Ferdinand Jakob Redtenbacher was a prominent German-Austrian mechanical engineer. He is remembered for his role as the originator of mechanical engineering as a science in Germany is fundamental and of general interest since the introduction of science into engineering is a “sine qua none” for the development of a powerful high tech industry.
Background
Ferdinand Jakob Redtenbacher was born on July 25, 1809, in Steyr, Austria. Redtenbacher grew up in a city noted for its metal industry and sometimes called the “Birmingham of Austria.” His father, Alois Redtenbacher, a prosperous merchant and a man of considerable culture.
Education
Redtenbacher’s father did not favor the “humanist” education than conventional in the German upper classes and apprenticed his son, at age eleven, to a grocer (1820–1824). This experience developed in young Redtenbacher a sense of practicality and reliance upon self-education.
Redtenbacher’s decision to become an engineer was made in 1825 when he spent nine months as an assistant draftsman and surveyor in the Imperial Construction Department at Linz. Later in the same year, he entered the Polytechnikum of Vienna, where he studied mechanical engineering while also attending lectures at the university. His chief teachers were the engineer Johann Arzberger and the mathematician Andreas von Ettingshausen.
Career
After his graduation in 1829 from the Polytechnikum of Vienna, Redtenbacher served for four years as Arzberger’s assistant in the chair of mechanics and theory of machines. In 1834 he became teacher, and later professor, of applied mathematics at the Obere Industrieschule of Zurich. Redtenbacher found his ultimate position when the Polytechnische Schule of Karlsruhe invited him to occupy the chair of mechanical engineering. He moved to Karlsruhe in 1841 and served there until his death in 1863.
Redtenbacher’s significance lies in his role as an engineering educator. It was he more than anyone else who gave the German Technische Hochschule its characteristic structure, and it was he who conceived and propagated the particular blend of theory and practice that constituted the success of German engineering for the following century. His influence was equally great through lecturing, writing, and administration.
Redtenbacher’s literary production consisted mostly of textbooks. His own education had been theoretical, in the spirit of the École Polytechnique, and based on the study of Euler, Laplace, Poisson, Navier, and Poncelet. He soon realized that the theoretical insights contained in such works were difficult to apply in practice and that the practical engineers of the English tradition denied the relevance of theory. In all his activities Redtenbacher strove to bridge this gulf. In Zurich, during frequent visits to the water-wheel factory of his friend Caspar Escher, he recognized that the newly introduced water turbines presented an opportunity to demonstrate the utility of well-presented theory; a book on water turbines was his first work (1844).
His desire to convince practical engineers of the value of theory comes out even more clearly in his Resultat fur den Maschinenbau (1848), his best-known work. This is a handbook with tables and formulas for the solution of all common mechanical engineering problems, presented without mathematical derivation. This work was supplemented by his Principien der Mechanik (1852), which provided the theoretical background, and by Der Maschinenbau (1862–1865), which concentrated on the art of engineering design. Besides a number of specialized books on steam engines, locomotives, and caloric engines, Redtenbacher also wrote a work of philosophical intent, Das Dynamidensystem (1857), a kind of mechanistic theory of atomism based upon ideas of Dalton, Poisson, and Cauchy.
As Redtenbacher’s administrative influence increased - he was soon the most famous professor, and after 1857 he was director, of the Karlsruhe Polytechnic - he was able to put his own conception of engineering education into effect. His students were required to serve apprenticeships in industry and were instructed in advanced mechanics and mathematics in a manner different from that of the École Polytechnique in its practical motivation and its irreverence toward formal rigor.
Redtenbacher’s model was not the tightly regimented Ecole Polytechnique but the liberal German university with its system of lecturing, its separate faculties, and its academic freedom. The example of Karlsruhe had great influence; in the planning of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (founded 1855), for instance, it was Karlsruhe, not the Ecole Polytechnique, that served as the exemplar, and Redtenbacher as the principal adviser.