Christian Zumbrägel

Even in the twenty-first century, myths of preindustrial forms of energy utilization are woven around watermills, waterwheels, and traditional millscapes. Along German watercourses, many grinding shops and hammer mills held on to waterwheels and delivered mechanical rather than electric power well into the twentieth century. It is not the case that the days of these “old technologies” (Edgerton 2008) were numbered as soon as hydroelectricity and “modern” hydraulic turbines appeared in the 1880s. When analyzing the dominating contemporaneous discourses around hydropower, it is easy to overlook these tendencies of historical persistence. This is not surprising, considering that scientific, literary, and preservationist narratives around 1900––actively and subtly––propagated and spread the idea of Muehlensterben, or the myth of dying watermills that has been rehearsed over and over again in reflections on hydropower history. In this article, we challenge the popular imaginaries of “old” and “outmoded” watermills in a two-step approach. Firstly, we contrast the well-known transition at the advent of hydroelectricity with hydropower activities, which took place simultaneously in Germany’s traditional commercial landscapes. Here, waterwheels remained in good use, despite the electrification and scientific development of hydraulic turbines. Secondly, we deconstruct the romantic bias towards the preindustrial symbolism of the waterwheel by analyzing different arguments in professional journals as well as romanticizing and nostalgic literature. We combine approaches and empirical material of both historical and literary sciences to gain a better understanding of how different narratives reinforced the image of watermills and waterwheels being outdated. In this respect, the interdisciplinary approach contributes to the emerging field of the Environmental Humanities.

In den vergangenen Jahren hat sich die deutschsprachige Technikgeschichte inhaltlich und konzeptionell selbstbewusst präsentiert und ihre Position als eine eigenständige Disziplin des historischen Fächerkanons bekräftigt. Eike-Christian Heine und Christian Zumbrägel stellen zentrale Perspektiven, Begriffe und Theorien vor, die die Technikgeschichte im Laufe des 20. Jahrhunderts prägten, und benennen technikhistorische Themen, die aus zeitgeschichtlicher Perspektive besonders zukunftsträchtig erscheinen.

The example of Vienna’s energy supply is taken to study the system charac-teristics of preindustrial city infrastructures. In the course of the 18th century the demand for fi rewood in Vienna, the seat of the Habsburg dynasty, soared to exorbitant heights. The urban fi rewood consumption required the successive broadening of accessibility to additional ample wood-production areas on the upper course of the Danube catchment basin. This horizontal diffusion of the exploitation area, displacing deforestation to vast woodlands in the hinterland, was accompanied by a novel interlinking of traditional transport mechanisms to obtain the city’s wood. With the ascendance to the “classical modern age,” the multilayered and segmented delivery methods in use since the Middle Ages (drifting, rafting, horse-drawn carts) meshed with the transport system to supply Vienna’s fi rewood. This preindustrial network of multifarious transport technologies already manifest typical system characteristics that are generally presented in the history of technology as the fi rst signs of large-scale systems of the modern age. This article looks at the hybrid character of this expansion in transport technology, the interdependencies with society and nature. Along the stream of fi rewood from its origins to the end-user I will look in particular at the lines of confl ict and sources of interference resisting the smooth fl ow of fi rewood and regularly stretching to its limits this socio-natural large-scale system of wood supply.

The transition into the industrial age was based on a novel usage of raw materials: Hard coal replaced wood as fuel; iron and steel became new key resources. In recent years this classical, material understanding of industrial- ization has been revised in various studies from the histories of technology and the environment. They raised awareness about paths of regional and sectoral industrialization that represented and delineated a broad panorama of different substances and materials. However, the importance that wood as the traditional universal resource had on industrialization has not been inves- tigated systematically. At the height of the German industrialization, wood was pervasive as fuel and as raw material. Wood research and the chemical industry developed this natural substance into an innovative industrial raw material (e.g., cellulose and fiber). The first part of the article provides an overview of the importance of wood in various sectors of wood processing and applications at the dawn of the 20th century. The second part focuses on two branches that highlight different dynamics in the persistence and variability of wooden materials: First, it explores new booms in impregnated wooden railroad sleepers in railway superstructure. Then wood applications in traditional millwrighting and hydro-engineering are discussed. These two case studies reveal a wide range of wood-specific applications in the industrial age. In this way, the pa- per seeks to contribute toward a differentiated understanding of the material dimensions of industrialization and specifies the relationship between the old and the new in this transitional phase.

