German and French Diesel Engineering 1920 - 1940
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, formulated, 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."
Market Patterns and Business Cycles
Diesel producers in Germany and France faced new but differing challenges in the wake of World War I. Whereas German firms were busy trying to regain old markets in the shipbuilding and electricity-producing. | industry, French machine producers worked hard to build a market from
scratch. Statistics show that immediately before the war only 1 percent of the world’s functioning diesel power was installed in France, compared with 45 percent in Germany.'® (Statistically, it thus seems appropriate to call the diesel a German machine at that time.) Because of the shortage and consequently high price of gasoline in the postwar period, any engine that could be run on more accessible and cheaper heavy oils was welcome in both countries, not least by motor vehicle owners. Nonetheless, designing an oil engine such as the diesel for road transportation was easier said than done. The classic diesel was a large, heavy, slow engine that worked well at a constant speed. Suited to stationary purposes and large ships, it could hardly be of any practical use for land transport before the design had been made much lighter and the piston speed increased. For trucks and buses, this step was taken in the 1920s; for automobiles, toward the end of the 1930s. In the 1920s the potential market for diesel engines was particularly large in France. Total French industrial production had by 1924 reached its prewar level and continued to expand rapidly until 1931.!° The number of registered automobiles in France increased more than tenfold in the 1920s, and the truck market boomed.?’ Weimar Germany’s general industrial production did not follow this trajectory; by 1930, after a short boom, it had fallen back below its prewar level. In 1929, France manufactured more than twice as many engine-driven road vehicles as Germany; statistics from two years later indicate that there were ninety-four citizens to each such vehicle in Germany, but only twenty-seven in France.?! The depression also hit Germany harder and earlier than it did France. Between 1929 and 1932 the motor vehicle market shrank dramatically in all Western European and North American countries, except Great Britain. In Germany vehicle production went down by over 60 percent, in France by only 30 percent. By then the diesel had begun to get a foothold in France while remaining marginal in the engine’s home country. In 1933, only one thousand diesel trucks and buses traveled the roads in the whole of Germany, as compared to five thousand in France.?
The general picture reversed after 1933. Partly as a result of the automobile-friendly policies of the National Socialist government, German production soon returned to 1929 levels, and by 1935 had climbed to a point more than 50 percent above 1929. The market for diesel-powered trucks and buses began to open up; in 1937,12 percent of all German-produced trucks and 33 percent of all buses were equipped with diesel engines.23 French production figures simultaneously declined, and France lost its position as the world's second largest producer of road vehicles.24 The number of vehicle manufacturers decreased significantly, more so in France than in Germany. Historian Joseph Jones observes that the French transport policy of 1933 "consisted of increased taxes on road fuel and on heavy goods' vehicles explicitly aimed at compensating for the railway deficit by punishing the automobile."25 In France a people's car (Volkswagen) was not on the agenda. With the creation of the state railway company, the Societe nationale des chemins de fer fran^ais (SNCF), in 1937 the government became even more concerned with protecting the heavy public investments that the railroad represented. One measure that the government now proclaimed was to increase "the tax on diesel-oil, which had previously been far less heavily taxed than petrol."26 Whether due to these policies or to business factors, it is clear that the market developed more slowly in France: "By 1938, only one in four of French trucks was under five years old, compared to 60 per cent in Germany... ,"27 In the same year thirty thousand trucks were produced in France, as compared to as many as eighty-eight thousand in Germany? one-fourth of the latter being delivered to the military.28 The total number of automobiles, however, still remained higher in France than in Germany: 1.8 million compared with 1.3 million.
Germany: Grammatical Codification
Against this background it becomes more understandable that, espe cially in the 1920s, people such as Lauster were concerned about losing control of the development of diesel technology. In 1923, Adolf Nagel, perhaps
the leading combustion-engineering professor in the whole of Germany,
had already given his colleagues in the VDI a worried report about the non
German contributions to the field.29 Although Nagel was happy to con
clude that foreign design solutions had not yet made inroads into Germany,
he could not hide his concerns that the work of people such as Akroyd
Stuart of Great Britain, Brons of the Netherlands, and Hesselman of
Sweden could develop into serious challenges in the near future. Nagel's
immediate anxieties, however, concerned not market share but engineering
congruence. These non-German engineers had launched solutions that
departed so much "from the much tried and manifest" main principles of
the original diesel engine that they threatened its "well-founded reputa
tion."30 There was a clear danger that these foreign dialects would corrupt,
as it were, the German diesel language.
