The early professors: an international faculty

Recruiting in Germany and beyond

The Polytechnikum could not have staffed its chairs from Swiss resources alone. Since Switzerland in the 1850s had few scientists and engineers of international standing, the school board recruited systematically abroad, above all in the German states. The revolutions of 1848 and 1849 had driven a number of able scholars into exile or into difficulties at home, and Zurich was in a position to offer them security, respectable salaries and a liberal political climate. The historians of ETH list among the professors whose names attracted students from abroad Gottfried Kinkel, Francesco De Sanctis, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Victor Cherbuliez, Rudolf Clausius, Karl Culmann, Franz Reuleaux and Gottfried Semper.¹ The list mixes engineers and natural scientists with poets, literary historians and philosophers. It shows that the general division created by the compromise of 1854 was taken seriously and that the school board used it to bring cultural prestige to Zurich.

The international composition of the student body matched that of the professoriate. In the first decades a high proportion of foreign staff and students remained a defining feature of the school. In some years more than half of the students came from outside Switzerland, with large contingents from Austria-Hungary and Russia.² Zurich thus became, within a generation of 1855, a place where young people from much of Central and Eastern Europe acquired their professional qualifications. Many of them returned home, carrying with them personal connections and a familiarity with Swiss institutions that later proved valuable to Swiss industrial and financial firms seeking customers and partners in those countries.

Engineers and physicists: Culmann, Reuleaux, Zeuner and Clausius

Karl Culmann, born in 1821 in Bergzabern in the Palatinate, was called to Zurich in 1855 as professor of engineering sciences and held the post until his death in 1881. He had travelled in the United States between 1849 and 1851 and had written detailed reports on American wooden bridges and on English and American iron bridges. His principal work, Die graphische Statik of 1866, introduced graphical methods for the analysis of beams, bridges, roof trusses, arches and retaining walls. Culmann's methods were applied by his former student Maurice Koechlin to the design of the Eiffel Tower.³ In the age of railway construction, graphic statics was a technology of immediate economic value. By allowing engineers to calculate bridges and viaducts reliably and cheaply, it reduced the technical risk that the investors in railway companies had to carry.

Franz Reuleaux, born in 1829 near Aachen, came to Zurich in 1856 and taught mechanical engineering until 1864, when he left for the Gewerbeakademie in Berlin. He worked in the department of mechanics alongside Gustav Zeuner and became famous for tracing mechanical engineering back to its mathematical foundations. His handbook Der Konstrukteur and his later theoretical kinematics, translated into English, French and Italian, made him one of the founders of the systematic science of machines.⁴ Gustav Zeuner himself moved to Zurich in 1855 as professor of technical mechanics. From 1859 he acted as director of the school, a post he held formally from May 1865, before returning to Germany in 1871.⁵ His interest in population statistics, which will reappear below in connection with insurance mathematics, illustrates how easily the engineers of the early Polytechnikum moved between mechanics, thermodynamics and the mathematics of mortality.

Rudolf Clausius taught physics in Zurich from 1855 to 1867. It was during his Zurich years that he published, in 1865, the paper in which he introduced the concept of entropy and gave it its name, one of the foundational contributions to thermodynamics.⁶ Thermodynamics was the theoretical basis of the steam engine and later of the turbine. A school that taught it at the highest level supplied the machine-building industry of north-eastern Switzerland with engineers who understood efficiency in quantitative terms. The connection between Clausius's lecture room and the order books of Escher Wyss or Sulzer was indirect, yet it can be traced. Theoretical sophistication became a selling point of Swiss machinery in international markets.

Mathematicians: Dedekind, Christoffel, Frobenius

In the first years mathematics served as an auxiliary science in the sixth division, alongside physics and the natural sciences. Under Kappeler's presidency the school board changed that status. Richard Dedekind, recommended by Dirichlet, taught in Zurich from 1858 to 1862 and gave comprehensive courses in calculus. He was the first of many young German mathematicians who began their careers at the Polytechnikum before moving to influential chairs in Germany. His successor Elwin Bruno Christoffel, who taught from 1862 to 1869, introduced a mathematical seminar in which the subject was pursued as an independent science regardless of its applications in engineering. This development led to the reorganisation of the sixth division as a department for the training of teachers of mathematics and science. Georg Ferdinand Frobenius headed the mathematical seminar from 1875 to 1892. When he left for Berlin, his departure was recorded in the minutes of the school board as a great loss.⁷

The list of mathematicians who taught at the Polytechnikum before the First World War reads like a roll of honour of the discipline. It includes Joseph Ludwig Raabe, Richard Dedekind, Elwin Bruno Christoffel, Carl Theodor Reye, Hermann Amandus Schwarz, Heinrich Weber, Georg Ferdinand Frobenius, Friedrich Schottky, Adolf Hurwitz, Hermann Minkowski, Hermann Weyl and George Pólya. By 1912 about ten per cent of the professors of the school were mathematicians.⁸ This concentration of mathematical talent in a small city had consequences far beyond pure science. It created a local tradition of quantitative reasoning that later nourished actuarial science, statistics, operations research and, in the late twentieth century, quantitative finance.

