THE PROBLEM

Though ambitious and imaginative, the engineering society's synthesis of industry, scientific technology, and nationalism was not particularly stable. The tension between “shop” and “school” was not resolved by appeals to nationalism or by the postulate of the engineer's spontaneously materializing social superiority in the future. All the glowing rhetoric notwithstanding, the cleavage between professorial and entrepreneurial visions of engineering soon surfaced as the most dynamic element in the young profession's existence. The same rift also casts light on the problem of the engineers' failure to emerge as the new elite of industrial Germany, even as they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in transforming the country's society and economy.

The engineers' function of combining theory and practice may be thought of as taking place anywhere on the spectrum that connects theory at one end with practice at the other. In terms of technological progress, any point on this spectrum has the potential of becoming a successful engineering application. The social counterpart to this image would be an infinitely gradated occupational structure, reaching from the pure scientist to the self-taught mechanic. Something like this actually came into being. In the course of the nineteenth century the simple dualism expressed by the preindustrial social divide separating the scholar from the artisan gave way to a much more complex and diffuse occupational structure.