German and French Diesel Engineering 1920 - 1940

The Grammar of Technology

German and French Diesel Engineering,

1920-1940

By MIKAEL HARD AND ANDREAS KNIE

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At a meeting of the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure (VDI, German Engineering Society) in 1925 Imanuel Lauster, an honorary doctor of engineering, expressed his "deep satisfaction" with the latest successful developments in diesel engineering. As a board member of the Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Niirnberg (M.A.N.), he was pleased to note that it was German engineers and companies that deserved the credit for this success. Lauster claimed that "the diesel engine in its present form is still a German engine" and hoped that "it will remain so."¹

Lauster did not utter these words in connection with any kind of celebration or anniversary. His assertion of the German character of the diesel engine at that time was meant as an exhortation to retain Teutonic hegemony in the field of diesel engineering. Growing international interest in the engine was threatening to shift the initiative away from German firms to foreign companies. Lauster's address could be interpreted as a desperateattempt to build a German coalition that could withstand foreign competition and influence. A couple of years later, similar attempts would actually lead to the design of a German "uniform diesel" (Einheitsdiesel)

Dr. Hard is professor of the history of technology at the Technical University Darmstadt and coeditor, with Andrew Jamison, of The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998). Dr. Knie is senior researcher at Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung (WZB). His most recent book is Mbglichkeitsraume: Grundrisse einer modernen Mobilitatspolitik und Verkehrspolitik (Vienna, 1997), written with Weert Canzler. This article draws on two research projects: "The Development of Technology in Organizational Contexts," financed by the German Ministry for Research and Technology, and "Closures and Openings in the History of the Automobile," financed by the Swedish Transport and

Communications Research Board. The authors thank Patrick Fridenson and three reviewers for invaluable comments.

© 1999 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.

0040-165X/99/4001 -0002$8.0

1. Emanuel Lauster, "Entstehung und Entwicklung des Dieselmotors," in Diesel maschinen II (Berlin, 1926), 31-33, at 33. German and French quotations throughout this article have been translated into English by the authors.

Lauster had his own ax to grind. Rudolf Diesel had grown up in France but had been forced to leave that country during the Franco-Prussian war. He had accepted the Frenchman Sadi Carnot’s idea of the optimally efficient heat-engine process as his visionary goal, and he had lived for a decade in Paris as an adult. The following comment attributed to Diesel makes Lauster’s worries more understandable: “If I had not been chased out of France, then the engine that carries my name might have been French.” As things turned out, it was in Germany that Diesel would work out his first design plans and build a network of industrialists that could help him start to realize his ideas. Central to this network had been Maschinenfabrik Augsburg, one of the parent firms of M.A.N.* Lauster regarded it as a question of honor that the original design characteristics from this early period be acknowledged, at least by German companies. In connecting artifacts and nationality, Lauster and Diesel reflected views that slowly began to emerge among historians and sociologists in their own time. In 1908 Conrad Matschof, a pioneer of German history of

technology, discerned what he saw as national differences between German and French steam-engine designs.” During World War I, Thorstein Veblen, the freethinking American sociologist and economist, delivered an analysis in which he contrasted the industrialization paths of these two European countries.® Their ideas had little effect at the time, and it would be more than half a century before similar ideas began to reemerge in a serious fashion in the writings of historians and sociologists interested in technological change. As in many other discourses, Lewis Mumford played a significant role.” His discussion about how authoritarian technologies developed in some parts of the world and democratic ones in other parts anticipated what during the last decade has become a surge of interest in the political, social, and cultural basis of technology.? In recent scholarship, national dif-

1.

7. Lewis Mumford, "Authoritarian and Democratic Technics," Technology and

Culture 5 (1964): 1-8.

8. See, for example, Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds., The Social Shaping

of Technology: How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum (Milton Keynes, 1985); Mei