Late great engineers: Robert Bosch - automotive pioneer and social innovator

It only ran for half a column, but his obituary in the 13 March 1942 edition of the New York Times seemed to deserve more space than that. The article summarises the life and work of the “German Industrialist Who Had Branches All Over the World,” who made “Spark Plugs, Lamps and Horns” and “Started With Small Shop 50 Years Ago.” That industrialist was Robert Bosch, who founded the technology company that rose inexorably to become a household-name brand informally known by the mononym Bosch; whose career included the roles of innovator and engineer, entrepreneur and social visionary, a supporter of education and healthcare through charitable works. In the 21st century, the Bosch Group is a multibillion-euro global corporation that facilitates ‘connected living’ through IR4.0. Its mission statement reads simply: ‘We are Bosch’.

Bosch’s entanglement in Germany’s 20th century military-industrial complex has long cast a shadow over the reputation of a man who was a champion of the worker, and who believed in providing the “exemplary working conditions and a good work environment” that became the hallmarks of his company. With pioneering social views – Bosch introduced an eight-hour day in 1906 and advocated industrial arbitration and free trade – he also believed in the reciprocal relationship between a paternalistic organisation and its labour force. Explaining how his ‘associates’ (as he insisted on describing employees) were so comparatively well paid, Bosch once said: “I don’t pay good wages because I have a lot of money. I have a lot of money because I pay good wages.”

Robert Bosch was born in 1861 in southern Germany into a prosperous farming family, and would maintain a keen interest in farming and hunting his whole life. The eleventh of twelve children, his childhood was influenced by his well-educated freemason father who placed a priority on his children’s education that was unusual given the Bosch family’s social status. This led to the young Robert taking an apprenticeship in precision mechanics from the secondary technical school – Realschule – in the city of Ulm. During the following seven years during he worked in Germany, as well as the United States where he was employed by Thomas Edison in New York, and with Siemens in the UK. While in Germany, Bosh attended lectures at Stuttgart Polytechnic to overcome his “fear of technical terminology”. On 15 November 1886, he opened the now legendary Workshop for Precision Mechanics and Electrical Engineering in Stuttgart.

It’s hard to calculate what Bosch’s start-up capital of 10,000 marks would be worth now. But given that the workshop originally employed only two associates and that the investment was soon swallowed up, it can be readily assumed that the sum he had amassed from his life savings and late father’s estate was not on a scale from which vast companies traditionally emerge. Bailed out by a bank loan the company survived, and with Bosch reinvesting his profits in machinery, by the turn of the century the company had a staff of 40. At this point, according to the New York Herald Tribune, “Gottlieb Daimler, automotive engineer, inspired Mr Bosch with the idea of spark-plug manufacture. Then his career began to skyrocket.” A less sensational account of the conditions that created the firm’s growth is to be found on the corporation’s official website: “Bosch benefited from the electrification of Stuttgart brought about by the industrial age. One product in particular quickly became a linchpin of the young company: the magneto ignition device.”

Robert Bosch (1861-1942)

This vital component generated the electric spark needed to cause the air-fuel mixture in a stationary internal combustion engine to ignite. Bosch saw the invention’s potential to solve the greatest technical headache faced by the automotive industry in its formative years: creating a reliable ignition system. Having adapted it to suit the requirements of a vehicle engine, this success represented the start of Bosch’s trajectory as an automotive supplier. By 1901, the first Bosch factory had opened as the business expanded overseas, initially into the United Kingdom followed by France, Austria and Hungary. Further expansion, including in the United States – first sales office opened in 1906, first factory in 1912 – came to an abrupt halt with the outbreak of the Great War which was “an unmitigated disaster for Bosch. The vast majority of the company’s key foreign markets vanished in one fell swoop and most of Germany’s wartime enemies seized not only the company’s tangible assets, but also its industrial property rights, patents and brands.”

The interwar period held mixed fortunes. Just as the company was making headway with innovations such as the electric horn, windshield wiper, diesel injection and pneumatic power brake system, a series of economic crises that would lead to the Great Depression devastated the automotive industry. The German engineer realised that focusing on a specific sector made him vulnerable, and so he embarked on a process of modernisation and diversification aimed at reducing his dependency on the automotive market. As the Bosch website explains: “in only a few years, he succeeded in turning his company from a small automotive supplier into a modern and multinational electrical engineering group.”

During this period Bosch introduced many of the reforms for which he is remembered. Politically and socially active, he promoted occupational training in his organisation and, as noted in Die Zeit, became one of the first industrialists in Germany to introduce the eight-hour working day. The implementation of this restriction gave rise to the not-entirely complimentary nickname among his fellow industrialists of ‘Red Bosch’. They also baulked at Bosch reputedly paying his workforce 60 per cent more than the current scale. Bosch meanwhile made no apology for his generous compensation rates, based on his belief that shorter hours and higher wages led to ‘industrial peace’ that in turn led to increased productivity that brought financial benefits to management and shopfloor worker alike.

A committed pacifist, and not wishing to profit from the armament contracts awarded to his firm during the Great War, Bosch initiated a programme of donating millions of marks to charitable causes, as well as part-funding the construction of the Neckar Canal. As a supporter of education he donated to schools, colleges and universities. As a supporter of alternative medicine he donated 5.5 million marks to the construction of a homeopathic hospital, which was opened in April 1940 as the Robert Bosch Hospital in Stuttgart.
Bosch’s political activism stemmed from his pacifism and desire to see a united Europe. He was committed to seeing post-war reconciliation between France and Germany, lasting peace and customs-free trade within continental Europe. In the build-up to the Second World War he was dismayed by the rise of National Socialism with its aggressive foreign policy and plans for economic sovereignty. When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, and sensing their chancellor Adolf Hitler envisioned a new war, Bosch’s peace-making efforts came to an end. The greatly troubled engineer effectively withdrew from public life.

In 1937 Bosch restructured his company by changing it into a GmbH (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, or ‘company with limited liability’), while its founder put his affairs in order before drawing up a new will. In this document he set out the company’s financial independence and autonomy, while ensuring that it would continue to remain in the hands of his descendants so that profits could be used for charitable and social causes. Part of the will reads: “It is my intention, apart from the alleviation of all kinds of hardship, to promote the moral, physical, and intellectual development of the people.” This paved the way for the establishment of a posthumous corporate constitution in 1964, which is still in place today.

It was perhaps inevitable that the company would become ‘entangled’ in rearming the Third Reich in preparation for the Second World War. The corporation remains transparent in its official literature about the historical fact that during this dark period its factories used ‘forced labour’, and had contracts with the Nazi party. But it also juxtaposes this admission with the mitigating statement: “Bosch and his senior executives supported resistance to the Nazi regime and helped to rescue Jewish associates and others facing persecution.”
And yet, as Bosch’s obituary in the New York Herald Tribune observes, he “received the title of ‘Pioneer of Labour’ from Adolf Hitler on his eightieth birthday”, and that while Bosch declined many public honours, he “accepted the Eagle Shield of the Reich from President von Hindenburg.” Robert Bosch did not live to see the end of the war and the fall of the National Socialists. He died on 12 March 1942 in Stuttgart, of complications resulting from an inflammation of the middle ear.

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