Burkhard Beyer. _Vom Tiegelstahl zum Kruppstahl: Technik- und Unternehmensgeschichte der Gusstahlfabrik von Friedrich Krupp in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts_. Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen. Essen: Klartext, 2007. 623 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, indexes. EUR 44.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-89861-506-8.

Reviewed for H-German by Gregory Shealy, University of Wisconsin-Madison

No Recipe for Success?

Burkhard Beyer offers a well-researched and detailed account of the growth and technological accomplishments of the Krupp Factory from its founding in 1811 until 1860. His narrative draws heavily from the Krupp corporate archives and the personal letters of the Krupp family in creating a work that interweaves the biographies of the firm’s first two leaders alongside the factories they built and the development of their product lines. It is impossible for a review to recount comprehensively all of the firm’s specific technical advances, the development of new markets, and the numerous setbacks and successes that Beyer relates in his detailed and sophisticated work, and so this review focuses the two of the major questions he addresses. First, Beyer asks how Krupp Steel assumed its exalted position in the pantheon of German industry. Second, he asks why Krupp’s cottage foundry did not fail and instead became the quintessential success story of German industry in the nineteenth century. In wrestling with these two questions, Beyer comes to terms with the interconnection between steel’s technological development and the uneven growth of the Krupp factory.

Beyer begins by emphasizing the degree to which Krupp Steel would eventually be elevated to the status of a national institution. Hitler exhorted German youth to be “as hard as Krupp Steel” (P. 11). Krupp Steel was the raw material from which every German cannon was made, and was credited with a decisive role in securing Prussian victories in wars of unification. But Beyer posits that nothing was inherently better about Krupp than its English rivals. Instead, Krupp produced a different steel with different qualities and different potential. Indeed, the English example upon which Friedrich Krupp had modeled his product enjoyed several decisive advantages: it tended to be cheaper and was better suited for the production of certain finished goods such as blades.

To examine how Krupp Steel achieved its mythological reputation of superiority, Beyer begins by recounting the steel industry’s development during the eighteenth century. After the Englishman Benjamin Huntsman developed cauldron steel in the 1740s, the world was captivated by his ability to smelt solid steel from liquid. Initially, most observers felt that something about the technology was inherently English, and that British raw materials were the only ones suitable for this method. In 1799, the French chemist Jean François Clouet definitively refuted this notion, and with the refutation, the floodgates opened. Many minor businessmen–including Friedrich Krupp–entered the field in the hopes of emulating Huntsman’s accomplishment. At first, Friedrich hoped to find a secret method for making better steel by attaching himself to incompetent engineers claiming to be technical experts who could show him the secrets of the “English” manufacturing method. He also sought raw materials and special ingredients that would guarantee superior output. When these attempts failed, Friedrich realized he needed to carve a niche for himself by making a wide array of smaller technical changes in the manufacturing process, as well as finding finished products whose technical demands conformed to the distinct nature of the company’s steel. Ultimately, there was no single secret, only a series of small changes and decisions about which finished products Krupp’s output could best produce. Given the depth, homogeneity, and hardness of its steel, the firm sought to market its material to manufacturers whose products needed a deep, homogenous hardening (cannons, axles, and mills).

And yet, throughout the period Beyer studies, the mythology of a secret recipe continued in popular discourses about the steel. The company’s exponential growth after Friedrich’s death facilitated this mythos, as did Alfred Krupp’s insistence that his highly trained workforce keep their manufacturing process secret. But Alfred’s flamboyantly public experimentation with steel cannons in the 1850s cemented Krupp Steel’s mythic reputation. Because cannons had previously been made with brass, the homogeneity and hardness of Krupp Steel allowed for the construction of a steel block weighing over one ton, the amount of material necessary to manufacture one. Krupp achieved international acclaim when he displayed his cannon at the 1851 London exhibition. Throughout the 1850s, Alfred was obsessed with making bigger calibers and cheaper cannons. Armies purchased his weapons in small numbers during the 1850s, but in 1859, in response to an alliance between France and Piedmont, the Prussian War ministry began buying them in large quantities. Krupp thus became associated with a product that established his reputation as one of Europe’s most advanced arms manufacturers.

