Georg von Arco (1869-1940) -- Ingenieur, Pazifist, Technischer Direktor von Telefunken: Eine Erfinderbiographie (review)

The pioneers of radio in Germany include such familiar names as Heinrich Hertz, Adolf Slaby, Ferdinand Braun, Alexander Meissner, Max Wien, and Robert von Lieben. Count Georg von Arco, another crucial figure in the story of German wireless, has largely been forgotten. But thanks to the efforts of Margot Fuchs, archivist at the Technical University of Munich, Arco can now reclaim his rightful place among those credited with establishing radio on the European continent.

First and foremost, Fuchs has structured the work as a biography of Arco, long-term technical director of the Telefunken company and a left-wing notable, interwoven with the story of radio in general and Telefunken in particular. Formed in 1903, Telefunken was a subsidiary of the competing Siemens and AEG firms and resulted from their decision to pool mutually blocking patents in a jointly owned R&D venture. It quickly emerged as the principal developer and marketer of radio technology in Germany, a position it did not relinquish until after World War II.

Telefunken owed its strong position at home and abroad in no small measure to the technological and inventive genius of Arco. Born into a traditional, aristocratic family, he was drawn to machines from an early age. He tried and rejected medicine and the military before settling on engineering, studying with Adolf Slaby and Alois Riedler, two of the leading engineering professors during the Wilhelmine era. It was Riedler who first detected Arco's potential as an inventor; Slaby took him on as his assistant to help reproduce (and improve upon) Marconi's wireless demonstrations of May 1897.

Fuch's second organizing principle is based on Arco's talents as a practical electrician; on his energy as an inventor, especially with regard to transforming the dubious laboratory schemes of others into large and reliable systems; and on his quest for bridging ever-greater distances, which culminated in the massive Nauen site west of Berlin. She uses Thomas Hughes's typology concerning the different functions of independent and corporate inventors, along with Arco's own retrospective reflections on the "Psychology of the Modern Inventor" (1931), to explore the changing nature of the inventor during the first half of the twentieth century. Specifically, Fuchs is interested in using Arco's example to highlight the tensions and intermediate forms between the stereotype of subordinate and routine corporate R&D and that of the independent inventor as modern cultural hero.

Fuchs begins by recounting Arco's early life, his turn to engineering during the mid-1890s, and his deepening involvement with Slaby and AEG before 1903. She discusses the "Slaby-Arco System" of early spark transmission and coherer reception (which copied, and lagged behind, Marconi's progress). She also reviews other early radio experimentation by Marconi in Britain, Alexander Popov in Russia, and Ferdinand Braun and his investors in Germany. Finally, she describes the competition between the Braun-Siemens and Slaby-Arco systems in 1902, their respective alliances with the German army and navy, and the resolution of the ensuing gridlock by a mandate from Kaiser Wilhelm II and the formation of Telefunken.

The second chapter centers on Arco as professional inventor, particularly his technological creativity and role as corporate engineering manager at Telefunken from 1903 into the 1920s. Fuchs shows Arco as the driving force behind the development of Telefunken's unique system of "sounding sparks," the quenched-spark (Löschfunken) technology based on Max Wien's discovery of the underlying principle. This chapter also covers Arco's investigation and rejection of Valdemar Poulsen's arc to generate continuous waves; his decision to develop instead the high-frequency alternator as the best way to produce continuous-wave long-distance transmission; and, finally, his 1913 decision to embrace the three-element vacuum tube, invented in Germany by Lieben.

In the final two chapters, the author discusses Arco's involvement in German public life—his participation in the Monist movement...