On 28 December 1879 the new railway bridge over the Firth of Tay in Scotland collapsed under a train. In the first days of January 1880 Theodor Fontane wrote the ballad Die Brück’ am Tay, The Bridge on the Tay. In it Johnie, the bridge keeper’s son on the train, trusts his engine: Ein fester Kessel, ein doppelter Dampf, / Die bleiben Sieger in solchem Kampf. (A solid boiler, a double steam, they will win in such a fight.) Three witches frame the poem, and one of them has the last word: Tand, Tand / Ist das Gebilde von Menschenhand! (A trinket, a trinket is the work of human hands.) Today the ballad is a classic of German lessons in school. German Wikipedia calls it a warning against a hubris that believes in technology.
The Tailor of Ulm
On 31 May 1811 Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger, the tailor of Ulm, tried to fly his self-built glider in public. He took off from the 13-meter wall of a bastion on the Danube, the site the town had demanded. He fell into the river. Fishermen pulled him out while the crowd jeered. Afterwards people called him a liar and a fraud. The customers of his tailor’s shop stayed away. He died in 1829 in a hospital, completely impoverished. Today it is thought that the cold water of the Danube creates downdrafts along the walls. In 1934 Bertolt Brecht wrote the poem Ulm 1592, which was taken into many school readers. In the poem a bishop declares after the tailor’s fall: Der Mensch ist kein Vogel, / Es wird nie ein Mensch fliegen. (Man is not a bird. No man will ever fly.)
When the Neuer Markt Closed
On 10 March 1997 Frankfurt opened the Neuer Markt, a stock market segment for young growth companies. Its index peaked on 10 March 2000. In the following 31 months it lost more than 96 percent of its value, over 200 billion euros. Some companies had published misleading figures. The segment was closed on 5 June 2003. Ten years after its start, the magazine Computerwoche wrote that many shareholders remembered it mit Grausen, with horror. The crash had shaken many investors’ trust in shares for good, and many still kept their hands off them. According to the German Shares Institute, the number of shareholders in Germany had fallen by 2.5 million since 2000.
Sixteen Months Late
Germany’s satellite-based toll for trucks was meant to start on 31 August 2003. The operating consortium, Toll Collect, could not meet the date. Because of various technical problems, the system started only on 1 January 2005, 16 months late and in a reduced form. In July 2005 the federal transport ministry took the consortium before an arbitration tribunal. In May 2018 the parties agreed on a payment of 3.2 billion euros to the Federal Republic. The arbitration ended in July 2018, after 13 years.
No Guarantee for the Flying Taxi
The company Lilium, based near Munich, developed an electric air taxi and employed about 1,100 people. In 2024 it asked for a federal guarantee of 50 million euros on a loan from the state development bank KfW. Bavaria was ready to guarantee another 50 million. The federal transport minister supported the aid. The FDP budget politician Frank Schäffler opposed it: Mit Steuergeldern des Bundes darf nicht spekuliert werden. (Federal tax money must not be used to speculate.) The budget committee of the Bundestag did not approve the guarantee, and the Bavarian money fell through with it. Lilium’s chief executive had written that the initial investments were simply too high to be carried by private money alone. On 28 October 2024 Lilium filed for insolvency.