Beyer interestingly places the development of even this product–so central to Krupp’s mythos–firmly within an international context.

Shifting alliances caused Prussia to consider innovation; international acclaim at world exhibitions publicized Krupp cannons; and Krupp eagerly sought patents from all over the world. In showing the degree to which Krupp’s technological development depended on, reacted to, and borrowed from foreign competitors, Beyer’s transnational account shows how even this most “German” of factories, one draped in nationalistic imagery, was nonetheless firmly situated in an indisputably global context.

Given the centrality of technology to Beyer’s narrative, he unsurprisingly differs from earlier accounts of the firm’s ends as regards its business history and the reasons for its ultimate success.

Most previous researchers have stressed how little Friedrich accomplished during his tenure. He had supposedly left Alfred with no name, no profitability, and an empty building. Alfred Krupp himself often repeated this story. Beyer argues, however, that Freidrich’s tenure laid the groundwork for his son’s success. Friedrich bequeathed business contacts, an oven, and a source for raw materials. Moreover, the expansion of the Krupp Works partially depended on the credit mechanisms that Friedrich had devised. Most importantly, though, Alfred was able to learn from his father’s failures. He eventually recognized that the complicated process of steelmaking required attention to a variety of small technical hurdles. He therefore did not waste time hunting for a non-existent, sure-fire secret recipe that would ensure success. Beyer thus argues that Alfred’s commercial success was predicated on his father’s work. Like his father, Alfred understood his company’s commercial life not solely in terms of selling, but primarily as a series of technological problems to be met and finished products to be found. Beyer sees the economic and technological experience that Friedrich bequeathed to Alfred as essential to the eventual breakthrough.

In a project of this scope readers inevitably, if somewhat unfairly, wish for certain contextualizations that Beyer does not provide. He treats English steel as an ambiguous measuring stick for comparing Krupp, yet never really looks in any great detail at other specific competitors (German or English) for gauging the Krupp family’s decisions. As a result, the Krupp foundry sometimes takes on the appearance of an insular entity, alone in confronting these challenges.

Was the Essen factory an anomaly, or representative of its contemporaries? The reader waits for an answer. Moreover, at times Beyer devotes too much attention to Friedrich and Alfred Krupp. As a result, he largely overlooks the company’s middle management and salesmen and creates a “top-down” history. This oversight is especially perplexing, given Beyer’s sophisticated treatment of the _Innenleben_ of the factory. He wonderfully reconstructs factory social hierarchies, relates the factory’s rules, and looks at the pay and daily job duties of workers within the foundry. In comparison, his examination of the firm’s middle management is scant. Though briefly accounting for the company’s accountants and salesmen prior to 1835, he never engages systematically their role in shaping the company’s strategy. One gets the impression of the two Krupps as autonomous entrepreneurs who made decisions largely without consulting others in the organization. This tendency likely arises from the degree to which Beyer relies on the entrepreneurs’ personal correspondences, but even so, I wanted to learn more about the agency such less-than-famous individuals exercised in informing the decisions of the company’s leaders.

The overall strengths of Beyer’s work far outweigh these minor issues, however, and the author has written an excellent work useful to specialists of technological, industrial, and business history. Anyone researching the Krupp firm would be well served to take account of Beyer’s highly instructive lesson, which underscores the degree to which the company’s technological systems and manufacturing processes were inherent to its ultimate success. Beyer’s book will likely be regarded as the definitive work on the formative years of the Krupp Works, as well serving as an important model for historians trying to accord the history of technology a central role within the metanarratives of industrialization, changing factory life, and commercial expansion.

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Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (June 2008)