Christian Kleinschmidt / Raymond Stokes, Erk Volkmar Heyen: Editorial, VII-XII
(Volltext: www.uni-greifswald.de/%7Elo1/ed20.htm)

I. Themenschwerpunkt

Margrit Seckelmann:
On the Administration of Technological Knowledge: The Imperial Patent Office between Bureaucratisation and Network Formation, 1877-1914, pp. 1-25

The Imperial Patent Office, which took up its work on 1 July 1877, was in charge of the administration of one of the key resources within the Industrial Revolution: technological knowledge. First of all, it had an information function and an archiving function. With the intention of motivating the inventor to disclose his innovative technological knowledge, it granted him a legally enforceable, temporarily exclusive utilisation of the invention through the bestowal of a patent. Hence, the Imperial Patent Office exercised a steering function through the creation of economically effective incentives. Among its additional tasks was a moderating function in a national and international network of inventors, patent agents, attorneys, public officials and scholars. The function of risk control, however, was only weakly developed and executed only indirectly through the provision of information on new inventions. Finally, since it was exclusively entitled to grant patents within the territory of the German Empire, another specific function of the Imperial Patent Office in the beginnings of the newly founded Empire was to contribute to the unification of the German market. In view of these functions, this article examines the bureaucratisation and professionalisation of the Imperial Patent Office and its employees, as well as its embedding in the communication network of the persons and institutions dealing with technological knowledge.

Vera Hierholzer:
Regulation by Division of Labour: The Monitoring of Food in the German Empire as Interplay between State Institutions and Scientific Expertise, 27-50

Industrialisation induced proceedings in 19th-century Germany which evoked a public awareness of food quality. The Empire responded to increasing complaints and growing insecurity by enacting nationwide legislation in 1879. The change of general conditions had an effect on both the legislative process and the design of the laws themselves. One early consequence was the systematic incorporation of scientific expertise into governmental processes of decision-making. Experts in natural sciences moved up to the status of jurists, who had previously held a quasi-monopoly; gradually, a personnel-organisational intertwining of state and science took place. As a further consequence, a model of cautious legislation was created to keep the food acts flexible in view of future developments. The criteria for measuring the quality of food products were consciously left to the courts and additional ordinances. However, these attempts to fill up the law remained rudimentary. Instead numerous amending regulations on a non-governmental and non-judicial level were created. A central position was assumed by the standardisation efforts of nutritional chemists. By creating common quality standards from the 1880s on, they established a consensus out of the variety of doctrines about food quality. The scientific standards thus evolved into ever more self-evident bases for the daily practice of monitoring and control. Finally, the state adopted the guidelines in the 1890s and translated them into an administrative framework. A co-operative model of regulation began to emerge: the state prescribed minimum standards for averting dangers that were semantically filled and monitored by nutritional chemists. Private norms were not merely substitutes for or supplements to the law, but rather formed their own, autonomous type of norm-setting, which was in constant dialogue with state regulation. In its most basic form, this model is still valid today.

Christian Kleinschmidt:
Technical Consumer Protection in Germany in the 19th Century, 51-66

Modern consumer protection is mainly a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century. In particular, "technical consumer protection" is a current term which affects technical devices, machines, toys and household requirements and their safety for consumers, a term which has been introduced recently by public institutions of technical supervision. Nevertheless, technical consumer protection became a relevant factor already in the 19th century, in the age of industrialisation and during the early development of the consumer society. It can also be interpreted as part of the emergence of the welfare state and the "institutional Revolution" in Wilhelmine Germany in the late 19th century. As a consequence of the introduction of new technologies in the 19th century (which were accompanied by accidents and quality and health problems), industrial users claimed quality guarantees and tests from the producers. The growing sensitivity for the use of technical consumer goods also affected public and scientific institutions, some of which became early advocates of private consumers and their interests. This article deals with different cases of technical consumer protection: the food and household requirement law enacted by the German Empire in 1879, the technical monitoring of boilers managed by the Technische Überwachungsvereine, and the material control carried out by the Prussian Kgl. Materialprüfungsamt. It outlines the divergent strategies of private and public institutions and the role of the state in this field. They moved between business self regulation and state intervention. Protection and security measures not only affected end consumers, but also industry and its competitive capabilities. Thus, besides technical consumer protection, producer protection also mattered. Thus, this is also an example of the German corporatist model, since the new institutions represented a cooperation and division of labour between business, state, and universities, which at the same time was an important precondition for the rapid growth and international success of German industry.

