Oskar von Miller, 1855-1934: Eine Biographie (review)

After surfing the Internet, Wilhelm Füßl writes that he soon was up against more than 20,000 entries for Oskar von Miller, a number about equal to that for Emil Rathenau, who influenced von Miller, though far short of that for Thomas Edison, who was likewise an influence. Von Miller first visited Edison in 1878, just after he formed a partnership with Rathenau, the Deutsche Edison Gesellschaft, which resulted in Berlin's first public power station in 1885. Füßl calls Edison an inventing entrepreneur and Rathenau a managerial one, while describing von Miller as an organizer or an engineering entrepreneur, and eventually a system builder.

Actually, Füßl depicts von Miller as an intellectual founding father and moving spirit with widespread contacts and lifelong friendships with such men as Rudolf Diesel, Marcel Deprez, and later on with Hugo Junkers, whom he in some ways resembled. Von Miller was one of the very early independent consulting engineers, educated at the Munich Polytechnic and commencing his career as an official with the Bavarian state railways. He became neither a pathbreaking inventor nor an entrepreneur in the strict sense. But he was imbued with two basic visions: the development of a nationwide grid for electrical supply, and the promotion of popular curiosity about technology as the essential base for prosperity and progress. The former he got during his visit to Edison's laboratories, the latter on his visit to the Science Museum in South Kensington, London—a vision confirmed by an 1881 visit to the Paris International Electrical Engineering Exhibition and the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers.

In five chapters, Füßl surveys von Miller's life and career in full detail, basing his narrative on an array of sources, many of them previously ne-glected. He also considers the life and career of Oskar's father Ferdinand, a master metal founder with a transatlantic reputation who conferred the somewhat artistic though entrepreneurial legacy that his son would inherit. Later on, it was through the close family connection of his brothers Fritz and Wilhelm with the rich Munich brewing family of the Sedlmayers that von Miller to a large extent funded his pioneering electrification projects. At an electrical engineering exhibition in Frankfurt in 1891, he debuted the first long-distance transmission of high-voltage alternating current, an epoch-making event that would ensure von Miller's position as an inspiration for and helmsman of electrification in Germany.

It was the Frankfurt exhibition, among others, that would evidence both von Miller's optimistic vision of technology and his talent for publicizing it as the benefactor of mankind, the ultimate expression of which was the Deutsches Museum in Munich, whose foundation stone was laid in 1906 by the emperor himself, though it would be almost two decades before von Miller would be able to enlarge and open it to the public—in 1925, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. A year earlier, the Walchensee hydropower plant was put into operation, which was the cornerstone of both the Bayernwerk, or Bavarian state company of public electricity supply, and the Bavarian electric-railway network. Both the museum and the power plant would become icons of the Weimar Republic, on the same order as the new transatlantic liners and the zeppelins. Similarly underscoring von Miller's prominence was the incorporation of his Institute for Hydraulic Engineering and Hydroelectrics into the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft.

Füßl concludes his biography with von Miller's retirement as the National Socialists came into power. When he died in 1934, most of the obituaries focused on his engagement with the Deutsches Museum and far less on his pioneering role as an engineer and an important force in the development of the German national electrical grid. Most of his postwar biographies would continue depicting him as a sort of politically neutral father figure, which he never was. Thus it was left to Füßl to describe von Miller in all the ambiguity of his...