Efficiency Archives - Page 2 of 4

The Running Machine

On 12 June 1817 Karl Drais rode his Laufmaschine, his running machine, from Mannheim to a relay station before Schwetzingen. It had two wheels and no pedals. The rider pushed it along with his feet.

Why did he build it? The Drais biographer Hans-Erhard Lessing has argued that the cause was a shortage. The volcano Tambora erupted in 1815, the following year brought snow in summer and failed harvests, and horses starved. Other historians of the bicycle dispute this. Lessing himself has said that it cannot quite be proven.

The Hay Box

The Kochkiste, the cooking box, is a wooden box with a lid, almost a cube. A pot is brought to the boil on the stove and then put into the insulated box, where the food finishes cooking in its own heat.

It was promoted around 1900 as a kitchen aid that saved energy and money. A booklet of 1915, Die Kriegsküche, the war kitchen, showed it for energy-saving cooking. It came back when fuel was short, in the Second World War and during the Berlin Blockade of 1948 and 1949.

Colanders From Steel Helmets

After 1945 household goods were scarce in Germany, because the bombing had destroyed so much. Steel helmets left from the war were punched full of holes in stamping machines. Handles were welded on, and enamel protected the metal from rust. The helmets became colanders.

In Berlin, the Bergmann works made cookware from former war material.

Bottles and Old Paper for Cash

SERO was the East German system for collecting used materials. The name stood for VEB Kombinat Sekundär-Rohstofferfassung, the state combine for collecting secondary raw materials. SERO paid five pfennigs for a bottle and ten pfennigs for a kilo of paper. Children in the Young Pioneers, the state youth organization, collected from house to house.

The reason was a shortage of raw materials and a policy of self-sufficiency. According to a conference presentation on the system, the recycling rate in 1989 was 54.5 percent for paper and 65.5 percent for bottles.

A Body of Cotton and Resin

The body panels of the Trabant were made of Duroplast, a material of 46 percent cotton and 52 percent phenolic resin. It was developed because steel was scarce in the postwar years, and it saved expensive sheet steel.

The first Trabant went into pre-series production on 7 November 1957. The last one left the line on 30 April 1991. Nearly 3.1 million were built. East Germans often waited 10 to 15 years for a new one.

Substitute

Ersatz means substitute, and English borrowed the word from German in the 1870s. In the First World War the blockade made the shortage of raw materials in Germany much worse. Yarn was spun from paper. Wooden soles replaced leather soles. By far the most important substitute was nitrogen, taken from the air by the Haber-Bosch process.

The habit is older. After the Seven Years’ War ended in 1763, Prussia planted large fields of chicory near Berlin, Breslau and Magdeburg. Coffee made from chicory could be grown at home instead of importing expensive coffee beans. Thirty years later there were 19 factories for Preußenkaffee, Prussian coffee.

The Coal Thief

Kohlenklau, the coal thief, was a cartoon figure of the Second World War. He was an animal-like thief with a sack, and he lurked at the stove, the oven, the window and the door. A poster of 1943 by the graphic artist Johannes Landwehrmann shows him. The campaign asked Germans to save coal at home and at work.

The Propaganda Ministry had long used subordinate agencies for public campaigns like this one. A German historical source collection judges that the campaign was largely unsuccessful.

The Suggestion Books at Bosch

In the autumn of 1924 Robert Bosch introduced Betriebsvorschlagsbücher, suggestion books, in his factories. Their purpose was to perfect working methods and to make the manufacture and administration of products better or cheaper. In 2014 the trade magazine INDUSTRIAL Production marked 90 years of the scheme. It reported that more than 21,900 Bosch employees at its German sites had submitted improvement suggestions in the previous year, with savings of about 33 million euros. The magazine closed with a line it attributes to Robert Bosch, without naming a source: Keiner soll mit dem Erreichten sich zufrieden geben, sondern stets danach trachten, seine Sache noch besser zu machen. (Nobody should be satisfied with what has been achieved. Everyone should always try to do his work even better.)

The Frankfurt Kitchen

In 1926, the Viennese architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed a kitchen for the Neues Frankfurt housing program of the city architect Ernst May. She based the design on the optimization of work processes. Every movement in the kitchen was timed with a stopwatch. The first kitchens were delivered in the autumn of 1926. About 10,000 of the 15,000 new apartments in Frankfurt received one. The smallest type measured 1.9 by 3.4 meters.

Words for not wasting

Verschwendung — squandering. A strong word in German, applied to time, money, materials and talent alike.

Sparsam — thrifty, and it is praise. Applied to a person, an engine or a design.

Aus wenig viel machen — to make much from little.

Wer den Pfennig nicht ehrt, ist des Talers nicht wert — who does not honour the penny is not worthy of the thaler.