Quote ?
Only after his death it was found out how for years Hermann von Helmholtz had used magnetic oscillations to reheat his meals when working late in the laboratory.
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Es Geloybte Aretz Continuation Thread
- Thread starter carlton_bach
- Start date
Only after his death it was found out how for years Hermann von Helmholtz had used magnetic oscillations to reheat his meals when working late in the laboratory.
That would be in character.
This is the guy though.
Christian Hülsmeyer - Wikipedia
It just occurs to me that military oversight over the national motor pool will obviously mean an early introduction of roadworthiness inspections (if only to ensure the owners don't modify them beyond usefulness). This is likely to be the job of the army. It will make German streets much safer early on, but since this does not affect the kind of upmarket cars that don't get the tax breaks and subsidies associated with entry into the mobilisation roster, it will probably create an interesting privilege. If you have the money to buy a 'taxed' car (import or domestic nonstandard), you are also exempt from inspections and can modify it as you wish. We will probably see heavily individualised cars rolling around German streets to advertise their owners' affluence, and 'rich person driving unsafe car' will be a continued source of irritation in the Social Democratic press coverage of traffic accidents.
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How is east prussia doing, and Holstein and sch something? Do east prussian still have weird accents?
What is the proper dialect of germany, whats their Parisians french?
What is the proper dialect of germany, whats their Parisians french?
East Prussia is doing okay, for a rural backwater with more history than future. the imperial government put serious money into repairting the war damage, and a lot of it went to the noble families who own so much of the province. As a result it is a bit of a Junker's Disneyland, a place where a lifestyle that is dying elsewhere goes on parade. It's very much Old Prussia, zackzack, lots of officers come from there or wish they did. And obviously they do have weird accents, but nowhere near as weird as the Bavarians or Saxons.
And Schleswig-Holstein, I nearly forgot, yes, interesting place. Beutepreußen, sometimes still chafing at the bit. The Völkische are strong in many rural areas bevcause the DKP is a little too Prussian, you know. The cities are solidly 'red', and the old nobility is being ground up between the two.
There is no one proper dialect. regional pride is strong. But if you are aiming for work on the silver screen (or with the imperial radio), you need to learn Hochdeutsch, basically an artificial dialect that happens when a speaker of Low German carefully reads Meissnerisch. Elocution lessons are part of every Bildungsbürger, with the aim of reducing undesirable accents.
As to what dialects 'fly', there is a very clear hierarchy. You can make fun of the clipped, sanitised Berlinerisch that the Prussian elite like to affect, but it will never stand in the way of your social advancement. In fact despite being a regional dialect, it is something many people not born to it seek to learn. Neither will a moderate 'Hanseatic' accent,. though not full-blown Platt. That only helps you in the merchant service. Rhenish dialect, while acceptable, carries a certain stigma of uncouthness, an unbecoming jollity that makes you almost-but-not-quite serious. East Prussian and Silesian mark you as a country bumpkin. Saxon, Bavarian and Swabian are strong enough culturally to support their own centres that value them, but they are not thought of too highly at court - they are felt to be almost foreign. Many members of their elites learn to hide their accents, letting them show just enough to demonstrate that is what they are doing.
Dialect is complicated.
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Certainly extremely contentious. There are Austrians, and not a few, who deliberately imitate Prussian speech patterns. Others deliberately eschew them. The court is very puntilious about 'heuer' and 'Jänner'.
I think it's more likely that we don't see the development of high end car brands[1]. Instead we simply see most major car brand having some high end models. I don't think we should underestimate how much of the German dominance of high end brand is because of cross-brand synergy between the different brand and from a general reputation of German enginering. The problem outside Japan I can't really see another country develop the same reputation: Sweden have some of the reputation, but they also have a reputation for a obsession of function over form.
[1]Luxury brand will still exist
Not far, unless you toned it down to a charming reminder of local identity. Then it could support a political career in the Zentrumspartei, I guess. Not the DKP - soooo unmilitary.So, where would my Grandmothers' Wallhausen Platt (Rheinland-Pfalz) take me in this world?
I think the idea can come from the USA. The market is big enough to support high-end brands, and US companies understand marketing very well. Mass production niche is taken, but selling a much nicer, distinctive vehiocle at a higher, but still manageable price is a vacuum that will be filled. Ford can't do it - who wants a Ford?