Nagel voiced a view apparently quite typical of the German engineer
ing profession: Sound and accepted engineering solutions are of greater
value than market success or adapting to the customer. Leading German
engineers took it upon themselves to define what was to be considered
legitimate knowledge and correct design solutions. They even coined a
term to describe this sort of consensus-oriented effort: technisch-wis
senschaftliche Gemeinschaftsarbeit (technical-scientific collective work).31
Often organized in the form of official tasks, such activities aimed at the
formulation of rules that were meant to guide practitioners, for instance
those working in the oil-engine area. These engineers codified an engineer
ing "grammar" meant to create conformity among those who spoke the oil
engine "language."
The leading forums for such codifying work were the Fachsitzungen
(expert sessions) for internal-combustion engineering that were held in
connection with the annual meetings of the VDI. At the 1927 meeting, for
instance, director F. Schultz of the venerable Gasmotorenfabrik Deutz
lamented the "confusion" that still ruled the area of diesel design and
reported on the work that the VDI had begun two years earlier with the
goal of "formulating new rules for internal-combustion engines."32
Similarly, Nagel put much effort into getting the definition accepted that all
heat engines where ignition starts as a result of high pressures be called
"Diesel engines," thereby "honoring a well-deserving German engineerho helped German engineering secure a much begrudged advantage
through his vigor and his belief in the success of his engine."33
M.A.N.: DEFENDERS OF DIESEL ORTHODOXY
Two of Rudolf Diesel's most precious ideas were the direct injection of
fuel into the cylinder and the simple shape of the combustion space.34
Rejecting extra combustion chambers and complicated piston-head
designs, he was the first vindicator of the direct-injection system. The con
troversy between proponents of direct injection and those of combustion
chambers did not really take off until after Diesel's death, when it became
possible to mix air and fuel without employing a heavy and bulky air pump.
One could then choose between having the fuel pass directly from the fuel
tank into the cylinder or mixing it with air in a specially designed space
before it entered the cylinder. After Diesel's suicide in 1913, M.A.N, was the
company that profited the most by being connected with his legacy. Not
surprisingly, it chose the direct-injection system. For about a decade, its
representatives turned out the most astute defenders of this orthodox faith.
One of the first firms in the world to build diesel-powered trucks,
M.A.N, announced its first diesel truck in 1923. The vehicle was equipped
with a direct-injection engine without an air pump. The distinct advantage
of this machine was its low fuel consumption; the distinct disadvantage was
its rough performance. Potential buyers were pleased with fuel costs much
below those of a gasoline engine, but less than happy with a vehicle whose
performance reminded them more of a tractor than a truck. Although sales
turned out to be weak, the company continued to produce the diesel truck
for eight years: by 1931, only 210 trucks of this design had found their way
onto the road.
The same inattention to what today are called market signals can be
found in large segments of the German engineering community during the
interwar period. In the mid-1920s, the leading members of the VDI had
already declared that direct injection belonged to the acceptable basic rules,
the grammar,
as it were, of diesel engineering. Such acceptance was, espe
cially in the German setting, important for industrial practitioners. Wil
helm Riehm, one of M.A.N.'s board members, went out of his way at the
VDI annual meeting in 1925 to get his company's new design solution
accepted by his peers as legitimate knowledge, on a par with precombus
tion, the hot-head, and the Brons system.35 His plea was heard. Direct injec
tion soon received serious treatment by, among others, Fritz Modersohn, of he Gasmotorenfabrik Deutz, and Julius Magg, author of an influential
diesel textbook.36
Modersohn's contribution to the precombustion/direct-injection con
troversy is noteworthy because it included an attempt to bypass the "unnec
essary" competition that displeased so many German commentators in the
interwar period.37 If manufacturers could agree
on a compromise, then
JANUARY
Modersohn was willing to accept both systems as legitimate solutions for
1999
the construction of high-speed truck and bus diesel engines. He suggested
VOL. 40
that they choose precombustion injection for small engines and direct
injection for large ones.
In practice, another kind of consensus developed. After 1931 M.A.N.
designed a diesel that included characteristics of both the direct-injection
and the precombustion engine. Before the fuel entered the cylinder, it had
to pass through a wide injection channel, where combustion got started.
