Shipbuilding - Early Developments
Germany faced a variety of disadvantageous circumstances when she was overtaken by those two great revolutions of navigation - the transition from sails to steam as a means of propulsion, and the substitution of iron for wood as construction material. When the American watchmaker, Fulton, fitted his first vessel with Watt engines, in 1802, Germany was on the eve of the ordeal of the French occupation. In 1807, the year which saw the first line of paddle-boats plying on the Hudson River between New York and Albany, that hard probation had already commenced ; and Europe was only just beginning to recover from the effects of the Continental blockade as the Savannah opened a new area of transoceanic traffic by crossing the Atlantic under mechanical power.
A steam engine had been built in a German workshop as early as 1785, but the general adoption of machinery in the country was very slow, and it was 1822 before it was put to any other use than that of pumping, the Royal Porcelain Works at Berlin leading the way in applying it to other purposes. In 1840 it was estimated that there were only 500 stationary engines in the territories belonging to the German Customs Union. In England 5,000 steam engines had been at work as early as 1810. Of the 245 locomotives which were in service on the German railways in 1840, only 38 were of home manufacture, 166 having been made in England, 29 in the United States, and 12 in Belgium. These facts will make apparent how heavily handicapped Germany was in the great international competition of the machine age.
Moreover, at the commencement of that epoch, German shipbuilding was still comparatively in a very primitive stage of development. The Hanseatic Federation, always more concerned about commerce and carrying trade than about industry, severely discouraged the building of ships by its members for other countries. Repeatedly it issued prohibitions against the sale of vessels to foreigners, and it was only after much trouble that Dantzig, which was favored through its geographical situation with an abundant supply of wood suitable for shipbuilding, secured the final abolition of these restrictions.
During the eighteenth century several states of the German littoral, and especially Prussia and Hamburg, endeavored to stimulate shipbuilding by the offer of premiums, and in other ways, but their efforts availed little against the short-sighted selfishness of the trade guilds, which arbitrarily fixed wages and opposed the opening of new yards as well as the extension of old ones. Nothing could have been better calculated to prevent an industry from keeping pace with the times, and the advent of steam found German shipbuilders for the most part confining their activities to the rule-of-thumb construction of small coasters.
The first marine engine to be built in Germany seems to have been that supplied by the works of Egells of Berlin (which subsequently developed into the Germania yard, at Kiel, in the possession of the Krupp firm), for a small paddle passenger boat for use on the Elbe; and it was not till 1852 that Furchtenicht and Brock, later the Vulcan Works of Hamburg and Stettin, launched what appears to have been the first sea-going steamer of German construction. For the transition from wood to iron as the material of ships' hulls, Germany was also very badly prepared. Her builders found it exceedingly difficult to break with their traditional empiricism, and asked sceptically how iron was to float. Many of them paid dearly for their lack of adaptability, and were eventually obliged to close their yards.
Even if they had been willing to change with the times, they would have been unable to procure the necessary technical instruction in their own country. A school of shipbuilding was opened at Grabow, near Stettin, in 1831, but both its teaching and its equipment were of a very rudimentary character, and it was only after it had been transferred to Berlin (1861) and staffed by the naval constructors of the Ministry of Marine, that it can be said to have done much towards the fulfilment of the purposes with which it was inaugurated. Meanwhile German students who wished to acquaint themselves with the shipbuilding art were accustomed to attend the courses at the School of Naval Construction at Copenhagen.
Another drawback under which German shipbuilding suffered was the distance of her mineral fields and iron works from the sea-coast. The addition to the cost of the raw materials thus incurred goes far to explain why the German yards found it so difficult to compete with their rivals on the Tyne, Wear, and Tees, who obtained their plates at their very doors. At a later period, when the Government had opened its eyes to the importance to the Navy of a strong shipbuilding industry, the materials required by the yards were granted special rates on the railways; and in 1879, when Germany adopted protection, they were admitted into the country free of Customs duty. On the other hand, the policy of the trusts in selling abroad at lower prices than at home has done something to counteract the effects of these measures, and Holland has been able to develop her shipbuilding industry with the aid of German materials supplied to her at cheaper rates than those charged to the home consumer.
Germany was also under a disadvantage through her poverty in the industries auxiliary to shipbuilding. A large modern steamer, whether battleship or transatlantic liner, was the most highly developed product of industry that exists, many of its component parts being the finished articles of special trades. Several of these special trades did not exist in Germany when she first seriously turned her attention to the cultivation of her shipbuilding, whereas they had been firmly established in England for generations. For many years after they had acquired the ability to construct hulls and engines, the German shipbuilders were entirely dependent upon British manufacturers for boilers, anchors, chains, windlasses, and many other important features in the equipment of their vessels. It was in England, too, that most of the machines now used in the building of ships were invented and first brought into use ; and here, again, Germany was, and still is, though not to anything like the same degree as a couple of decades ago, in the position of a pupil who has yet to obtain full command over his implements.
The first German iron steamer was built at the Schichau Works at Elbing in 1855, and from 1859 to 1862 the machinery for wooden gunboats was supplied. Two iron steamers were launched by Klawitter at Dantzic in 1855, in which year also the Godefroy wooden shipbuilding yard, the later Reiherstieg yard, laid the keel of the first iron ocean-going steamer built on the North Sea coast. The foundation of the Germanischer Lloyd during the 1860s meant that a new influence was exercised upon German shipbuilding equivalent to that exercised by Lloyds upon the British mercantile marine It was not, however, until 1882 that the Hamburg-Amerika Linie inaugurated the serious competition between German and British builders by entrusting the building of the mail steamer Rugía to the Vulcan Shipbuilding and Engineering works at Stettin, and the Rhaetia to the Reiherstieg Shipbuilding and Engineering Works at Hamburg.
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