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Abstract
Only a few late nineteenth and early twentieth century academic physicists sought to develop, produce and market technical inventions. This paper examines a few pre-World War I scientists from the German speaking world who committed to ‘full blown entrepreneurship’ and compares them to others who invented and patented but did not pursue a business enterprise. It shows that the turn to entrepreneurship required a combination of intellectual, technical, social and individual factors. Connections between their scientific research and teaching and new technological fields related to science opened possibilities and allowed scientists to exploit their laboratory and theoretical expertise to develop devices and methods. The marketability of these inventions was a central factor in moving them to an industrial career. This turn resulted from pushes within the academia and pulls towards industry: low professional prospects and financial difficulties in the university and/or attractive offers by industrialists.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Gabriel Galvez-Behar, Anna Guagnini and Joris Mecelis for organizing the conference on academic entrepreneurs in Ghent (March 2015) and this collection of essays, which directed my attention to the issues in this article, and for their thoughtful suggestions and comments on my work in its various stages, and to an anonymous referee.
Notes
1. Guagnini’s survey of the British case and my own search of German speaking academics point at less than a dozen full blown entrepreneurs among the physicists in each country in the four decades before the First World War. I do not regard academic-inventors, like Walther Nernst, who actively looked for companies that would develop and produce their inventions, but neither established a company not went into partnership, as full-blown entrepreneurs. Kormos Barkan, Walther Nernst and the transition to modern physical science.
2. For example, out of the four main examples of full-blown entrepreneurship by academic scientists mentioned in Guagnini’s article three fits this move from patenting (William Thomson, Silvanus Thompson and the partners Barr and Stroud. It fits less the path of Lodge, although he also used his patents. I exclude the case of Fleming Jenkin since he had begun his commercial activity before he became a university teacher). See also the cases discussed in this article.
3. Etzkowitch, ‘Research groups as “quasi-firms”’.
4. Here I discuss five cases of academic physicists and chemical physicists who became full blown entrepreneurs in the German speaking world in the decades before the First World War. There are probably few further examples (probably of less successful entrepreneurs) that I have not recognized in my survey.
5. Maestrejuan, ‘Inventors, Firms, and the Market for Technology during the Kaiserreich, 1877–1914.’
6. On American entrepreneurs see Morris, ‘Commerce and Academe.’
7. In the terms used by Marcovich and Shinn for example, this was a transitory science and technology regime. Marcovich and Shinn, ‘Regimes of Science Production.’ On the different regimes of science and the distinction between science and technology at the time, see also the introduction to this collection and Mirowski, Science-mart, 87–92.
8. Ibid., 47, 49.
9. Fox and Guagnini, Laboratories, Workshops and Sites.
10. Smith and Wise, Energy and Empire, 705. Inventing and patenting scientific instruments was common also among scientists who were not engaged in devices and invention beyond the laboratory like Jacques and Pierre Curie, Katzir, Beginnings of Piezoelectricity, 23. For the use of patents to protect a scientific method see for example Urey in a letter from 3 May 1933, cited in Heilbron and Seidel, Lawrence and his Laboratory, 112.
11. Heilbron and Seidel, Lawrence and his Laboratory, 111.
12. Heilbron and Seidel, Lawrence and his Laboratory, 112.
13. Shaul Katzir, ‘Scientists as occasional inventors,’ a talk at the Society for the History of Technology, 50th Conference, (Lisbon, October 2008).
14. Cady, ‘Saving Ancestors,’ 1963; Cady, ‘A Machine for Compounding Sine Curves,’; Cady, Wire-connector, US1093972 patent, filed 11.7.1913; McGahey, ‘Harnessing Nature’s Timekeeper,’ 47–49.
15. Katzir, ‘War and Peacetime Research on the Road to Crystal Frequency Control’; Katzir, ‘From Ultrasonic to Frequency Standards.’
16. Cady, ‘Problems Confronting the Independent Inventor,’ manuscript of a talk 6.8.1963, in AIP archives, 1.
17. By purchasing power 50,000 USD of the late 1920s worth about 650,000$ of 2015. It was probably about ten years of Cady’s salary. McGahey, ‘Harnessing Nature’s Timekeeper,’ 59. David B. Potts, Wesleyan University, 1910–1970, 136, 190.
