German and French Diesel Engineering 1920 - 1940

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The Grammar of Technology

German and French Diesel Engineering,

1920-1940

By MIKAEL HARD AND ANDREAS KNIE

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


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.2 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.”3 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.4 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.”5 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.6 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.8 In recent scholarship, national differences in how technologies are developed and used have analyzed. The sociologist Werner Rammert has, for instance drawn our attention to the various shapes and user patterns that charphone system in different countries.9 This article aims to contribute to the emerging scholar differences in technology. In the history of technology, "style" has been commonly used as a tool for national and parisons. Perhaps most well known is Thomas Hughes's analysis of differing technological styles operative in the electricity network of Berlin, London, and Chicago.10 Hans-Liudger Dienel has lately picked up on this thread, suggesting that the style of German refrigeration technology was strongly influenced by the engineering sciences, whereas the American style was governed more by the structural demands posed by mass production.11 Alain Dewerpe has talked about “national styles of production” in relation to shipbuilding technology in France, Germany, Great Britain, and Norway,12 and John Staudenmaier has referred to the American inclination toward standardized parts and products to illustrate how style can be used to describe the patterns of technological action within a cultural sphere.13 Staudenmaier defines technological style as “a set of congruent technologies that become ‘normal’ (accepted as ordinary and at the same time as normative) within a given culture”! In our comparison of German and French diesel engineering we start by using this concept, then try to go further and identify some of the mechanisms that led to the national differences observed. Lauster’s remarks to the VDI imply that at least some German engineers went out of their way to try to coordinate the actions of their colleagues by promoting the idea of a normative standard—sometimes given the name the “true faith” (reine Lehre).15 As this article will show, no such ambitions were discernible in France. Although French engineers and industrialists were always eager to point to French predecessors whose work could belittle foreign contributions, they never cultivated a strong sense of communality and normality. Where German firms dogmatically adhered to their own designs, their French counterparts were more open and flexible. We will argue first that the concept of technological style is only partly applicable to German and French diesel engineering. Some records in Germany show quite distinct attempts to create congruence among various engineering groups in the interwar period. In France, however, no such | attempts can be found. In contrast to the Germans, the French were, so to speak, without style. Second, these national differences can better be described and analyzed by means of concepts from the world of linguistics. Adopting the sociolinguistic approach of Pierre Bourdieu, we suggest that congruent technologies are created through processes similar to those that lead to the creation of official languages and grammars.'® Terms such as “dialect,” “language,” and “grammar” could be particularly helpful in an analysis of how designs and engineering knowledge are worked out, for- mulated, and codified. These terms might allow the constructivist and

| semiotic approaches in the history and sociology of technology to expand |

in a more operational direction. More specifically, a sociolinguistic

approach might better dissect the social processes whereby certain centrally |

| placed and powerful “core-sets” of engineers define which practices should

be accepted as correct and which should be discarded as incorrect." |


  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.
  2. Concerning technological visions (in German, Leitbilder), see Meinolf Dierkes, Ute Hoffmann, and Lutz Marz, Visions of Technology: Social and Institutional Factors Shaping the Development of New Technologies (Frankfurt a.M. and New York, 1996).
  3. According to La praxis, January 1936, 31, Rudolf Diesel supposedly said this to his friends.
  4. Lynwood Bryant, “The Development of the Diesel Engine,” Technology and Culture 7 (1976): 432-46; C. Lyle Cummins, Diesel’s Engine, vol. 1, From Conception to 1918 (Lake Oswego, Ore., 1993); Eugen Diesel, Diesel: Der Mensch, das Werk, das Schicksal (Hamburg, 1937); Andreas Knie, Diesel: Karriere einer Technik. Genese und ~~ Formierungsprozesse im Motorenbau (Berlin, 1991); Friedrich Sass, Geschichte des deutschen Verbrennungsmotorenbaues von 1860 bis 1918 (Berlin, 1962); Donald E. Thomas, Diesel: Technology and Society in Industrial Germany (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1987).
  5. Conrad Matscho8, Die Entstehung der Dampfmaschine (Berlin, 1908), 107.
  6. Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1915).
  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); Meinolf | Dierkes and Ute Hoffmann, eds., New Technology at the Outset: Social Forces in the Shaping of Technological Innovations (Frankfurt a.M. and Boulder, Colo., 1992); and Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
  9. Werner Rammert, Technik aus soziologischer Perspektive: Forschungsstand, Theorieansiitze, Fallbeispiele (Opladen, 1993).
  10. Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore, 1983). A growing interest in the study of “national styles” is also apparent in the history of science and may be exemplified by Herbert Mehrtens, “Der franzosische Stil und der deutsche Stil: Nationalismus, Nationalsozialismus und Mathematik, 1900-1940,” in Frankreich und Deutschland: Forschung, Technologie und industrielle Entwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Yves Cohen and Klaus Manfrass (Munich, 1990), 116-29; and Mary Joe Nye, “National Styles? French and English Chemistry in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Osiris, 2nd ser., 8 (1993): 30-49.
  11. Hans-Liudger Dienel, Ingenieure zwischen Hochschule und Industrie: Kiltetechnik in Deutschland und Amerika, 1870-1930 (Géttingen, 1995).
  12. Alain Dewerpe, “Le style et le drapeau: Les conventions du produit naval francais au début du XXeme siecle” (paper presented at the conference “Institutions et conventions du travail en France et en Allemagne, 1890-1990,” arranged by the Institut de recherche sur les sociétés contemporaines [IRESCO] of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique [CNRS] and WZB in Paris, May 1995).
  13. John M. Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 200. In this paragraph we have chosen only to refer to historians of technology, but the concept of “technological style” is also discussed by archaeologists and historians of architecture; compare Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery, eds., History from Things: Essays on Material Culture (Washington, D.C., and London, 1993).
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