Ben Marsden:
The Administration of the "Engineering Science" of Naval Architecture at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831-1872, 67-94

Following the historical actors, this article understands "engineering science" as the practical application of diverse scientific approaches to man-made artefacts, rather than to the natural world. The chief institutional focus of the article is the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), founded in 1831. In a context of laissez faire, the managers of the BAAS routinely lobbied government in favour of reformed scientific endeavour for the national benefit in those cases where individualist efforts were likely to be inadequate. Questions of engineering were relegated to the Association's Section G (Mechanical Science), which was dominated early on by academic experts comfortable with light-touch government intervention and mathematical work. In the 1850s, the Section flourished under a group of entrepreneurs of science, including the business partners W. J. Macquorn Rankine, a Glasgow professor, and James Robert Napier, a Clyde shipbuilder. Then, new opportunities arose to administer an engineering science of the ship that drew together naval architecture and steam marine engineering. Well-funded BAAS committees worked to "scientise" the ship using so-called Humboldtian approaches: such global data-gathering had enhanced the BAAS's profile and mobilised international collaboration between governments and individuals. The chief ambition, now, was to measure the construction and performance of ships in actual practice, according to uniformly specified criteria and using carefully designed forms and logs. Standardised data would be provided by co-ordinating disparate agents, including gentlemanly politicians, Admiralty, foreign navies, mail companies, shipbuilders, and elite marine engineers. However, the collection of authenticated facts, as a basis for future theorising, proved difficult, as did the promised deployment of those facts to generate useful theoretical insights. Although there were alternative approaches, these BAAS committees remained wedded to a programme of experiments on a large scale with real ships that only the Admiralty could sponsor. This particular engineering science of the ship proved elusive when the Admiralty opted, instead, for cheaper, although highly controversial, experiments with small-scale models.

Mike Esbester:
Administration, Technology and Workplace Safety in Britain in the Early 20th Century, 95-117

This article examines some of the adverse consequences of industrialised work, and the administrative means used to address these consequences. It is argued that the administrative approach won out over technological solutions, and came to dominate workplace casualty prevention. By 1913, when over 29000 employees in Britain were killed or injured in a single year, railway worker safety was becoming an urgent issue. Forestalling possible state imposition of new technologies, the railway industry introduced its own, administrative, solution: the educative safety campaign. The article examines safety education, which used "social" techniques to try and "educate" employees as to "correct" and "incorrect" work practices. It is shown how education fits within the bureaucratic tradition of the railway industry, representing an attempt by management to use administrative structures to influence safety at the shop-floor level, and negate the need to introduce expensive changes to existing practices. As a result, attention was diverted away from the possibility of developing alternative technologies that would reduce the danger of injury, and was instead focussed upon a "rational" administrative solution that enabled the retention of the existing system of work and its inbuilt dangers. It is shown that the success of safety education lay not so much in reducing casualties, but in convincing the state that it did not need to intervene in managerial prerogative.

Jon Agar:
Mechanical Metaphor, Mechanization and the Modern British Civil Service, 119-138

This article summarizes and extends arguments found in the author's book "The Government Machine" (2003) that relate the representation of bureaucratic work using mechanical metaphor to projects to mechanize bureaucratic work, and vice versa. Several episodes from the history of the Civil Service are examined. First, the Northcote-Trevelyan report of the mid-1850s set up a programme for administrative reform, deploying a fundamental split between generalists and mechani¬cals. By the end of the 19th century mechanical metaphors for bureaucratic work were commonplace, for contextual reasons that are detailed. Second, the article examines a specific mechanical metaphor – the internal combustion engine as power unit – used in 1951 by the recently retired Registrar-General of England and Wales to promote the virtues of an immense register of personal information developed during wartime. This example shows how deftly a mechanical metaphor could be made part of wider administrative campaigns. Nevertheless, a central theme to this study of mechanical metaphor and mechanization is that the language of machines could be, and was, creatively appropriated by others. In particular, a middle-ranking cadre of civil servants took the 19th-century talk of mechanical government and turned it into support for programs of real mechanization. Their vision of mechanization went much further than that of their seniors in the Civil Service. A middle-ranking expert movement of mechanizers flourished in the years following the First World War, with the powerful Treasury department, sometimes (wrongly) considered an enemy of modernization, at its centre. Finally, further evidence is added to the claim that some features ascribed to the modern stored-program computer make sense when viewed as a materialization of certain representations of administrative work. The key actor here is the English mathematician Alan Turing. Turing's notion of the capacities of what he called a universal machine was decisively shaped by consideration of what could be done by a hierarchy of clerks. The history of administration therefore provides a necessary context for the history of the computer. Likewise, histories of computerization need to be placed within a broader history of mechanized office labour.

