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How about winning the two world wars and taking all the scientist worth their name out of Germany? Remember that before WWII US of America was like China is to
by Htsthbjig 12y ago
How about winning the two world wars and taking all the scientist worth their name out of Germany?
Remember that before WWII US of America was like China is today, a very powerful industrializing country, but with a lack of formal education.
American products were inferior to German-Austrian-Swizzerland ones, but they were able to manufacture at a massive rate that Germanic countries were not able to compete.
After winning WWII, half of the great German scientists went to USA(west Germany), the other half went to Russia(east Germany).
German scientist were the ones that directed the Space programs both in US and Russia and educated native scientists along with other European ones that traveled to US as their countries were devastated after the war.
- ZenoArrow 12y ago"American products were inferior to German-Austrian-Swizzerland ones" Got some examples? Cars are a given, but I couldn't think of any others where the difference was that pronounced.
- WalterBright 12y agoAirplanes, aviation engines, jet engines, rockets
- leoc 12y agoOptics too, I think. The superiority of German optics was a big deal in WWII, though I'm not certain how they compared specifically to US products.
- junto 12y agoKarl Zeiss is still a big name in optics: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss
- leoc 12y agoYes, and not just them: http://www.gtai.de/GTAI/Content/EN/Invest/_SharedDocs/Downloads/GTAI/Info-sheets/Electronics/info-sheet-optics-photonics-industry-en.pdf http://www.gtai.de/GTAI/Content/EN/Invest/_SharedDocs/Downlo... It's definitely still an area of strength for Germany.
- ZenoArrow 12y agoAre you talking about pre-WW2 or post-WW2?
- WalterBright 12y agopre-WW2
- commandar 12y agoOn the other hand, German bombing sights were vastly inferior to what was available to the Allies, leading Germany to adopt a dive-bombing doctrine that lead to vastly inferior heavy bombers.
- mmanfrin 12y agoRemember that before WWII US of America was [...] with a lack of formal education. Source? American scientists were the only ones staffed on the Manhattan Project. Germans were focused on rocketry, and their work contributed heavily to the space program, but to say the US science was nonexistent seems a bit of a stretch.
- dubcanada 12y agoScience is not that cut and dry. It was German scientists who discovered nuclear fission.
- Ma8ee 12y agoAmericans like Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Emilio Segre, Leó Szilárd, James Chadwick or James Franck?
- leoc 12y agoIt's definitely an exaggeration to say this of the US in 1933 or '39. It might be pretty accurate to say of the US around 1870.
- refurb 12y agoI would have to agree. I know it's only one segment of science, but look at the US pharmaceutical industry prior to WW2. The discovery and mass manufacture of penicillin is only one example. I would argue that the German pharma industry at the time had a much longer lineage, but I would claim that the US had "a lack of formal education".
- orbifold 12y agoMost of the leading scientists of the Manhattan Project (e.g. Oppenheimer) had received some of their education at a european university or studied under someone who had.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- binarymax 12y agoReminds me of a "joke" that my Uncle told me once: An aircraft controller was sitting in a tower in Berlin-Tegel, and hears a request for landing by a Lufthansa pilot speaking German. The controller asks the pilot to please repeat the request in English. The pilot asks, "Why must a German pilot of a German aircraft landing in a German airport make a request in English?". A British Airways pilot, listening in on the conversation, interrupts: "Because you lost the war".
- mcherm 12y agoWhereas the REAL answer to the question is "So that the British Airways pilot, listening in, can understand the request and has an opportunity to realize that it might cross his flight path." The use of English as a common worldwide air-traffic control language is widely considered a step forward in air safety.[citation needed] The safety comes from the consistency, not from any particular property of English.
- commandar 12y ago>American products were inferior to German-Austrian-Swizzerland ones, but they were able to manufacture at a massive rate that Germanic countries were not able to compete. I think that's somewhat of an oversimplification. Yes, Germany couldn't compete with American industrial output, but a recurring theme with German weapon designs was a tendency to be very difficult to manufacture even if the industrial capacity was there. They were often beautifully engineered, but relied on complex operating systems that required enough precision machining to seriously rate limit their already strained production capacity.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoIndustrial output: at the WWI memorial in Kansas City, they state that for every car extant in the world at that time, there were 7 in the USA.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y agoIncluding the 7 in the US?
- mjevans 12y agoTranslating idiot: they implicitly meant 'in the rest of the world' instead of 'the world' (probably wrote it that way to begin with actually... and someone else probably 'made it shorter').
- Nitramp 12y ago> American products were inferior to German-Austrian-Swizzerland ones, but they were able to manufacture at a massive rate that Germanic countries were not able to compete. Keep in mind - WWII was won by Russia, not the US. Russia however did indeed out-produce Nazi Germany.
- refurb 12y agoKeep in mind that Russia helped beat back the Germans due to the US lend-lease agreement. Without that, I would argue Russia would have had a hell of a harder time.
- dominotw 12y agoThis has been done to death all over the internet but the general consensus seems to be the that Soviets would have had much harder time defeating the Nazi's without american help but would have eventually won the war regardless.
- refurb 12y agoNot to drag this on further, but it would depend on the role the US/UK played. If they remained neutral the entire time i don't know if Russia would have eventually won. Germany wasted a lot of energy defending the west coast of europe.
- rjsw 12y agoThe Soviet Union still made a fair number of T34s all by themselves.
- leoc 12y agoYes. The Soviets largely manufactured (and designed) their own combat vehicles, but everything from trucks on down came in vast quantities from the US. Meanwhile the mighty Wehrmacht was still mostly horse-drawn.
- orbifold 12y ago
- TTPrograms 12y agoI'm under the impression that a majority of the most prominent scientists were taken to USA post WWII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
- dreamweapon 12y agoOP recruited a lot of talented people, but (apart from von Braun) they certainly weren't Germany's "most prominent" scientists, by any stretch. A few Wikipedia-notables (largely due to their participation in OP), but hardly any household names, as it were.
- tim333 12y agoI think some people were embarrassed by German after WWII given that Germany's behaviour during WWII left something to be desired. My father and his parents emigrated from Germany, Anglicised their name and switched to English.
- dreamweapon 12y agoHow about winning the two world wars and taking all the scientist worth their name out of Germany? Umm, most scientists "worth their name" either fled, or opposed, or were killed (or like Hilbert, forced into silence) by the NS regime. Other than von Braun and Heisenberg, there just weren't that many titanic figures with influential positions, and who were genuinely (or even tacitly) pro-Nazi after 1940 or so (I'm not sure there were any, in fact). Of course there were still university professors, and all those technicians working for von Braun's program, and so on -- but the point is that they weren't people of great influence in the international community. So it is most likely the defection of top minds like Bohr and Einstein that led to Germany's continuing loss of dominance after WW II, rather than the number of lesser scientists who stayed behind to work on actual weapons projects.