Page 584 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo II

1224 XXXIX Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

initiative, resulting in inadequate and disparate, German states were financing an entire
array of institutions related to technical education. British entrepreneurs also didn’t want
to reveal their secrets”, they not only considered “learning from the books” deceitful
but also counterproductive, they had no intention on spending money on something that
wasn’t immediately useful, they considered technical education as useless, their own
career of success proved this (for example, the greatest success had been reached by
individuals such as Arkwright, Cartwright, Bessemer who formed themselves through
practice and not on the books). In many industrial fields a mysticism of “practical
experience” developed so that poorly paid “scientists” were set in sheds, refurbished
workshops unsuited for delicate experiments and tests. Not even close to the enormous
laboratories financed by German institutions. Furthermore, possibilities of work and
career prospective were low and unattractive for those having a degree in higher
scientific and technological studies, so talented ones tried to pursuit humanistic courses.
The mystique of practical experience results evident from this parliamentarian enquiry
of 1885:
“You all well know that in every spinning mill there’s a worker who spins better
than all the rest and when one needs a thinner thread it is to him that one turns to. Even
without technical education, there’s always such a worker, do you think that technical
schools for spinning workers could create a bunch of these workers”?
Germany on the other hand developed a real cult for technical culture with the
hochsculen seen with the same admiration as one would use for historical buildings.
In the end, Britain’s scholastic system, which could have been a great tool for mobility
and social promotion by means of talent, became a powerful factor of crystallization
intended to defend the barricades of the new establishment by assigning the monopoly of
knowledge and canons of behavior which society valued. In Germany the system aimed
at strengthening the social organism and economy not only by means of education, but
also by finding and training the most gifted elements.
The relative lack of technical competence and scientific information went along in
Britain with a similarly bewildering lack of venture capital.
There was capital but the potential domestic borrower didn’t want any. British
entrepreneurs, solid in his admiration for experience and in preferring practice to
theoretical experiments was inclined to mistrust novelties. In Germany innovation was
institutionalized: change was an integrated part of the system. A continuous flow of
little perfections that added all together brought forth a technological revolution. This
difference in receiving innovation was reinforced by the diversity of entrepreneurial
criteria. The British manufacturer remained faithful to classic calculation: aiming at
maximizing profit by investing in such a way that considering cost, risk and expected
sale offered a higher margin of profit compared to existing machinery. The meaning of
this monetary structure is more clearly seen if we compare it with German technological
criteria. Here a different arithmetic was true, maximizing not profit but technical
efficiency. For the German engineer, for the industrialist and the banker supporting him,
new was desirable, not so much for the profit but because it worked better.
In conclusion, The British had capital but those who canalized it and distributed it