Revolutionary Innovation

Executive Summary of Forgotten Creators

Chapter 1: Why We Should Remember What Was Forgotten. As shown in this chapter, the world does not appear to be producing truly revolutionary scientific innovations at the same rate it once did (certainly if measured in terms of revolutionary innovations per researcher or per amount of funding). Instead the academic research sector seems increasingly fixated on maximizing its rate of publishing papers regardless of their quality, redundancy, or relevance; the corporate research sector appears more and more focused on very low-risk, immediately marketable products; and the government research sector seems increasingly incapacitated by bureaucracy and budget cuts. Rather than trying to create solutions for these modern systemic problems from scratch, one may study what conditions facilitated the successes of innovators in other times and places.

Many people like to believe that their own country has been the most innovative, and indeed, inventions and discoveries have been made around the world and throughout history. Yet as illustrated by the examples in this book, the highest concentration (or at the very least, one of the highest concentrations) of revolutionary innovations appears to have come from scientists and engineers who were trained in the predominantly German-speaking central European research world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unfortunately, the history of those innovations has been significantly obscured by World Wars I and II, the Cold War, language barriers, and cultural stereotypes, leaving the modern world less aware of the details and less able to fully reproduce the research conditions that led to so many revolutionary achievements. Therefore the objectives of this book are to:

– Elucidate the major creators and creations produced by that German-speaking world in various fields of science and engineering (Chapters 2–9).

– Determine the systemic factors that promoted so much revolutionary innovation in that particular place and time (Chapter 10).

– Evaluate the previous successes and failures of transferring that scientific knowledge and those systemic methods to other research systems (Chapter 11).

– Propose methods by which modern governments, organizations, and/or individuals could better emulate the success of the earlier German-speaking research world (Chapter 12).

A variety of study scopes and methods would be possible and enlightening, but this book focuses on revolutionary innovators who were educated in that earlier German-speaking world (defined herein as German, Austrian, and Swiss researchers; eastern European and other researchers who trained in the German-speaking world; and scientists and engineers in the closely coupled Dutch research system) between approximately 1800 and 1945, as well as their subsequent careers (in some cases to the dawn of the twenty-first century). As explained in detail in this chapter, this study does not argue that the modern research system has produced no revolutionary innovations, but rather that it can and should be improved. This study is not intended to support nationalist or ethnic bragging rights, the Third Reich, or any notion that research conditions in the German-speaking world were ever perfect. At best this book can only give a concise overview of a vast field encompassing the actions of thousands of scientists and engineers across many countries over a period of two centuries, as well as investigations into that time period by countless subsequent scholars.

The German-speaking world produced astonishing numbers of revolutionary innovators and innovations in a wide range of fields, as enumerated in eight chapters:

Chapter 2: Creators and Creations in Biology and Medicine. Advances from genetics to antibiotics.

Chapter 3: Creators and Creations in Chemistry and Materials Science. Breakthroughs from color film to synthetic rubber.

Chapter 4: Creators and Creations in Earth and Space Science. Discoveries about the universe from continental drift to stellar distances.

Chapter 5: Creators and Creations in Physics and Mathematics. Revolutionary ideas from relativity to quantum mechanics.

Chapter 6: Creators and Creations in Electrical and Electromagnetic Engineering. Inventions from semiconductors to computers.

Chapter 7: Creators and Creations in Mechanical Engineering. Systems from automobiles to submarines.

Chapter 8: Creators and Creations in Nuclear Science and Engineering. Reactions and applications from fission to fusion.

Chapter 9: Creators and Creations in Aerospace Engineering. Vehicles from jet planes to moon rockets.

Chapter 10: Creating the Creators. Based on evidence presented in this chapter, a number of specific factors within the German-speaking world promoted revolutionary innovation:

1. Science was socially glorified, from children’s activities and amateur science clubs to prestigious jobs and government-lauded scientific heroes.

2. A century-long steady exponential increase in funding gave scientists, employers, and sponsors much more freedom to pursue higher-risk and/or longer-term research.

3. Many Ph.D. students were encouraged to propose their own research topics and to pursue them independently.

4. Scientists received their final degrees nearly a decade earlier in life, and independent research funding up to two decades earlier, than modern scientists do.

5. Scientists who made major contributions to multiple disciplines, and fraternization among scientists from different disciplines, were much more common than in the modern world.

6. Instead of peer review, an autocratic yet farsighted scientific management culture of “enlightened despots” granted stable jobs and funding to the most promising creators and creations.

7. Both scientists and sponsors used a systems analysis approach to focus on the most important problems and the most effective innovations to address those problems.

