In 2003 the frozen-food company FRoSTA adopted its own Reinheitsgebot, purity law, a name that recalls the beer law. It allowed no additives at all. Sales collapsed, and the company stayed with the rule.
Its chief executive Felix Ahlers explains the rule by the way the food is made. Wir wollen keine Zutaten ins Essen mischen, die man zu Hause nie verwenden würde. We do not want to mix any ingredients into the food that one would never use at home.
In March 1973, a Volkswagen test engineer wrote an internal memo proposing a sporty version of the new Golf. Development chief Ernst Fiala turned it down. Volkswagen’s own history quotes him: “It’s far too expensive, you’re all mad.” A small group of engineers went on anyway. Officially, their prototype was a test platform for the chassis.
In May 1975, the team showed the car to VW’s chief executive Toni Schmücker, who approved it. The Golf GTI was shown at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September 1975 and went on sale in 1976. According to Volkswagen, dealers sold ten times the planned number in the first year.
Carl Zeiss trained for four years as an apprentice mechanic. In his time, microscopes were made by Pröbeln, by trial and error. Zeiss wanted to build microscope optics from calculations instead. A first collaboration with a scientist produced no result. On 3 July 1866 the 50-year-old Zeiss began to work with Ernst Abbe, a 26-year-old lecturer in mathematical physics at the University of Jena. Abbe’s task was to put the workshop’s microscope production on a secure scientific foundation. The first microscope built from his calculations performed worse than the old ones. The work was finally completed in 1872. After that, no competing product surpassed the quality of their microscopes.
On 27 February 1892 Rudolf Diesel applied to the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin for a patent on a Neue rationelle Wärmekraftmaschine, a new rational heat engine. He received it on 23 February 1893, as a patent on a working process for combustion engines. In 1893 he also published a book: Theorie und Konstruktion eines rationellen Wärmemotors, Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat Engine. Through the book he came into contact with Heinrich von Buz, the general director of the Maschinenfabrik Augsburg. From 1893, with financial support from Krupp, Diesel developed his engine there. The first ignition came on 10 August 1893. The first working engine was finished in 1897. German Wikipedia notes: Aus der geplanten halbjährigen Entwicklungszeit waren vier lange Jahre mit zahlreichen Rückschlägen geworden. (The planned half year of development had become four long years with many setbacks.)
The company book Fünfzig Jahre Bosch 1886–1936, Fifty Years of Bosch, opens with sayings of its founder, Robert Bosch. One reads: “Es war mir immer ein unerträglicher Gedanke, es könne jemand bei Prüfung eines meiner Erzeugnisse nachweisen, daß ich irgendwie Minderwertiges leiste.” It was always an unbearable thought to me that someone testing one of my products could prove that I deliver anything inferior. “Deshalb habe ich stets versucht, nur Arbeit hinauszugeben, die jeder sachlichen Prüfung standhielt, also sozusagen vom Guten das Beste war.” I have therefore always tried to send out only work that would stand up to every objective examination, that is, so to speak, the best of the good.
German engineering practice treats the standard as a floor rather than a target, and specifications are commonly written above the required value. The norm states what is sufficient. A German specification states what the engineer was willing to sign.
The words Made in Germany were imposed on German goods by the British Merchandise Marks Act of 1887, intended as a warning to consumers that the product was foreign and inferior. Within a generation it had become the opposite. An insult was turned into the most valuable country-of-origin mark in the world.
Wertarbeit — value-work. Craftsmanship, but the compound names the value rather than the craft.
Qualitätsarbeit, Wertigkeit, solide, gediegen — four more German words of approval for a made thing, and none of them is about appearance.
Billig und schlecht — cheap and bad, spoken as a single phrase, as though the two were the same observation.
Meisterbetrieb. German craft firms display the designation on the van, the shopfront and the invoice. It is not a claim about the work. It is a statement about who is permitted to do it.
Gütegemeinschaft. German industries organise quality associations that define their own marks and inspect their own members, awarding RAL quality marks with independent testing behind them. An industry polices its own standard, above what the law requires.