But some of the point is that if you’re not German, and you hear the word “German Car” you see a high end car on your inner eye. It’s harder to make that connections if the country in question is also producing cars seen as shoddy. It’s why the German cross brand synergy have only improved as VW moved away from cheap cars, Opel have become seen as “German” and Trabant have disappeared“. American car did have something of a high end reputation after the war in OTL, but in the end without cross brand synergy this didn’t last.
I agree, that kind of identification of a nation with upmarket cars is not going to happen. International success is going to be brand-based. Not 'French' but Citroen, not 'American' but Chrysler and Cadillac. Similar to what Ferrari has - nobody is going to call a Ferrari an "Italian car". But in this TL, people will "know" that Germany doesn't really make that kind of car.
National Brandenburg Central, Der Weg nach Walhalla episode 4: "Nullpunkt", earlier that evening, 9 July 1965 [post canon]
Engineers design cars. Genius designs roads.
Dr Todt with all due respect..
I was talking of the Emperor.
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Missing Expensively: A Tale of Zeiss
One of the best-kept and most useless secrets of the German military industry was the Zeiss Typ 36 Bombervisier, a complex optical device that allowed bombardiers to calculate the trajectory of bombs released from moving aircraft. Used in conjunction with a special type of tracer munition fired downward to gauge wind speed and direction at different altitudes and a handbook of tables for setting the direction, it presented a foolproof and actually practicable method of aiming bombs. The Bombardier would adjust the optics in three dimensions according to wind, speed and altitude, await the target entering the cross-hairs, and release the deadly cargo in exactly the right spot to put it on top of the helpless enemy concentration from 8000 metres or more. Early tests using zeppelins allowed precision strikes targeting individual buildings in controlled overflights, but in the end the theoretical capabilities were never realised even in field testing. A practice attack run by a wing of ZAG 42 Kondor bombers flying at 7500 metres – well below the ceiling of modern anti-air fire – carried out after intensive crew training on a clear, almost windless summer day placed a dispiriting 15% of ordnance within 200 metres of the designated target. The fat that the vauted precision attacks were not materialising was well known to the higher echelons of the Luftmacht by 1943, but few had the courage to consider what alternative approaches might be viable. Most clung to the desperate hope that some new technology, some new tactic might yet work the magic they craved.
Accordingly, the aviators of the Luftmacht paid a high price in the first months of the war. Their bomber wings sortied almost daily from heavily protected airfields to meet escort fighters over the front and enter Russian airspace to bomb rail hubs, port facilities, industrial centres, and troop concentrations. On every raid, enemy interceptors and AA fire took its toll. Though the Russian air defences were neither formidable nor well run, they proved formidably effective against the dirigibles that joined early attacks. By November of 1944, having lost almost half its ships, the Zeppelinwaffe was withdrawn from frontline operations and reassigned to naval reconnaissance, a role to which the airship proved excellently suited. High-altitude bombing aeroplanes , especially when protected by the vaunted ZAG37 wings, were harder targets, but they, too, suffered attrition rates that proved unsustainable. Yet most depressing of all, reconnaissance overflight and intelligence reports both agreed that the bomb damage inflicted on the enemy was all but negligible. No railyard was put out of commission for more than a few days, no factory permanently shut down, no harbour closed to traffic. When the winter storms of December and January 44/45 enforced a prolonged pause in operations, the staff decided to abandon the ill-starred campaign.
Instrumental to the decision was the infamous memorandum presented by the Statistische Abteilung that had calculated the material needed to conduct a successful strategic bombing campaign using the emerging effectiveness figures. The cost amounted to 35% of all Germany's projected war expenditures. This was vetoed in no uncertain terms by Emperor Wilhelm III, otherwise the Luftmacht's strongest institutional ally.