This compromise caught on so well with other companies that it developed
into the previously mentioned "uniform diesel." Under the supervision of
the Nazi government, five firms introduced this engine into their produc
tion program, but with limited commercial success.38
The preoccupation of leading German engineers with defining accept
able, legitimate solutions and of established German firms with orienting
their design activities toward common norms is interesting. The German
engineers' focus also stood in sharp contrast to the attitudes and practices
of their French colleagues. Julius Magg was one of the most active
German-speaking engineers in defining official solutions. His Diesel
maschinen had been commissioned by the VDI to avoid "divided opinions
about the general basis of diesel engineering," thus protecting the craft
from annoying customer demands. By codifying what they believed
should be considered correct design solutions, Magg and his colleagues
hoped to protect Diesel's original "ideal process" in a period of technical
and market uncertainty. His and others' German textbooks were meant to
serve the same function in engineering practice as grammars do for lin
guistic usage. By means of a diesel grammar, an "official diesel language"
was to be developed to help withstand threats posed by a multitude of German and foreign "dialects."
DAIMLER-BENZ: "WE UNDERSTAND MORE ABOUT AUTOMOBILE ENGINEERING THAN THE CUSTOMER DOES"
M.A.N, was by no means the only company to preserve the traditional diesel design ideals. When Daimler-Motoren AG, the largest German truck producer, decided shortly after World War I to develop a diesel engine for its trucks, it stayed true to the classical blueprint. The first diesel truck that the firm brought onto the market in 1923 even included the traditional airpump that had been the standard in ship and stationary diesels. The decision proved to be commercially disastrous. Daimler did not sell a single vehicle equipped with this old-fashioned engine, which was an out growth of an almost extinct, albeit grammatically correct, idiom. Having invested considerable work and prestige in this design, Daimler's engineers struggled hard to retain it in the company's production line.39 They did not succeed. After Daimler merged with Benz in 1926, their creditors went mercilessly through all activities in the new joint company. Daimler's air-pump diesel did not pass the test. Instead, Benz's precombustion chamber engine became the company's joint product. This design was certainly better adjusted to the market, even though Daimler-Benz's notorious arrogance toward its customers (exemplified by the quotation above) and preference for engineering delicacy made it difficult for the company to get out of the red.40 The company managed to sell its first diesel truck in 1930, but it would take half a decade before its automotive diesels became important.41 Probably to Lauster's delight, Daimler-Benz's engines were thoroughly German.42 Like most of their German colleagues, Daimler-Benz's engineers seem to have gone consciously out of their way not to pick up any foreign patents or other design solutions. German-speaking engineers such as Magg were busy building a consensus about what should be considered appropriate designs. Daimler-Benz was certainly not atypical in its preoccupation with design perfection and its lack of interest in mass-market demand and rational production.43 As a result, German manufacturers lost domestic market share to American companies such as Ford.44
KRUPP-JUNKERS: "RATHER ORIGINAL, BUT BY NO MEANS IDEAL"
The abhorrence that the German engineering core-set felt toward unconventional design solutions can be further illustrated by the case of Hugo Junkers's diesel. As a young engineer working with a gas-engine project in Dessau just after the turn of the century, Junkers had already decided in favor of the opposed-piston, two-stroke system.45 Such a solution was indeed bold. Although it was theoretically possible to increase the degree of efficiency by having two pistons per cylinder instead of one, Junkers's engine challenged design traditions with roots going back to eighteenth century steam-engine technology. Since Newcomen, combustion engines customarily came with one piston per cylinder. When Junkers translated his ideas from the gas-engine to the diesel engine language, he met little positive response. In 1912 he presented his new diesel at a meeting of the Society of Naval Architects (Schiffsbau
technische Gesellschaft), which, with VDI, was a leading German institution for the discussion and formulation of a correct diesel language. The reception was very cool.46 Junkers's calculations could not shatter established conceptions of what constituted a well-designed machine. Since his "dialect" sounded too strange to square with the official language of diesel engineering it could easily be ignored, although in principle it remained within the limits set up by existing grammars. Unable to pass inspection by the German engineering world, where he would remain an outsider, Junkers sought acceptance in other camps. His truck engine would later be accepted in France. His greatest German success came in the aeronautics industry, which was apparently less concerned with preserving age-old traditions than were the shipbuilding and motor vehicle industries.47 In particular, aircraft manufacturers were open to any solution that promised to decrease engine weight per horsepower. When Junkers's diesel reached a weight-to-power ratio of less that 0.5 kilograms per horsepower, it began to attract considerable attention.48 In 1936 Deutsche Luft-Hansa put its first Junkers-equipped airplane in regular service across the Atlantic, initiating the short but memorable heyday of the so-called Jumo (Junkers-Motoren) planes.49 However, within the German motor vehicle industry Junkers's design remained marginal. None of the large companies picked up this strange dialect. Only KRAWA (Kraftwagenabteilung), the relatively small vehicle division of the Krupp AG, became a German licensee for Junkers's trucks and buses.50 Of course, Krupp was no marginal company, but its involve ment with road vehicles was not wholehearted, nor were its plans consis tently carried out. Although Krupp had taken part in the early work with diesel engines at the turn of the century, it never put any effort into developing its own automotive engine in the twenties. When M.A.N., Daimler Benz, and other German truck manufacturers began to design their own road-vehicle diesels, Krupp took the easy way out and in 1928 bought the rights to Junkers's patents. Production continued on and off for the ensuing three decades, but without any noteworthy innovative activity.51 There are also no signs that the company tried to coordinate its work with the French who spoke this dialect. By positioning itself outside mainstream engineering, the company lost the possibility of drawing on others' experience. Strange and singular dialects tend to disappear, which is exactly what happened to Junkers's.