The advent of “white coal” and the rise of large dams presented a major challenge to maintaining riverine fisheries. In the early twentieth century, Anthon Landmark, a Norwegian expert on fisheries, and Johannes Oeltjen, a German hydro engineer, collaborated to erect a “high-class” fishway system at the Hemelinger dam on the Weser River in northern Germany. The fishway system—consisting of four passage facilities—was designed to assist salmon, trout, and eels to pass a newly designed dam that threatened to block their migration to spawning grounds. The construction incorporated the latest ideas of experienced engineers and experts on fisheries. Bringing together insights from the history of technology and environmental history, this paper seeks to expand our understanding of a technology that is widely neglected in historical research but much discussed in present debates on the protection of waterways.

The water mill with the water wheel is still surrounded today by the myth of a pre-industrial form of energy production. In fact, these "old" drive technologies remained the most important source of energy at many streams at least until the interwar period. These "old technologies" (David Edgerton) of hydroelectric power engineering did not become obsolete with the scientificisation of turbine construction and electrification. Many watercourses in the low mountain ranges of South Westphalia were subject to operating conditions which, for practical reasons, suggested that operators of small hammer mills or wire reels should retain their "old" water wheels for a long time to come. This technical, environmental and knowledge history of small hydropower does not, as is often the case, ask about the degree of novelty of technical change, but about the durability of the old and the traditional.

Le saumon sur l’échelle. Les passes à poissons et les migrations piscicoles dans les rivières d’Allemagne du Nord vers 1900 La reproduction naturelle des anguilles, des saumons et des truites dépend du passage entre mer et rivière. Les passes à poissons soutiennent les animaux pendant leurs migrations pour franchir les barrages et atteindre leurs frayères. Les pêcheurs utilisent cette technique depuis le XIXe siècle dans le but de réguler les cycles de reproduction de leurs poissons commerciaux. Cependant, avec leur comportement instinctif et parfois récalcitrant, les populations des milieux aquatiques ont à plusieurs reprises échappé au contrôle humain: par exemple, lorsque les anguilles ont ignoré les passes à anguilles, de sorte que les ingénieurs hydrauliques ont modifié les constructions techniques pour les adapter aux besoins et aux préférences des anguilles; ou lorsque le rythme de fonctionnement d’une écluse de navigation a été adapté au comportement migratoire des saumons. La vie aquatique n’a pas accepté passivement les dispositifs techniques dans son habitat et a contribué à structurer les processus sociotechniques le long des cours d’eau. Cette imbrication des changements techniques avec les humains et les animaux devient visible lorsque l’histoire technique et environnementale suit les trajectoires de migration des poissons.

Seit einigen Jahren stehen Fischliftsysteme im Zentrum wasserbaulicher Überlegungen, die um die Wiederherstellung der Gewässerdurchgängigkeit kreisen. Aktuelle Studien beschreiben diese Sonderform der Fischaufstiegsanlagen als eine neuartige und innovative Techniklösung. Allerdings gehen die Entwicklungspfade dieser Technik auf die um 1900 entwickelte Recken’sche Fischschleuse zurück. Die Auseinandersetzung mit den Konstruktionsformen vergangener Tage befördert Technik- und Umweltwissen, das vor dem Hintergrund aktueller gewässerökologischer Herausforderungen wieder relevant erscheint.

The availability of ever-increasing amounts of energy are the basis of our current energy-intensive lifestyle. Accordingly, historians of energy have primarily addressed the growth in energy consumption that has lasted for about two hundred years. On the way to sustainable energy futures, it is necessary to reduce the overall energy consumption level. The article searches for historical traces of energy conservation and points out that current discussions about energy sufficiency are expressions of a discourse that goes back at least to the early modern period and has recurrently been updated since then.

A Microhistory of Dams. Local Cooperatives and Small-Scale Hydro Projects during the Dam Boom in Western Germany around 1900 Before the First World War, the dam architect Otto Intze flooded extensive valleys in western Germany’s low mountain ranges in order to provide the neighboring Ruhr district with water and electricity. Intze’s biography and his giant dams are wellrepresented in historical research.However, very little is known about the early phases of the dam-building boom before 1900. Taking a microhistorical approach, this article reconstructs the roots of one of the earliest dam projects: the Fuelbecke dam at Altena (1894 –1896). This construction was of comparatively small dimensions, served local purposes, and was instigated by a cooperative formed by small iron producers in the local upland region. I argue that local dam-building initiatives of this kind were decisive for the boom in Western German dam construction after 1900.