A Business Card Made of Steel

People from Schaffhausen like to tell this story when they talk about Johann Conrad Fischer: the internationally renowned and yet modest steel producer was once told that he wasn’t allowed to see a certain fabric owner. In response, he placed a small cube of his famous meteor steel on the butler’s tray instead of a business card. It’s said that it didn’t take a minute for the master of the house to walk in: “Either you are the devil or Johann Fischer from Schaffhausen,” he said to him before inviting him into his house.

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When the World’s Best Crucible Steel Was Made in Schaffhausen

Johann Conrad Fischer was an ingenious inventor who turned his father’s small bell foundry into a steelworks, which was internationally renowned for the quality of its products. Fischer specialised in crucible steel, a rather new product that involved casting steel into semi-finished products, which were converted into final products later. Fischer constantly developed new alloys to optimise his products. Worldwide known became his meteor steel, which combined the base material (steel) with nickel.

Schaffhausen crucible steel made by Fischer was presented at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. At that time, the product was already known all over the world. Here’s one example from the field of coins: the London Royal Mint made part of its dies of Schaffhausen steel, just like the mints of Munich and Paris did.

Yet, you wouldn’t do Fischer justice by reducing him to his inventions. He was an important, ground-breaking local politician who had a strong impact on the federal policies of Switzerland, particularly regarding economic issues. He was a loving husband and father, who wrote sensitive poems for his wife and who cared deeply about the education of his seven children.

And, last but not least, Fischer was a hilarious diarist.

England at the Peak of Industrialisation

We know this because Johann Conrad Fischer published the diaries of his journeys abroad. The MoneyMuseum possesses his diary published in Aarau in 1816, which was dedicated to his about seven-week-long journey to Great Britain immediately after the lifting of the Continental Blockade. Fischer had worked in Great Britain in 1794/5. Afterwards, he had built his own steelworks – now he wanted to know exactly what the British competition had to offer in comparison to him.

What is almost unimaginable today – guiding a direct competitor through one’s firm in order to reveal all business secrets – seems to have been perfectly normal at the beginning of the 19th century. Fischer was a guest of all major and famous factory owners in Birmingham and Sheffield. He was invited to have lunch with them and guided through their works; thus, Fischer’s diary is a wonderful read for all those who want to get an idea of how factory owners lived and thought like in times of industrialisation. We visit a factory owner’s family together with Fischer on a Sunday. Of course, lunch was served at 1 p.m. and not at 4 p.m. as would have been usual. After all, they wanted to ensure that the servants could attend the service.

We meet the sons of James Watt, designer of the first steam engine, and Josiah Wedgwood II, producer of the famous blue jasperware with its white applications. 

We take part in Fischer’s numerous factory tours and observe how fabrics are woven, machines are designed and assembled, famous Wedgwood porcelain is formed, heated and packaged, and how rifles and cartridges are produced.

Food for Thought

Fischer describes what he sees from the perspective of a factory owner. He is driven by the curiosity to find out whether he might use some of the innovations in his own works. And most readers of his books probably had the same idea in mind. While we’re rather bored when reading about lengthy calculations, Fischer’s contemporaries devoured them – and afterwards they probably calculated whether they might work for their businesses, too. 

Let’s take his cost analysis for the cheapest way of illuminating a factory as an example. He based his considerations on the probably largest spinning mill of Great Britain, which had just switched over to gas lighting at that time. He calculated in detail what the factory had to spend on gas (650 pfennigs) and what tallow candles would have cost (3,000 pfennigs).

Such considerations were essential for Swiss manufacturers. After all, they were under cost pressure to keep pace with the technically much more advanced English competition.

Journeys Before the Invention of Mass Tourism

However, Fischer is far too good a writer to only talk about such details. He entertains his less technically versed readers with humorous descriptions of his journey: There is a fat Turk who is supposed to travel from Dover to Paris by stagecoach, but unfortunately speaks neither English nor French. “For ridiculous but necessary care, the house in London that he had been commended to had attached an open consignment note, as to a box, to his robe and thus addressed him to his correspondents in Dover with the request of arranging his passage and sending him to Paris the same way.”

And an English lord of a manor who had lost about one hundred pounds sterling by betting on a horse race consoled himself with alcohol: “After relieving his heart he began to snore and in that condition he was pushed out on a carriage at the next stop.”

Or the story from Manchester, where Fischer almost had to spend the night in a “somewhat den of thieves”: “Drunken soldiers, sailors lying on tables and benches and slovenly women with suitable companions made up the gathering where I was to spend my night.” A passer-by rescued the horrified Swiss man and brought him to a decent inn.

Do We Want This Form of Industrialisation?

Fischer admired England. And yet he didn’t become an English-style manufacturer. He ran his steelworks as a small, patriarchally structured business, where maximising profit wasn’t top priority.

In England, his close look had been directed not only at the production methods, but also at the circumstances in which the workers there lived. In 1851, the year of the Great London Exhibition, he gave a speech to the Swiss Society of Natural Sciences in Glarus – back then, the most important economic bosses were members of this association – and said the following: “In England, from where I recently returned, great things, one might say almost incredible things have happened indeed, and here proof has been given just as much and almost to an even greater extent of what a cooperation of individuals which are inspired by unity and the same spirit can produce compared to what the imperative word of an autocrat of earlier times was able to create. ... This is the beautiful side of the medal lying in front of us, but let’s also have a look at the other side, namely at the side of English producers, i.e. that of the actual workers and not of the gentlemen who are sitting in their offices, despite the apparently high daily wage, their life is not an enviable one. ... None of the thousands upon thousands of factory workers there can enjoy a single clod of earth ... They do not feast their eyes on such a beautiful and varied nature, which, even if it were there, would be hidden from them by the steam of thousands upon thousands of high and low chimneys.”

Opponent of Free Trade

Fischer knew Great Britain and didn’t underestimate it. That’s why he vehemently fought against free trade on the side of Swiss craftsmen, who felt threatened by the import of cheap mass goods. For him, the industry’s stage of development was the crucial difference. Since the British produced much more cheaply than all their competitors, he considered Great Britain the only beneficiary of global free trade.

Fischer was pretty much the only Swiss industrialists of this opinion.

He was a remarkable personality that looked far beyond the horizon – and shared his observations with us. His travel diary is also an exciting book for today’s reader.

As long as the coronavirus makes travelling impossible, seize the opportunity to travel through time with Johann Conrad Fischer rather than through space.