France: Multilingual Competence
Because the demand for trucks grew so rapidly in France in the twenties, the potential market for an automotive diesel was considerable. As we have noted already, German commentators were concerned that this expansion might threaten their efforts to maintain hegemony in diesel engineering. In France, commentators expressed more economic concerns, namely that their home market would be flooded by German diesel engines and diesel trucks. Reviewing an automobile exhibition in 1928, the technical journalist G. Delanghe wrote that four or five German firms had plans to make inroads into the French market with their high-speed diesels, and that "it is, unfortunately, not yet possible to meet them with an equivalent French engine."52 The situation, however, soon changed. In 1931, Delanghe could happily note that "[a]lmost all truck manufacturers offer their customers chassis mounted with diesel engines."53 The French diesel was now ready to meet the soaring market.
PEUGEOT-C.LM.: "ECONOMY, SAFETY, SIMPLICITY!"
In 1908, an associate of the Peugeot automobile company, the mathematically trained engineer E. H. Tartrais, had begun to analyze and experiment with heavy-oil engines, but not until 1921 did his investigations begin to show such promise that the company decided to spread the word about them. Technical descriptions and popular articles were placed in various journals. In line with the tradition of those days, well-staged journeys were made to attract public attention.54 At the request of Peugeot's managing director, the journalist Henri Petit wrote favorably about his return trip from Paris to Bordeaux shortly before the annual motor vehicle exhibit in 1922.55 Petit made the 1,100-kilometer trip in two days, allegedly without incident: "[the engine] met all the expectations that the Peugeot company had created."56 The only nuisances Petit recorded were that the oil engine ran rougher than a gasoline engine, emitted "light smoke," and was more difficult to get started. In his technologically optimistic way, Baudry de Saunier wrote in Omnia: "By giving its confidence and full assistance to the Tartrais engine, the house of Peugeot deserves the praise of our country. It has indeed oriented itself toward the engine of the future. Well done, engineers!"57 La science et la vie stated with no less enthusiasm that the Tartrais engine would be particularly useful in the French colonies, since it might be possible to run on vegetable oils. Tartrais's engine was heterodox vis-a-vis the official language of diesel engineering on several scores.58 It ran on heavy oil, but it was not defined by its contemporaries as a diesel engine. Tartrais departed from the diesel grammar in that he employed an electrically heated filament to support ignition. He had also designed two chambers that looked very similar to those of precombustion diesels, but whose function was not the same. This heterodoxy made it difficult to find outside solutions to problems that plagued the engine. There was, simply put, no one to talk to. Very little help could be found in France, and the German patents that Tartrais received in 1920 and 1921 were never picked up by firms in that country. Peugeot's engineers did not overcome the drawbacks that Petit had noted, and in 1926 the company decided to turn in other directions.59 The ensuing changes were made in two ways that illustrate not only the ease with which French firms switched designs, but also their dependence on foreign archetypes.60 First, Peugeot turned the Tartrais engine into a pure diesel engine. The outcome was a two-stroke engine with a precombustion chamber in which ignition was caused by high pressure in the cylinder.61 This engine, however, seems to have created more interest in engineering circles than among potential customers. Second, in 1927 Peugeot bought a license for a German patent: the Junkers design. Peugeot decided that production should begin at its old plant in Lille and, with thirty-five million francs as capital, set up a separate company, la Compagnie Lilloise des Moteurs (C.L.M.).62 C.L.M.'s strategy was straightforward: building engines that could easily fit into existing boats, rail cars, trucks, bulldozers, tractors, and even airplanes.63 The goal was to create a multipurpose diesel that could be used where high speeds were required.Although this strategy sounds simple enough, it was not an easy task to accomplish at a