Over the course of 1945, numerous attempts to revive strategic bombing were made, and though these are usually dismissed as ineffective, the judgement only holds when they are measured against the expectations of pre-war planners. The greatest immediate benefit was the reallocation of fighter and AA assets needed for protecting bombers and airfields to frontal operations. This enabled the German army to achieve parity in the air, forcing the Russian air forces on the defensive. Bombing operations, using four-engined bombers against frontline targets, proved a valuable tool in the breakthrough battles of spring '45. Strategic strikes, resumed in summer of 1945 against infrastructure targets and expanded in autumn against cities to weaken morale, rarely achieved the devastation that had been projected, but coordinated with offensive operations on the ground were able to disrupt operations at critical junctures. And it was, of course, the Luftmacht's strategic bombing force that delivered the war-ending hammer blow that handed them the weapon they had been longing for to turn them into a viable arm.
One of the best-kept and most useless secrets of the German military industry was the Zeiss Typ 36 Bombervisier, a complex optical device that allowed bombardiers to calculate the trajectory of bombs released from moving aircraft. Used in conjunction with a special type of tracer munition fired downward to gauge wind speed and direction at different altitudes and a handbook of tables for setting the direction, it presented a foolproof and actually practicable method of aiming bombs. The Bombardier would adjust the optics in three dimensions according to wind, speed and altitude, await the target entering the cross-hairs, and release the deadly cargo in exactly the right spot to put it on top of the helpless enemy concentration from 8000 metres or more. Early tests using zeppelins allowed precision strikes targeting individual buildings in controlled overflights, but in the end the theoretical capabilities were never realised even in field testing. A practice attack run by a wing of ZAG 42 Kondor bombers flying at 7500 metres – well below the ceiling of modern anti-air fire – carried out after intensive crew training on a clear, almost windless summer day placed a dispiriting 15% of ordnance within 200 metres of the designated target. The fat that the vauted precision attacks were not materialising was well known to the higher echelons of the Luftmacht by 1943, but few had the courage to consider what alternative approaches might be viable. Most clung to the desperate hope that some new technology, some new tactic might yet work the magic they craved.
Accordingly, the aviators of the Luftmacht paid a high price in the first months of the war. Their bomber wings sortied almost daily from heavily protected airfields to meet escort fighters over the front and enter Russian airspace to bomb rail hubs, port facilities, industrial centres, and troop concentrations. On every raid, enemy interceptors and AA fire took its toll. Though the Russian air defences were neither formidable nor well run, they proved formidably effective against the dirigibles that joined early attacks. By November of 1944, having lost almost half its ships, the Zeppelinwaffe was withdrawn from frontline operations and reassigned to naval reconnaissance, a role to which the airship proved excellently suited. High-altitude bombing aeroplanes , especially when protected by the vaunted ZAG37 wings, were harder targets, but they, too, suffered attrition rates that proved unsustainable. Yet most depressing of all, reconnaissance overflight and intelligence reports both agreed that the bomb damage inflicted on the enemy was all but negligible. No railyard was put out of commission for more than a few days, no factory permanently shut down, no harbour closed to traffic. When the winter storms of December and January 44/45 enforced a prolonged pause in operations, the staff decided to abandon the ill-starred campaign.
Instrumental to the decision was the infamous memorandum presented by the Statistische Abteilung that had calculated the material needed to conduct a successful strategic bombing campaign using the emerging effectiveness figures. The cost amounted to 35% of all Germany's projected war expenditures. This was vetoed in no uncertain terms by Emperor Wilhelm III, otherwise the Luftmacht's strongest institutional ally.
Over the course of 1945, numerous attempts to revive strategic bombing were made, and though these are usually dismissed as ineffective, the judgement only holds when they are measured against the expectations of pre-war planners. The greatest immediate benefit was the reallocation of fighter and AA assets needed for protecting bombers and airfields to frontal operations. This enabled the German army to achieve parity in the air, forcing the Russian air forces on the defensive. Bombing operations, using four-engined bombers against frontline targets, proved a valuable tool in the breakthrough battles of spring '45. Strategic strikes, resumed in summer of 1945 against infrastructure targets and expanded in autumn against cities to weaken morale, rarely achieved the devastation that had been projected, but coordinated with offensive operations on the ground were able to disrupt operations at critical junctures. And it was, of course, the Luftmacht's strategic bombing force that delivered the war-ending hammer blow that handed them the weapon they had been longing for to turn them into a viable arm.
A *Norden bombsight, very nice if a bit on the nose. Whose unprocessed hair was used for the crosshairs?
