This was particularly true in the electrical industries, which were entirely the product of nineteenth-century science, and in the chemistry of the synthetic products of coal and oil.
The story of the incorporation of science into the capitalist firm properly begins in Germany. The early symbiosis between science and industry which was developed by the capitalist class of that country proved to be one of the most important facts of world history in the twentieth century, furnished the capability for two world wars, and offered to the other capitalist nations an example which they learned to emulate only when they were forced to do so many decades later. The role of science in German industry was the product of the weakness of German capitalism in its initial stages, together with the advanced state of German theoretical science.
It would be well for those who still do not understand the importance of German speculative philosophy to ponder, if not the example of Marx, of which they are so mistrustful, the concrete instance of modern science and its sharply contrasting careers in Germany on the one hand and in the United States and Britain on the other. “If much in contemporary Britain is to be explained in terms of Bentham's philosophy," writes P. W. Musgrave in his study of technical change in Britain and Germany, “so did Hegel have a great influence in Germany." Hegel's influence on the development of science was, as Musgrave points out, both direct and indirect. In the first instance, there was his role in the reform of Prussian education in the second decade of the nineteenth century. And next, there was the pervasive influence of German speculative philosophy, of which Hegel was the culminating thinker, in giving to German scientific education a fundamental and theoretical cast. Thus while Britain and the United States were still in the grip of that common-sense empiricism which stunts and discourages reflective thought and basic scientific research, in Germany it was these very habits of mind that were being developed in the scientific community.8 It was for this reason more than any other that the primacy in European science passed from France to Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century, while Britain in the same period remained mired in “what J. S. Mill called ‘the dogmatism of common sense' backed by rule of thumb."9
By 1870, the German university system could boast a considerable number of professors and lecturers, especially in the sciences, who, favored by light duties and well-equipped laboratories, could pursue basic research. Industrial research laboratories such as that maintained by Krupp at Essen were to become models for corporate research everywhere. The polytechnic institutes which had arisen during the 1830s and 1840s as an alternative to university education, and were to evolve into the celebrated Technische Hochschulen, attracted students from all over the world. And the apprenticeship system, stronger than elsewhere, was producing higher grades of mechanics in large quantities in those crafts required by the new industries.
The manner in which Germany anticipated the modern era is nowhere better illustrated than in the story of the German chemical industry: “It was Germany which showed the rest of the world how to make critical raw materials out of a sandbox and a pile of coal. And it was IG Farben which led the way for Germany. IG changed chemistry from pure research and commercial pill-rolling into a mammoth industry affecting every phase of civilization."1o
The leadership in chemistry and its industrial applications first belonged to France, especially after the cutting off of supplies of soda, sugar, and other products during the Napoleonic wars “promoted the French chemical industry and helped to give France chemical predominance for thirty years."" Thus Germans and others learned their chemistry in France in the first half of the nineteenth century; one of these students was Justus von Liebig, who, after studying with Gay-Lussac and other French chemists, returned to Germany to lay the foundations for modern organic, and especially agricultural, chemistry. One of Liebig's students, August Wilhelm von Hofmann, found his first teaching job in England, where in 1845 he became the first director ofthe Royal College of Chemistry. Hofmann had a particular interest in the chemistry of coal tar, a subject into which he led his best British pupils, among them William Henry Perkin. The earliest efforts of chemists had been merely to get rid of coal tar by boiling it off, but since it boiled in stages and at different temperatures, the result was a variety of tars which could, by chemical processing, be made to yield useful substances. Perkin, in 1856 (at the age of eighteen), derived the first true synthetic dye from aniline, a coal tar derivative; it could color fabrics and hold its color against washing, time, and sunlight. The importance of this discovery was the juncture it established between the older textile industry and the new steel industry which produced coal tar as a by-product of the use of coal in reducing iron.
Britain was, of course, the greatest textile and steel manufacturing country in the world, but British manufacturers turned a deaf ear to Perkin. They imported dyes from all over: indigo from the Far East, alizarin red from madder root, scarlets from cochineal and tin solutions. Germany, on the other hand, had coal but, having entered the race for colonies late, no access to the world's dyestuffs. Perkin turned to the German capitalists, and in so doing helped lay the foundation for the long German supremacy in the chemical industries. By the turn of the century, the six largest German chemical works employed more than 650 chemists and engineers, while the entire British coal tar industry had no more than thirty or forty.²\* Thus at a time when British and American industry used university-trained scientists only sporadically, for help on specific problems, the German capitalist class had already created that total and integrated effort which organized, in the universities, industrial laboratories, professional societies and trade associations, and in government-sponsored research a continuous scientific-technological effort as the new basis for modern industry. This was soon recognized by the more far sighted economists of that day (notably by Marshall and Veblen). Henry L. Gantt, after Taylor probably the foremost advocate and practitioner of scientific management of his time, wrote in 1910:
110 Labor and Monopoly Capital
The Scientific-Technical Revolution
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\* James B. Conant tells this story: “At the time of our entry into World War I, a representative of the American Chemical Society called on the Secretary of War, Newton Baker, and offered the service of the chemists in the conflict. He was thanked