Humanists at a technical school: De Sanctis, Burckhardt, Vischer and Kinkel

The general division gave the Polytechnikum a group of teachers who had no counterpart at the technical schools of Karlsruhe or Munich. Francesco De Sanctis, a Neapolitan liberal living in exile, arrived in Zurich in March 1856 to teach Italian literature. He inaugurated his lectures on Dante's Commedia on 24 April 1856 and went on to lecture on Petrarch, Poliziano, Machiavelli, Manzoni, Leopardi and Ariosto. His lectures on Petrarch of 1858 and 1859 formed the basis of his later essay on the poet. His Zurich years as a whole prepared the History of Italian Literature for which he is remembered. He left Zurich on 6 August 1860 to return to Naples after the unification of Italy. His principle for teaching future engineers has often been quoted: before being engineers, they were men.⁹

The Basel historian Jacob Burckhardt taught at the Zurich Polytechnikum for three years, from 1855 to 1858, before returning to his native city, where he wrote the works that made him one of the most influential historians of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ His presence among the first professors is confirmed by the standard historical encyclopaedia, which names him together with Semper as the most prominent early teachers of the school.¹¹ He held the chair of art history, a subject that complemented Semper's teaching in the school of architecture.¹² The Swabian aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer and the German poet and democrat Gottfried Kinkel belonged to the same circle of teachers who gave the Polytechnikum an intellectual life of unusual breadth.¹³ The name Cherbuliez in the same list most probably refers to the Genevan economist Antoine-Élisée Cherbuliez (1797–1869), a liberal in the tradition of Jean-Baptiste Say, who after teaching in Lausanne was appointed to the first chair of political economy at the federal polytechnic school.¹⁴ Political economy was thus taught in Zurich from the first years of the school, to future engineers who would later sit on the boards of railway companies and banks.

For a history of the financial centre, the humanists matter in two ways. They made Zurich attractive to foreign students and to their families, who could expect their sons to receive a general education alongside their professional training. They also shaped the self-image of the graduates, who regarded themselves as members of an educated elite and later claimed the corresponding social position. The association of former students founded in 1869, discussed below, explicitly argued that a broad general education qualified engineers for leadership. The generalist culture of the Swiss engineer-manager, who could move from a technical department into the executive board of a bank or an insurer, has one of its roots in the general division of 1855.

Notes

1. ETHistory 1855–2005, epoch summary “1855–1904: Zwischen Schule, Fabrik und Labor”, https://www.ethistory.ethz.ch/besichtigungen/epochen/ETH05_epochen.pdf. ↩
2. J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, “Zurich Federal Polytechnic history”, MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/ETH_history/. ↩
3. “Culmann, Karl”, Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/culmann-karl. Culmann also served as director of the Polytechnikum from 1872 to 1875. ↩
4. ETH-Bibliothek, “Franz Reuleaux (1829–1905)”, short portrait, https://library.ethz.ch/en/collections-and-archives/short-portraits/franz-reuleaux--1829-1905-.html. ↩
5. Wikipedia, “Gustav Zeuner”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Zeuner. Cited for orientation. Zeuner is also remembered for the three-dimensional population diagram of 1869 that later became known as the Lexis diagram. ↩
6. Wikipedia, “Rudolf Clausius”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Clausius. Cited for orientation. Clausius moved to Würzburg in 1867 and to Bonn in 1869. ↩
7. ETH Zurich, Department of Mathematics, “Die ersten Jahrzehnte / The first decades”, https://math.ethz.ch/the-department/history/first-decades.html. ↩
8. J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, “Zurich Federal Polytechnic history”, MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/ETH_history/. ↩
9. University of Zurich, “Francesco De Sanctis (1817–83)”, profile for the 175th anniversary of the University of Zurich, https://www.175jahre.uzh.ch/fakultaeten/weiter-denken/programm/zentraleveranstaltungen/italia/studiosi/profili/desanctis.html. De Sanctis later served as Minister of Public Instruction of the Kingdom of Italy. ↩
10. Denise Tonella, “Jacob Burckhardt – der international erfolgreichste Schweizer Historiker”, blog of the Swiss National Museum, 25 May 2018, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2018/05/jacob-burckhardt-der-international-erfolgreichste-schweizer-historiker/. ↩
11. Peter Fleer and Hans Werner Tobler, “Eidgenössische Technische Hochschulen (ETH)”, HLS, version of 27 November 2012, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/010419/. ↩
12. Wikipedia (German), “Jacob Burckhardt”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Burckhardt (“Von 1855 bis 1858 war Jacob Burckhardt ordentlicher Professor für Kunstgeschichte am Eidgenössischen Polytechnikum in Zürich.”). ↩
13. ETHistory 1855–2005, epoch summary “1855–1904: Zwischen Schule, Fabrik und Labor”, https://www.ethistory.ethz.ch/besichtigungen/epochen/ETH05_epochen.pdf. ↩
14. Institut Libéral, “À la redécouverte d’Antoine-Élisée Cherbuliez”, https://www.libinst.ch/fr/actualites/redecouverte-cherbuliez/. The identification of the Cherbuliez named by ETHistory with the economist is an inference by the author of this chapter. ↩

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