The Beginning of Projekt Mjölnir
Sometimes, the reality of how scientific breakthroughs happen has very much to do with the personal relationships, the clashes, synergies, and biographical quirks of individual researchers, and two recent books about the turning point of the twentieth century have illustrated this convincingly once again. Andreas Steiger's “Titanenkampf” shows that if it had not been for Einstein's personal and vitriolic opposition to the Joliot Hypothesis, an idea he felt threatened his view of subatomic particles more than quantum theory did, there would never have been a concerted effort to disprove it. If it had not been for the infamous “Atoms are not batteries” outburst at the 1934 Cambridge conference, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut would not have felt that German honour was at stake, and as a result the funding for the famous experiments into transuranic elements would not have been nearly as forthcoming. The story that Emperor Wilhelm ordered the sale of imperial coaches and furniture to raise the required millions is actually untrue, but the fact that it was believed shows the urgency with which the project was pursued.
Thus when the first such experiments were made, it was then Doctor (soon Professor) Meitner's much less gifted, but far more politically astute supervisor Otto Hahn who took them up in order to further his career. His statement in a letter of 23 October 1934 that they were “eine kaiserliche Grille, aber eine dem Fortkommen förderliche” (an imperial foible, but good for the career) undermines his later claims of prescience, though it turned out that his work ensured a brilliant professional future to every nuclear scientist in all of Europe. The series of radiation experiments carried out in his laboratory did not yield any tangible advances until Lise Meitner's spectacular hypothesis that the observed behaviour was best explained by nuclear fission. The idea was enthusiastically embraced by Einstein who felt it vindicated his stance on particle stability and thus saw speeded-up publication in the Jahrbücher der Physik. The historic 'Beobachtungen des Kernzerfalls” went out under the name of a female research assistant largely because other than Hahn, no leading physicist quite dared subscribe to it in case it turned out wrong. As it was, it turned out spectacularly right, earned Lise von Meitner a full professorship and the Adlerorden, and ended the claim that women were no good at physics for good. “Curie is observed coincidence”, Maxwell famously quipped, “but Meitner is proof.”
Of course, Meitner's experiments could never have succeeded without the work done on transuranic elements by four scientists whose lives are the subject of the second book. Maria Stängler compellingly describes in her “Physikalisches Kleeblatt” how the natural synergies between the personalities and styles of Fermi, Oppenheimer, Szilard, and Felix Bloch shaped Vienna University's Physics department and ultimately succeeded in soliciting the private donations and grants that made their very expensive labour possible. It was from their workshop that more than half of all transuranic elements known by 1946 emerged, a stunning achievement by any measure.
Another personal connection that made history, though not in a scientific environment, is only mentioned in passing by Steiger, but developed in greater detail in Heisenberg's much underestimated memoir “Lebensweg eines Strahlenforschers”. It is the personal friendship between Heisenberg, doyen of the Institut II and bitter opponent of Einstein, and Wolf von Baudissin, rising star of the Berlin military cabal in the Kriegskabinett and Wehrtechnisches Amt. Baudissin, like many ambitious officers of his generation, had enjoyed a thorough technical and scientific education and specialised in statistics and analysis. Not only did this suit him for posts in the immediate environment of the emperor, who enjoyed surrounding himself with technical experts, but it meant he had a grasp of the significance of scientific facts. When Heisenberg, an avid proponent of exploring the technological applications of nuclear fission, discussed the matter with him, the young Hauptmann immediately understood the potential implications. As a result, he drafted the historic Kabinettsmemorandum 168/41 that found its way to the imperial desk.
The rest, as they say, is history, though it will likely not be told until the files are unsealed in 2042. What happened to German nuclear science in late 1941 was described by participants as a complete blackout; the curtain fell, as Niels Bohr described it. No more papers reached publication, laboratories were increasingly closed up to the outside and scientists drafted into secret operations. Though many high-profile scientists, most famously Einstein, showed no inclination to engage in this work, they joined the information embargo. Einstein repeated to reporters the world over that he did not think there was any realistic hope of harnessing the powers of the atom for practical purposes. The natural response in many capitals was panic, and a deluge of money poured into nuclear science. Though many such efforts produced significant advances in science and engineering – most notably the British Rare Earths project's work on computers – none stood a chance of catching up with the German lead.