8. The lack of natural resources spurred the creation of a wide range of innovative alternatives.

9. International rivalry (both economic and military) was a powerful driving force for innovation.

10. German-speaking companies were less afraid of losing their own innovations to each other than of being outstripped by foreign countries, giving them a strong motivation to innovate.

Chapter 11: Immortalizing the Creations and Forgetting the Creators. As documented in this chapter, the modern world eagerly adopted the creations of the earlier German-speaking world, yet ultimately largely forgot both the creators and the systemic approaches that had made such creations possible. Over the course of waves that occurred before, during, and after the Third Reich, all of the creations, most of the creators, and some of the systemic approaches were transferred from the German-speaking world to the United States and other countries in a German scientific diaspora. Those countries spent many decades fully perfecting and mass-producing the innovations that had been created by the earlier German-speaking world, resulting in our modern world of jet aircraft, electronics, and pharmaceuticals. Most of the creators who had already died or who remained in German-speaking areas were largely forgotten by the non-German-speaking world, which often mistakenly attributed their creations to whichever non-German-speaking individuals or organizations had acquired their technical information. Most of the creators who emigrated out of German-speaking areas led well-funded but quiet lives perfecting their creations and were also ultimately forgotten. Especially during the 1940s–1960s, the United States and other countries practiced some of the general approaches that had made the earlier German-speaking world successful, thereby cultivating new innovators and innovations of their own.

By the 1970s, most of the German-speaking creators had retired or died, their creations had been refined to the point of diminishing incremental returns, and global research systems had abandoned most of the German-like practices they had adopted, significantly reducing their efficiency at producing entirely new innovators and innovations. The Cold War as a strong motivating force for innovation had also relaxed around 1970, and any truly revolutionary new innovators (or innovations) that were produced by the global research system found it increasingly difficult to obtain proper support as time went by. From the 1990s onward, with the Cold War over and officials both public and private haggling over every research dollar while spending heavily or even wastefully in other areas, the academic, corporate, and government research sectors each became increasingly dysfunctional in their own ways.

Chapter 12: Learning from the Creators. Based on the successes of the earlier German-speaking world, this final chapter offers lessons that could be applied at any scale from the national level down to an individual’s career. At a nationwide or statewide level, the following policies could improve the ability of the modern scientific system to produce revolutionary innovators and innovations:

1. The social and financial status of science research should be elevated greatly. Better quality and greater variety of educational science experiment kits for children should be produced and more widely advertised and used. Student science competitions (especially ones like science fairs that emulate real scientific research) should be given much greater emphasis, and the winners of those competitions should be very publicly praised and rewarded. The salaries and working conditions of science and other teachers should be improved in order to attract very talented people to those positions and to recognize and reward the most effective teachers. Important scientific discoveries and inventions, as well as the people responsible for them, should be given much more coverage in television news programs, movies, newspapers, magazines, and popular internet sites.

2. If the amount of funding and permanent job positions better matched the number of graduating students and career researchers (by increasing funding wherever possible, or otherwise by limiting the number of students going into research), scientists would be able to spend much more of their time and energy doing productive research, and much less of their time and energy pursuing elusive funding and positions. It would also be much more acceptable to sponsors, institutions, and the scientists themselves for researchers to pursue longer-term work without an immediately demonstrable payoff, as well as more innovative higher-risk work that would be less guaranteed to yield results than very incremental, low-risk work.

3. Science students should be trained from an early age to be very creative and very self-reliant researchers. Students should be strongly encouraged to select their own research topics and methods. Research advisors should provide as much advice and assistance as is necessary (but only what is necessary) to ensure that their students are pursuing productive research topics using suitable methods. Research advisors should not use students as unpaid or low-wage labor to benefit the advisors’ own research grants or lists of publications.

4. The average age at which scientists receive their final degree and obtain independent research funding should be reduced back toward their early to mid-twenties. That would greatly increase the number of productive working years during which those scientists have the greatest creativity, the most energy, and the fewest non-research obligations.

5. The system should train and reward at least some percentage of multidisciplinary scientists who can make major contributions in multiple fields, apply knowledge and methods from one field to another, and use their broader view to guide fields away from less productive areas and toward more productive ones. All scientists should be strongly encouraged to make their research comprehensible to people outside their field, and to interact with scientists in other fields in a variety of environments, in order to cross-pollinate ideas among different fields.

