Marry an Engineer

Alfred DuPont Chandler, Jr. was a professor of business history at the Harvard Business School. Probably the best book that I have read on capitalism and the difference between the many forms, such as Britain, was his Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990). Chandler received his Ph.D. from Harvard in History and utilized the papers of his ancestor Henry Varnum Poor, a leading analyst of the railway industry and a founder of Standard & Poor’s, as a basis for his thesis. Chandler passed away in 2007.

Chandler had a fascinating passage regarding engineers in this book:

It is instructive to compare and contrast the status of engineers in the United States, Britain and continental Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. In continental Western Europe, they were accepted into the highest levels of industrial management and simultaneously achieved the highest social status. Respectable families liked to marry their daughters to engineers; this was the litmus test. In America, engineers would never achieve a comparable social status, which was reserved rather for “old money”, lawyers and descendants of the bungling Pilgrim Fathers, but they reached the highest positions in manufacturing and commerce. In Britain, broadly speaking and with important exceptions, they achieved neither authoritative positions in business nor social status; Britain’s answer to the polytechnic was the “public” (i.e., private) school, for which technology was anathema and came late. The resultant superiority of German over British engineering was illustrated in World War II when the Messerschmitt 109 and Focke-Wulf 190 proved themselves able to fly faster, higher and further, and carry a greater weight, than the equivalent British fighter planes. Such was the esteem in which the 190 was held that Winston Churchill decided to mount a commando raid on its base to seize a specimen – a raid that would be aborted when one accidentally landed in England; what Britain learned from its revolutionary technology was used in designing the subsequent Typhoon series of fighters.