus of the perfected and marvellous mechanical arts by which textiles are produced, and any one who visited the French Exhibition of 1889 would realise the perfection, especially in the dyeing and colour printing, which the manufacturers of Mulhausen had attained. The scientific educational methods kept up even after the termination of the école polytechnique period by the technical Société Industrielle of Mulhausen, which has produced in the literature of its Proceedings a display of wealth of research of which we in England can offer no equivalent counterpart. In the mechanical arts they have produced in Hirn a theoretic savant who will rank with Clerk-Maxwell, and in the splendid engines designed by Dr. Proell they proved their capacity in high class steam-engine work.

Even in the shipbuilding-a constructional art in which Englishmen have a just claim to be considered the great masters-our position is threatened; only the other day there was launched from a German yard a first-class armoured battle-ship, perfect it is said to be in every detail, and the Kaiser's delight was quite justified.

Had anyone prophesied twenty years ago such an event as this launch he would have been laughed at.

In the new and bright child of science, alternative current electricity, the philosophically trained German scholar found a subject for which he was fully prepared. There was ample evidence of this displayed at the Frankfort Exhibition seven years ago. Even if the

record of improvements in electrical science were confined to the outcome of the ateliers of Messrs. Siemens and Halske, it is promising enough; besides, electrical scientists have a never-to-be-forgotten debt due to Germany for initiating the great test of long-distance electric energy transmission between Lauffen and Frankfort. The results displayed to the astonished and wondering eyes of Europe the vista that electrical science offered to electrical engineers in providing power to our industries from sources miles away from the locale of its utilisation.

In the manufacture of instruments of precision, apparatus for scientific research, and for general everyday laboratory work, the Bohemian glass-blowers are simply sans rival, and the workers in our laboratories would be in a curious dilemma if German glass-makers could not be relied upon.

It is perhaps unnecessary to refer to the brilliant record of results that in recent years have emanated from the laboratories devoted to the higher branches of scientific research. The work of Helmholtz and Röntgen may be mentioned en passant. In the art of printing Germany has led the way for centuries, and musicians especially are highly indebted to the Leipzig press for cheap and clear examples of musical scores.

In the boundary dividing engineering and chemical science the influence of German work is well defined; instance the important improvements effected in the manufacture of Portland cement, itself another English invention.

For the manufacture of bricks and tiles, German science has given us the Hoffmann kiln, a decided improvement in economy and efficiency over the Old English type of kiln.

It would be quite easy and without much strain on the memory to extend the record, already brilliant and far-reaching, of the work accomplished by our foes in the industrial fight—a struggle which daily becomes keener and keener..

German industry owes a debt of gratitude to the late Prince Albert, who, himself an ardent student of science, realised, after his sojourn here had given him a knowledge of our contemporary superiority in industrial operations, that an open display of those processes that had enabled England to attain her then unchallenged position as the supreme industrial and commercial nation in the world would be an incalculable benefit to his German countrymen. The Exhibition of 1851 was, therefore, initiated. The Germans came, they saw, and the question for us is, Will they be allowed to conquer? An Englishman will never withhold a tribute of unenvied praise to genuine and pure effort that hopes to win by honest intent and honest work; but he certainly has a right to protest against a commercial method such as that which the author exposed in the Leeds Mercury some ten 3 Q

VOL, XL-No. 238