Stephen Sambrook:
The British Armed Forces and their Acquisition of Optical Technology: Commitment and Reluctance, 1888-1914, 139-164

During the latter part of the 19th and the early part of the 20th centuries a series of interlocking technological advances in military and naval engineering created conditions where the application of optical technologies became indispensable in the refinement and successful employment of newly emerging types of weapons of war. This article examines the way in which the British state, through the agencies of its armed forces, influenced the technological evolution, economic growth and international competitiveness of a specific sector of the optical industry. It illustrates how the British Army and Royal Navy at the start of the review period displayed distinctly different philosophies and practices towards this developing technology and its associated business infrastructure, and explains why those differences originally existed and how they came to be modified and substantially diminished by the start of the Great War. The account shows how each of these agencies of the state was committed to the adoption of new optical technology but displayed uncertainties over its acquisition and deployment that were rooted not just in technical development, tactical doctrines and financial constraints, but also in significant unofficial social and cultural factors that were rooted in the differing natures of these two military communities. The successive determination of these elements of indecision and tension within the armed forces resulted in the emergence of a new optical munitions industry which, though without any direct subsidy from the state, became not only adequate to the nation's armament needs but also, in its most important segment, an aggressive and highly successful exporter in the international arms trade.

Sally Horrocks:
Defence Research and Private Industry in Britain: Finding Capacity for Research in the Electronics Industry, 1940s-1960s, 165-185

During the summer of 1948, in the wake of the Berlin airlift and the intensification of the Cold War, the British government embarked on an accelerated programme of defence research and development (R&D). Crucial to this programme was the expansion of capacity for the electronics R&D required to support the operational efficiency of new aircraft under development for the Navy and the Royal Air Force. To secure this capacity the supply ministries sought administrative solutions that would enable them to harness the expertise to be found in private industry as well as state funded research establishments. This article examines the relationship between the Ministry of Supply and two of its key R&D contractors: Mullard, a subsidiary of the Dutch Philips group and the General Electric Company (GEC). Together these case studies shed light on the way in which the administrative arrangements developed by the Ministry amounted to technological policies that discriminated between firms and shaped their internal capabilities in ways that had long-term consequences. In particular, they reveal the efforts that Ministry of Supply officials were prepared to make to secure their preferred industrial collaborators and the enduring nature of these links. As a consequence, these administrative interventions left important legacies for British industrial and technological development.

Helmuth Trischler:
Defence Research and Civil Innovation System in the Federal Republic of Germany: Solid-State Physics in Freiburg, 187-208

After the Second World War, defence-related research had to find its place in the newly emerging innovation system of West Germany. Having experienced the "Third Reich", the scientific community identified defence research with militarism and political intervention into the autonomy of science. The defence authorities had to work hard to develop their network of scientific experts, and it was not before the fundamental re-organisation of the German innovation system in the late 1960s and early 1970s that defence research established its position in the system of knowledge production. But this position was contested and the proper relation between civil and defence-related research remained on the political agenda, all the more as the end of the Cold War and the challenge of the unification fundamentally changed the political context of defence research. This historical process is discussed in this article using the example of one of the main players of defence research in West Germany, the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid-State Physics (IAF) in Freiburg, which was founded in 1957. It shows that the institute reoriented its research profile several times in order to fit the dynamics of changing military and civil interests. These multiple changes of identity reflect the fact that the place of defence research and technology in West Germany was unstable from its early beginnings and has remained contested to the present.

Johannes Weyer:
"Power Games in Space": On the Political Logic of State Subsidy of Big Technology in Germany and the European Union, 209-234

This article deals with space policy in Germany from the early rocket experiments of Wernher von Braun in the 1930s up to the current European satellite navigation project "Galileo". At least in hindsight many decisions to launch big technology projects in space (e.g. the International Space Station ISS) have proved to be irrational insofar they turned out to be economically worthless or even a failure. The article tries to explain the apparent irrationality of policy decision-making in this field by referring to the underlying social process and the networks of actors who shape and support the construction of technology. It points to the logic of political action, since actors here always try to maintain or even expand their organisational domains. Big technology projects have proven a suitable means to play these games in the political arena. In the 1960s and 1970s the German Research Ministry could establish and expand its domain this way. Today the European Commission plays a similar game of establishing a new sphere of authority within space policy by promoting "Galileo" as a new means of European industrial policy. This reflects a new self-consciousness of Europe as a space power, and of the European Commission as the key player in this policy field.