time when the diesel was generally defined as a slow and heavy engine, unsuitable for motive applications, and in an environment oflittle experience with opposed-piston engines. Junkers's fifteen-year track record in this business did not relieve his French licensee from problems. Despite C.L.M.'s access to a well-established motor vehicle factory with roots extending back to the nineteenth century, it took two years before the firm had adjusted well enough to this foreign dialect that it could undertake production of all the engine's central components on its own: "From 1928 to 1930 the very intricate manufacturing of fuel pumps and injectors was brought to perfection?thanks to the quality of the workers and technicians."64 But C.L.M. did not wait until 1930 to market its engine.65 The firsttruck fitted with one of its diesels was shown at the Paris exhibit in the pring of 1928, and soon C.L.M. diesels could be found not only in Peugeot
but also in Laffly and SOMUA (Societe d'Outillage Mecanique et d'Usinage
d'Artillerie) trucks.66 The company sold more than a thousand engines in a
year and a half.67 Demand grew rapidly, and by 1940 C.L.M. had produced
a total of twenty-five thousand diesel engines consisting of seventeen dif
ferent models.68 The multipurpose strategy worked.
The Peugeot-C.L.M. case illustrates several points. It shows how diffi
cult it may be even for large and established firms to maintain unique tech
nical dialects, and it indicates that some advantages exist in adopting
modes of speech common to a larger group. By choosing the Tartrais
engine, Peugeot's engineers isolated themselves from the national and
international engineering community. Since they spoke a strange dialect
that did not square with the diesel grammar, they got into a situation in
which they could not adequately communicate with other engineering
milieus. Their choice to accommodate Tartrais's engine to the diesel gram
mar in 1926 could be seen as a way of escaping this isolation. Although the
decision to go for the Junkers engine did not place the French in the main
stream of diesel engineering, it can be interpreted as a means of finding a
common ground between German and French technology: "The Junkers
engine ... reproduces the mechanical outline that is well known from the
Gobron-Brillie engines."69
BERLIET: "COPY AND IMPROVE!"
Marius Berliet was a self-taught technician whose name belongs with
the other pioneers of French motor vehicle engineering.70 A restless tin
kerer by nature, he quickly picked up new trends and was seldom afraid of
taking on large challenges.71 Considering his strong background in truck
production, Berliet's dawning interest in the diesel engine toward the end
of the twenties came as no surprise. His company had just gone through a
difficult period, but had now managed to pay off its bank debts and was
reasonably free to start new projects.72 Because little was known of the
high-speed diesel in France, Berliet went to Germany in 1929 to learn about
the latest developments. The outcome of this trip was a license agreement,
- 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.
- 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).
- According to La praxis, January 1936, 31, Rudolf Diesel supposedly said this to his friends.
- 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).
- Conrad Matscho8, Die Entstehung der Dampfmaschine (Berlin, 1908), 107.
- Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1915).
- Lewis Mumford, "Authoritarian and Democratic Technics," Technology and Culture 5 (1964): 1-8.
- 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).
- Werner Rammert, Technik aus soziologischer Perspektive: Forschungsstand, Theorieansiitze, Fallbeispiele (Opladen, 1993).
- 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.
- Hans-Liudger Dienel, Ingenieure zwischen Hochschule und Industrie: Kiltetechnik in Deutschland und Amerika, 1870-1930 (Géttingen, 1995).
- 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).
- 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).
- Staudenmaier, 200.
- Theo Delfried Domina, “Antriebstechnik,” in Ein Jahrhundert Automobilgeschichte: Nutzfahrzeuge, ed. Olaf von Fersen (Dusseldorf, 1987), 120-63, at 130.
- Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
- Harry Collins, “The Place of the Core-Set in Modern Science: Social Contingency with Methodological Propriety in Science,” History of Science 19 (1981): 6-19.