Steel Will: The Life of Tad Sendzimir by Vanda Sendzimir

Abstract

TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 187 investment in nuclear electrification had been launched in 1974, there was no going back. (Ironically, Algerian methane, so desperately needed in the 1970s, has risen sharply to 30 percent of French supply since 1981.) But geopolitical contingency was not all. GDF was always the runt among public enterprises—malnourished. From nationalization in 1946 to the turn toward natural gas in 1957, modernist planners saw gas as an old form of energy to be used only until better could be developed. While investment in EDF’s hydroelectric program soared, GDF was deprived. Graduates of elite schools spurned underpaid careers as gaziers. Even after GDF mastered natural gas in the 1960s, state-pricing policies favored both electricity and petroleum over gas, and GDF’s advertising budget was meager. Today, with the price of oil so low, and France exporting surplus electricity cheaply to neighboring countries to pay the interest on EDF’s nuclear debt, GDF’s prospects of expanding the use of its most benign of fossil fuels are dim. Yet if the single market of the European Union became the reality envisioned in Brussels, the age of Colbertism would be at an end. All national champions would lose their monopolies and be forced to compete for business both inside their home country and throughout unified Europe. French industrialists might even purchase gas privately in Norway and pay GDF to transport it to France, like an American common carrier! At the same time, enlargement of the European Union would free GDF to sell its know-how—accumulated by French tax and ratepayer expense—throughout Europe, east and west. Cecil O. Smith, Jr. Dr. Smith teaches the history of technology at Drexel University. Steel Will: The Life of Tad Sendzimir. By Vanda Sendzimir. New York: Hippocrene, 1994. Pp. 368; illustrations, index. $24.95. Tadeusz Sendzimir’s (1894-1989) two innovations most widely adopted in the steel industry are a continuous process for producing high-quality galvanized steel and the “Z mill” for cold rolling very thin sheets of alloy steel to precise specifications. Sendzimir holds seventythree patents in the United States, and many more elsewhere, and in 1975 was awarded the Brinell Gold Medal. About 400 Z mills have been installed in various countries. Vanda Sendzimir’s biography of her father, undertaken at the latter’s suggestion, is a highly readable account of his life and activities as inventor and enterprising businessman. She sytematically elicited his recollections and challenged them skeptically while recording them during the four years prior to his death. She also went through his papers and sought out his erstwhile colleagues, including employees, for oral histories. And she inspected and educated herself about many technical aspects of the steel plants, physical symbols of his life work. 188 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The character of the man, with all his single-minded wilfulness, individualistic elitism, insensitivity to family and feelings, authoritarian­ ism, egotism, painful Polish anti-Semitism, and failure to acknowledge others’ work, together with his technical inventiveness, drive, and a certain old-world charm, emerges very vividly. The author’s reports on her father’s views and those of others, as well as her own experience of her father, constitute invaluable data not otherwise retrievable for future historians of the steel industry. Political circumstances and economic opportunities took Sendzimir from one country and culture to another, and the book is very good at characterizing the complex changing cultural and political contexts of his life and work. Born in Galicia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire whose inhabitants tended to be Polish nationalists, he studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University in Lvov. Early in the First World War, avoiding conscription into the Austrian Army, he escaped to Kiev, where he worked as a garage mechanic. There he found enormous political turmoil and in 1918 was again a refugee, this time making his way to Shanghai. Sendzimir set up and ran a factory for producing bolts, needed by the Chinese Eastern Railway—the first mechanized bolt factory in China. In 1926/27, Shanghai, his refuge from political instabilities, was in turn wracked by violent upheaval, leading to the control of the city by the...