18. Unfortunately, the sources here, as in other cases described below, do not provide figures for revenue from patents and companies and salaries (needed for comparison). I refer to more precise data when is provided.
19. Katzir, ‘War and Peacetime Research on the Road to Crystal Frequency Control.’
20. Quote from Süsskind, ‘Pierce, George Washington,’ 605; Saunders and Hunt, ‘George Washington Pierce.’
21. Arons came from a wealthy banking family and could easily support himself with his own capital.
22. Wolff, ‘Die Quecksilberdampflampe von Leo Arons’; Arons, ‘Ueber einen Quecksilberlichtbogen’; Wolff, ‘Leo Arons – Physiker und Sozialist.’
23. That Aron was a Jew reduced his chances to get a position and might have motivated him to pursue a career in technology. Katzir, ‘Aron’s Electricity Meters,’ 476, 479. Katzir, ‘From Academic Physics to Invention and Industry,’ 13. This was probably not the case with Arons, whose political activity as a social democrat stood as a center of a public controversy.
24. Unlike Pierce, who had a secured academic position, Aron could not stop publishing. Yet, the work on technology drifted him away from his expertise in theoretical physics.
25. Katzir, ‘Hermann Aron’s Electricity Meters’; Katzir, ‘Scientific Practice for Technology’; Katzir, ‘From Academic Physics to Invention and Industry.’
26. D’Ans, ‘Carl Freiherr Auer von Welsbach,’ A59–92; Müller, ‘Carl Auer von Welsbach.’
27. The two elements: ytterbium and lutetium, were separated and identified independently by Georges Urbain and Charles James. Adunka, ‘Carl Auer von Welsbach’; id. ‘Carl Auer von Welsbach und die Geschichte der von ihm gegründeten Fabrik in Atzgersdor.’
28. Braun began getting substantial amount after the establishment of Telekom in 1903, which promised him ¼% of the company’s capital annually. In 1913 (which might have been the last year in which he received money from the company) he received 34,000 RM from the company, while his university salary was of 9,000 plus 1,500 RM ‘supplement’, Hars, Ferdinand Braun, 117, 167–9, 214–5.
29. Kurylo and Susskind, Ferdinand Braun; Hars, Ferdinand Braun, 130–181.
30. Feffer, ‘Ernst Abbe, Carl Zeiss, and the Transformation of Microscopical Optic,’ 38.
31. Maestrejuan, ‘Inventors, Firms, and the Market for Technology during the Kaiserreich, 1877–1914,’ 20. Abbe could still patent his inventions in other states.
32. Shinn Research-Technology and Cultural Change, 1–40.
33. Feffer, ‘Microscopes to Munitions,’ 113.
34. Feffer, ‘Microscopes to Munitions.’
35. Cahan, ‘The Zeiss Werke and the Ultramicroscope.’
36. ‘Science based industry’ means here an industry whose techniques depend among others on scientific empirical and technological findings made before the development of the particular methods. This does neither deny a contribution (usually crucial) of traditional techniques and technological research and development nor a flow of knowledge from technology into science.
37. Microscopes manufacturing was clearly a field based on artisan techniques. Feffer, ‘Microscopes to Munitions.’ Arguably, gas lighting was based on scientific knowledge in its early stages, but that was no longer the case in Auer’s time.
38. Hong, Wireless: From Marconi’s Black Box to the Audion.
39. The role of instrument as mediators between science and technology has been pointed out among others in Hong, ‘Historiographical Layers in the Relationship between Science and Technology.’
40. Shinn, Research-Technology and Cultural Change.
41. As seen in Guagnini’s contribution to this volume, Thomson’s unique combination of science and entrepreneurship stands out also in the British context, with a closer case of William Stroud, but the latter eventually left the university for his business. The unique place of Thomson makes the attempts to generalize from his case (like that of Marcovich and Shinn) quite problematic.
42. Jonathan Zenneck quoted in Kurlyo and Susskind, Ferdinand Braun, 127; Goldstein (on Aron) ‘Aus vergangenen Tagen der Berliner Physikalischen Gesellschaft,’ 41. Cady’s letter to president of the Academy of Applied Science Robert H. Rines, 25.10.1963 (Cady papers in Archive Center, National Mueum of American History), Arons’ letter to Ludwig Darmstaedter, 29.11.1910, quoted in Wolf, ‘Aronslampe,’ 346.