By Thomas F. Schwartz
In mid-October, 1954, Herbert Hoover received an invitation from West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to visit. Hoover accepted and in late November gave a series of speeches. One was an acceptance speech for an honorary degree from the Eberhard Karl University at Tübingen on November 25, 1954. The title of the talk is the title of this blog. Two main themes were emphasized: 1) that in the 16th century the university had on staff Philip Melanchthon, an important figure in the Reformation and friend of Georgius Agricola, author of De Re Metallica, a work that the Hoover’s spent years on translating and annotating, and 2) the importance of scientific discovery at universities that develop into transformative technology.
Hoover stated:
I have been in Germany many times, but one occasion was on a scholastic adventure. Some years before the first World War, together with Mrs. Hoover, we undertook to translate from the Latin the first comprehensive book published on my branch of the engineering profession. That was a work entitled De Re Metallica, by Georgius Agricola—being a huge folio of 600 pages with many intelligent illustrations. It was published almost exactly 400 years ago. The author’s real name was George Bauer, a doctor living among the mines of Saxony and Bohemia. He also held some public offices, among them Burgomeister of Chemnitz. Agricola had a tendril of memory with this university. Although he was a staunch Catholic, he was a lifelong friend of Melanchthon, a lecturer here, who aided in securing the publication of his book.
Previous translators had failed at any adequate translation because Agricola wrote in a language which ceased to grow on the technical side a thousand years before his time. He therefore invented or adapted a maze of Latin terms for materials and technical processes unknown to the Romans. As a part of disentangling these puzzles, Mrs. Hoover and I visited the scene of his work. She also probed the literature in German libraries on these subjects which began to appear some years after Agricola. Ultimately, with these aids, we disentangled some hundreds of terms that he had added to the Latin language.
It might interest you to know that this book by a long-since forgotten German scholar had some responsibilities for the torrent of gold and silver with which the Spanish Conquistadors of Peru and Mexico flooded the world in the 15th and 16th centuries. It seems Highly probable that the processes used in working the mines were taken from Agricola’s book. No other text existed at that time, and the particular processes which they needed were not used in Spain. And a further tribute to this scholar, he was the first to illuminate correctly the principles of many metallurgical processes which we still use today. However, we have improved the machinery.
Philip Melanchthon was a protégé of Martin Luther at Wittenberg. Luther, the son of a German miner, questioned the teachings of the Roman Catholic church setting into motion the Reformation. Melanchthon assisted Luther in defining the ideas of the reformers and authored the Augsburg Confession. But like Luther himself, Melanchthon had correspondence with the leading minds of his time including Agricola, Erasmus and others.
Hoover’s mention of the use of Agricola in processing the silver and gold mined in Peru and Mexico had important consequences. The Spanish forced labor on indigenous people under horrible conditions to extract the ore. The amount of silver and gold going to Spain caused some significant historical issues. As David Hackett Fisher notes, prices in Europe began to increase before the influx of silver and gold increased the money supply, furthering the trend of price inflation. The abundance of new wealth going to Spain, however, produced even greater deficits. As leading biographer Geoffrey Parker, describes Philip II, King of Spain: “Perhaps Philip’s greatest failure as a CEO, however, lay in his inability to understand his finances.” Under Charles V (1516-1556) and Philip II (1556-1598) Spain was the most powerful state in Europe but also the most financially unstable. Between 1557 and 1647 it went bankrupt six times despite the riches pouring in from the New World mines. Unwise decisions such as Philip’s building the Spanish Armada, were but one cause of wasted opportunities.