II. Varia

Erk Volkmar Heyen:
Bridges on the Horizon: Technical-Administrative Opening of Area and its Metaphorical Interpretation in Painting, 1830-1970, 237-276

This article deals with bridges as a specific technical element of political-administrative iconography, thus combining history of technology as well as public administration with history of art. During the 19th and 20th centuries bridges were used to be seen as symbols of irresistible industrialisation and urbanisation. It is shown that in the painting of this period bridges have a much richer spectrum of meaning in which technological and scientific aspects are brought together with religious, philosophical, political and psychological aspects, especially if the artist places the bridge on the horizon or nearby. In the article's first section, the horizon as metaphor for human orientation in the history of philosophy and art is outlined as well as the metaphorical potential which derives from the technical function
of a bridge. In the second section, 13 paintings of landscapes and cities (among others by van Gogh, Caillebotte, Feininger, Delvaux) are analyzed in detail. The bridges and their surroundings are looked at from three points of view: coping with nature's challenges and overpowering it; facilitating encounters and hindering them; admiring engineering and simply putting up with it. In the third and final section, a painting by Gerhard Richter (1969) showing a motorway bridge over a river with just little metaphorical meaning is contrasted with a very famous medieval portrait by Jan van Eyck, the so-called Rolin Madonna (1435-1437), where the extraordinarily dense metaphorical meaning a bridge can have is at its height, a density which today has vanished without being totally absent because a distant echo of traditional thought and view is still lasting.

Monika Dommann:
Documenting: Institutional Memory Practices in Science, Business and Administration, 1895-1945, 277-299

"Document", originally used as a juridical term for legal records and evidence, emerges as a new conceptual keyword for memory practices at the end of the 19th century. This article traces the visionary beginnings of the documentation movement by Paul Otlet and Henry La Fontaine through its culmination in the foundation of a central word memory agency (the International Institute for Bibliography) and its decline on the eve of the First World War to its transformation and professionalisation in the 1930s. It analyses how new working tools like the decimal classification, dossiers, abstracts, clippings, microfilm and photocopies initiate epistemic, technological and institutional shifts. It argues that these administrative tools are deeply embedded with novel concepts of temporality. The idea of acceleration combined with the requirement to remain up-to-date makes the course of development seem unpredictable and the future appears open. At the turn of the 20th century, documentation was praised as a new, flexible and future-oriented memory practice for science, business and administration. While documentation proved to be successful in modernising libraries, the effects on public administration practices remained marginal until the end of the Second World War and mainly limited to Dutch municipalities.

III. Forum

Konrad Ott:
Control of Nature as State Responsibility and the Role of Technological Visions: Philosophical Reflections on Historical Research, 303-316

Under a philosophical perspective as outlined by Martin Heidegger, this article analyses some guiding visions of technological development in Germany between 1800 and present. It advances some hypotheses and arguments about the history of guiding technological visions and about the role of the state in Germany. Special emphasis is given to recent literature on how technological visions modified the German landscape in the 19th century. It is argued that state administration gave strong support to specific "Baconian" visions of technologically induced modifications in land use. The tension between the "Baconian" ideal of rationalizing the overall use of land (agriculture, forestry, river systems) and the romantic vision of conserving nature is outlined. It is claimed that ecological, industrial and imperial guiding visions competed at the beginning of the 20th century, ending in the dominance of imperial visions. The article provides an explanation for why Germany adopted US American visions after 1945. It ends with some remarks about the present struggle between competing visions, claiming that the competition between high-tech-visions and ecological visions has some affinity with the situation one hundred years ago.

Peter Collin:
Legal-Administrative History of Technology: Publications on "Recht in der Industriellen Revolution" from the "Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte", 317-338

The four books under review here, written by members of a junior research group and recently published in a special series, deal respectively with technical norm setting, patent law, the regulation of infrastructures and the supervision of steam boilers in Germany in the era of Industrial Revolution until the First World War. The article is mainly interested in aspects of organisation, procedure and personnel. Law of technical regulation was created on different levels. In the second half of the 19th century the importance of international cooperation increased. Technical norms were put into international law or arranged by international conferences and associations, which influenced national debates and legislation. Private regulation became important, too, but it often developed in the shadow of governmental influence. Thus, norm setting revealed itself as a compromise. The growth of technological knowledge stimulated the organisational differentiation of public administration and led to specialized agencies. The necessity to integrate fragmented knowledge and harmonize divergent interests grew as well. Debates were embedded in national and international networks of officials, scientists, politicians and representatives of industry. The complex effects of administrative decisions in technologically sensitive fields of action demanded a more cooperative attitude of the authorities involved and thus a broader opening of the decision-making procedure to more persons concerned. The growing importance of scientific and technological knowledge in German economy also gave rise to question the traditional supremacy of jurists within the political-administrative system.

Wilfried Rudloff:
The Educational System and Educational Administration of the Federal Republic of Germany in Recent Historical Research, 339-358

A central issue in the international discussion on educational reform of the last two decades is the claim of giving schools and universities a higher degree of autonomy. The new importance attached to matters of administrative reform raises the question in how far recent research on the history of education in Germany after 1945 has thrown some light on the historical background of the current discussion. Examining publications on both the school and the university this article asks which new insights on the governance structure and the administrative problems of the German educational system the historical research of the last years has provided. Although there has been some interesting research concerning particularly the inner changes of the Gymnasium and the transformation of the university system there is still much left to been done concerning the history of German educational administration.