6. While there is certainly a place for methodical peer review, entrusting virtually all funding and hiring decisions to peer review risks overlooking those creative new scientists and ideas that are so revolutionary that they cannot easily and immediately get broad consensus from the scientific status quo. The modern research system should set aside some percentage of research funding to be allocated by “enlightened despots” who are good at identifying potentially revolutionary innovators and innovations. Such enlightened despots should have the clear authority to grant financial and political support to any people or projects they deem worthy, and to grant that support for many years without having to demonstrate that there is an immediate payoff, or even that all funded research will eventually pay off. Wherever possible, any remaining peer review should be done by reviewers unaware of the researchers’ names and affiliations, so that they can more fairly evaluate the actual research in question.

7. By using systems analysis, key decision makers in government, industry, and academia could help focus more resources on the most important problems and potential solutions. If individual scientists were taught to practice systems analysis, they could use that method to guide their careers and their research projects in more promising directions, and to ensure that no potentially useful regions of the conceptual “phase space” had been overlooked.

8. In the face of dwindling natural resources and the rising long-term costs of climate change, pollution, and waste, government-funded programs and government regulations for industrial programs should prioritize the development of very innovative methods of reducing the consumption of natural resources and minimizing the creation of waste products.

9. Peaceful economic rivalry and regional pride could constructively motivate nations or states to accelerate their research programs. Regional high-tech centers could promote interactions among programs they contain, and rival high-tech centers could compete for the best scientists, projects, research funding, and economic income from resulting inventions and products.

10. Companies should view very innovative, longer-term research and development (R&D) as a worthwhile investment in staying ahead of competitors, not a financial liability whose resulting products could be copied by competitors that did not fund their own R&D. Improved tax, patent, regulatory, or other government incentives could make it much more lucrative for the first company that develops any given major innovation, and/or less lucrative for copycats.

In addition to the above lessons for national or state research systems, Chapter 12 also offers additional lessons for individual companies, organizations, and laboratories; for individual scientists and engineers; and for scholars who study past, present, and potential future innovation systems.

The appendices focus on some potentially quite advanced creations of the German-speaking world during World War II that are currently much less well understood by modern historians, and whose complexities necessitate a considerably longer treatment than could be given in Chapters 2–9:

Appendix A presents archival documents that suggest that Germany had the largest and most advanced biotechnology programs in the world at that time, was developing neural interfaces to control prosthetic limbs and weapons systems, possessed a significant offensive program in biological warfare, and discovered advanced V-series nerve agents during the war.

Appendix B gives an overview of evidence that transistors and other microelectronics innovations may have originated in the German-speaking world, and that information on those technologies may have been transferred to and exploited by Allied countries after the war.

Appendix C presents documents that appear to show that the German-speaking world developed and tested a variety of directed-energy technologies, including particle beams, electromagnetic pulse weapons, major steps toward lasers, focused sound waves for applications ranging from ultrasound imaging to acoustic weapons, and electromagnetic railguns.

Appendix D provides considerable evidence that Germany may have developed and even successfully tested fission bombs during the war (which would have made it the first country in world history to possess nuclear weapons), and that it may have even had a megaton-level hydrogen bomb in an advanced stage of development when the war ended.

Appendix E presents archival documents that appear to show that wartime Germany made considerable progress toward developing the aerospace technologies that have formed the “nuclear triad” for most of the postwar decades: intercontinental jet bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and submarine-launched missiles.

Although the evidence in the appendices does not constitute conclusive proof, it should prompt further archival research to clarify the true extent of those wartime programs.

The Bibliography of over 450 pages covers relevant books, articles, government reports, and archival documents.




Keywords: Operation Paperclip, Operation Overcast, Operation Crossbow, Operation Hydra, Operation Osoaviakhim, Operation Lusty, T-Force, Alsos, Azusa, BIOS, CIOS, FIAT, JIOA, OSS, CIC, SHAEF, OSRD, NDRC, Manhattan Project, Leslie Groves, Vannevar Bush, Donald Putt, Samuel Goudsmit, Hans Kammler, Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, Eugen Sänger, Irene Bredt, Hermann Teichmann, Hans von Ohain, Herbert Wagner, Rolf Engel, Werner Heisenberg, Siegfried Flügge, Kurt Diebner, Manfred von Ardenne, Paul Harteck, Georg Stetter, Erich Schumann, Walter Trinks, Hubert Schardin, Walther Gerlach, Vergeltungswaffen, Wunderwaffen, Vemork, Farm Hall, heavy water, atomic bombs, H-bombs, nuclear triad, V-1, V-2, A-4, A-9/A-10, V-101, Silbervogel, stealth, lasers, particle beams, particle accelerators, printed circuits, transistors, integrated circuits, LEDs, superconductivity, biotechnology