Sometimes, the reality of how scientific breakthroughs happen has very much to do with the personal relationships, the clashes, synergies, and biographical quirks of individual researchers, and two recent books about the turning point of the twentieth century have illustrated this convincingly once again. Andreas Steiger's “Titanenkampf” shows that if it had not been for Einstein's personal and vitriolic opposition to the Joliot Hypothesis, an idea he felt threatened his view of subatomic particles more than quantum theory did, there would never have been a concerted effort to disprove it. If it had not been for the infamous “Atoms are not batteries” outburst at the 1934 Cambridge conference, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut would not have felt that German honour was at stake, and as a result the funding for the famous experiments into transuranic elements would not have been nearly as forthcoming. The story that Emperor Wilhelm ordered the sale of imperial coaches and furniture to raise the required millions is actually untrue, but the fact that it was believed shows the urgency with which the project was pursued.
Thus when the first such experiments were made, it was then Doctor (soon Professor) Meitner's much less gifted, but far more politically astute supervisor Otto Hahn who took them up in order to further his career. His statement in a letter of 23 October 1934 that they were “eine kaiserliche Grille, aber eine dem Fortkommen förderliche” (an imperial foible, but good for the career) undermines his later claims of prescience, though it turned out that his work ensured a brilliant professional future to every nuclear scientist in all of Europe. The series of radiation experiments carried out in his laboratory did not yield any tangible advances until Lise Meitner's spectacular hypothesis that the observed behaviour was best explained by nuclear fission. The idea was enthusiastically embraced by Einstein who felt it vindicated his stance on particle stability and thus saw speeded-up publication in the Jahrbücher der Physik. The historic 'Beobachtungen des Kernzerfalls” went out under the name of a female research assistant largely because other than Hahn, no leading physicist quite dared subscribe to it in case it turned out wrong. As it was, it turned out spectacularly right, earned Lise von Meitner a full professorship and the Adlerorden, and ended the claim that women were no good at physics for good. “Curie is observed coincidence”, Maxwell famously quipped, “but Meitner is proof.”
Of course, Meitner's experiments could never have succeeded without the work done on transuranic elements by four scientists whose lives are the subject of the second book. Maria Stängler compellingly describes in her “Physikalisches Kleeblatt” how the natural synergies between the personalities and styles of Fermi, Oppenheimer, Szilard, and Felix Bloch shaped Vienna University's Physics department and ultimately succeeded in soliciting the private donations and grants that made their very expensive labour possible. It was from their workshop that more than half of all transuranic elements known by 1946 emerged, a stunning achievement by any measure.
Another personal connection that made history, though not in a scientific environment, is only mentioned in passing by Steiger, but developed in greater detail in Heisenberg's much underestimated memoir “Lebensweg eines Strahlenforschers”. It is the personal friendship between Heisenberg, doyen of the Institut II and bitter opponent of Einstein, and Wolf von Baudissin, rising star of the Berlin military cabal in the Kriegskabinett and Wehrtechnisches Amt. Baudissin, like many ambitious officers of his generation, had enjoyed a thorough technical and scientific education and specialised in statistics and analysis. Not only did this suit him for posts in the immediate environment of the emperor, who enjoyed surrounding himself with technical experts, but it meant he had a grasp of the significance of scientific facts. When Heisenberg, an avid proponent of exploring the technological applications of nuclear fission, discussed the matter with him, the young Hauptmann immediately understood the potential implications. As a result, he drafted the historic Kabinettsmemorandum 168/41 that found its way to the imperial desk.
The rest, as they say, is history, though it will likely not be told until the files are unsealed in 2042. What happened to German nuclear science in late 1941 was described by participants as a complete blackout; the curtain fell, as Niels Bohr described it. No more papers reached publication, laboratories were increasingly closed up to the outside and scientists drafted into secret operations. Though many high-profile scientists, most famously Einstein, showed no inclination to engage in this work, they joined the information embargo. Einstein repeated to reporters the world over that he did not think there was any realistic hope of harnessing the powers of the atom for practical purposes. The natural response in many capitals was panic, and a deluge of money poured into nuclear science. Though many such efforts produced significant advances in science and engineering – most notably the British Rare Earths project's work on computers – none stood a chance of catching up with the German lead.