From Goethe to Semiconductors
A Prussian Industrial Vision
Sometimes essays should be short and sweet. We’re experimenting with a new style of essay for the next few months, one that is light and meandering in its scope. This series will act as breadcrumbs for future, longer pieces.
WE WERE READING Ed Conway’s fascinating book “Material World” when we came across this interesting little snippet about Prussia’s burgeoning glass industry:
“Meanwhile, in Prussia, the state provided financial support and guaranteed orders for the nascent glass sector, a kind of nineteenth-century industrial strategy led, strange as this may sound, by the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Schott, Abbe and Zeiss were given time and support to experiment.”
Industrial strategy led by Goethe? That was enough to get us curious.
What follows is our attempt to track the why and the how of Goethe’s vision.
Around 1814, all-around polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe made a suggestion in his autobiographical writings. He demanded a fusion of physics and chemistry1:
“Would it be possible to bring a capable physicist to Frankfurt,” he wrote, “who would unite with the chemist...”
Goethe wanted the spirit of science to go into uncharted directions, which he envisioned would happen if the scientists from these two siloed fields would unite. In the presence of necessary instruments and a bustling city, science would go into a noble direction.
By 1824, inspired by Goethe's comment, a group of 11 Frankfurters started the Physikalische Verein — a physical association of scientists and interested citizens2.
By this time, a deep network of knowledge and ideas was already bustling in Prussia. Goethe's ideas had already inspired others. One of them was Karl August. Son of the Duchess of Weimar, and later Duke himself — Karl became friends with Goethe around 1774. He would go on to become a patron to many innovators and artists.
Neighbouring Jena was also on the rise. Home to the University of Jena, it was fast becoming a place where scientists would work on cutting edge fields. One of these men, Friedrich Körner, would go on to establish the foundation of optics and glass in Jena.
Funded by the Duke, Körner's laboratory and furnace was the home of astounding glass research3. Working alongside local talent, including a professor of chemistry at the university (appointed by the Duke and Goethe) Körner experimented with different types of glass, with the aim of perfecting them for various scientific use-cases.
By 1834, Körner would take on a young eighteen-year old Carl Zeiss as his apprentice.
Eventually Carl would open his own workshop by 1846, and unknowingly set the stage for the machine age.
Zeiss would continue to work on optics and microscopes. His partnership with Ernst Abbe was also legendary — Ernst had passed through the Jena network and the Physikalische Verein and naturally crossed paths with Zeiss. From 1872 onwards, all of Zeiss’s microscope optics were based on calculations made by Abbe4.
Thus Zeiss, Abbe, and other collaborators gave birth to ZEISS. This company now makes the optics used to bend light as part of the lithography process in ASML's machines5. Without this essential component, advanced semiconductors would not be possible today!
This little exploration makes one thing clear: networks of knowledge and patronage which support the development of new ideas can cause amazing discoveries to proliferate. There are countless examples of such networks throughout history (the Medicis, Silicon Valley and DARPA, even ASML’s early Dutch-based network around Phillip’s R&D engineering culture). Each of them has led to world-changing innovations.
We wonder what new networks of this kind are growing today.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Sämtliche Werke. Autobiographische Schriften. Band III. Insel Verlag, Leipzig 1909, S. 297
Asianometry has a cool video on this.