My Life with the Printed Circuit by Paul Eisler

Abstract

1124 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE cold rubber, and acetylene chemistry. In no case, however, can he point to a tape recorder (say) which was directly derived from German work and made large profits for an American firm. His evidence dries up after the late 1940s, when American companies were still enthusiastic about the breakthroughs they were going to make as a result of this intelligence, but before these breakthroughs actually occurred. Cold rubber was perhaps the best example of the American industry making a major technical breakthrough as a result of German research, but the cold rubber developed in the United States between 1945 and 1949 was different in several respects from the experimental product seized from the Germans, and the West Ger­ man synthetic rubber manufacturer, Chemische Werke Huis, licensed the American technology in the mid-1950s. In other fields, however, the efforts of American firms to digest FIAT’s findings did little to accelerate their progress relative to their German counterparts. For the larger chemical companies, such as Du Pont, the German work merely indicated which lines of their own research were worth pursuing further. Even if the financial impact of this intelligence­ gathering operation was less than Gimbel asserts, it still had a significant influence on the development of the American sciencebased industries in the late 1940s, and he has provided us with a good, but brief, overview of its multifarious activities. Peter J. T. Morris Dr. Morris, now at the Science Museum, London, was a Royal Society—British Academy postdoctoral research fellow in the history of science at the Open University. His latest book is The American Synthetic Rubber Research Program, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. He is the founder and co-organizer of the I. G. Farben Study Group. My Life with the Printed Circuit. By Paul Eisler. Bethlehem, Pa., and Cranbury, N.J.: Lehigh University Press and Associated University Presses, 1989. Pp. 170; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliogra­ phy, index. $29.50. Recent histories of industrial research and development have concentrated on the activities of large corporations and massive “big science” schemes. This modest account of the life’s work of Paul Eisler is an interesting addition to that literature, a view from the other side of the fence, and something of an antidote. Numerous themes emerge from the account of Eisler’s efforts to make a living as a small-time inventor with a couple of big ideas. Mostly these are touched upon in an undeliberate way, making their apparent naiveté endearing. Here is a rich mine of anecdote and opinion for scholars looking for examples of, to name but a few: invention and war, the role of the technical outsider, small-scale industrial R&D, the awkward TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1125 relationships between research and development and between devel­ opment and commercialization, the strategies of the product cham­ pion, the management of company laboratories, and the gritty side of patenting and patent defense. Eisler paints a picture of himself as a somewhat hapless character. He champions many good ideas only to find that none of them take on a life as expected. He seems to sign any sort of contract, only meekly regretting, years later, that he entirely failed to look after his financial and career interests. He trusts all manner of corporate bounder, apparently never learning the most basic concepts of office politics. His inventions are numerous and many of them fundamen­ tally appealing. The printed circuit itself, as well as its endless applications, is worth some wonder. The use of heating foil appar­ ently made him some money in the end, by heating Californian waterbeds as much as by more grand applications such as de-icing airplane wings. His ideas applied to food processing and to the design of batteries may yet find champions, or at least successors. There are numerous tantalizing hints that would have been most enlightening about the man himself if developed and would have explained some of the mysteries we are left with. We learn perhaps too little about his early life, especially considering that the printed circuit was a very early invention. We see little of his character, and he is dismissive, perhaps...