Chapter 15 – From Amsterdam to Venice
June had arrived, and it was already summer. All across Prussia, life went on seemingly unaffected by the war. On the streets and alleys of Berlin, people bustled about, shops and factories operated normally, and the city was as lively as ever.
For the past two months, Ernst had been busy organizing the Hexingen Development Bank. Fortunately, founding a bank in this era was relatively simple, with few requirements and regulations. After two months of preparation, the Hexingen Development Bank was finally established. Many senior managers from Ernst's various companies attended the opening ceremony. With the completion of equity transfers among Ernst's many factories, the Hexingen consortium took shape.
After the bank was founded, in addition to offering basic deposit and loan services, its first major move was to invest in the newly formed Berlin Electric Company and Berlin Energy & Power Company. Naturally, this was Ernst's idea. At first, these two companies were little more than shells. To find suitable managers, Ernst worked hard—visiting universities, inspecting industry firms, and placing job ads in newspapers. After sorting through a large number of applicants:
On July 28, the Frenchman Étienne Lenoir became the first general manager of Berlin Energy & Power Company. Lenoir was the inventor of the earliest internal combustion engine. Although he made significant strides in developing that engine, his research had consumed vast sums of money, and no one had invested in him, leaving him living in poverty. When Ernst invited him—offering a generous salary and promising support for his research—Lenoir gladly accepted.
At the same time, a soon-to-graduate student named Karl Friedrich Benz became Lenoir's assistant. At this point, Karl Benz was about to graduate from the Karlsruhe Polytechnic in Baden-Württemberg. Ernst recruited him early, letting him skip the usual factory internship phase by going straight to help the veteran Lenoir.
Berlin Energy & Power Company also bought the engine patent of a young Frenchman named Alphonse Beau de Rochas and hired him as a technical consultant. Thus, Berlin Energy & Power began to take form. This Alphonse Beau de Rochas was not especially famous historically, but he had once raced to register the carburetor patent ahead of Nikolaus August Otto, who was the recognized inventor of the four-stroke engine. Initially, Ernst had hoped to recruit Otto himself for a top position, given Otto's huge influence on human progress, but he was a step too late. As early as 1863, Otto had obtained a patent for improving the two-stroke engine and soon found a financial partner, Eugen Langen—a wealthy heir from the German sugar industry. Together, Otto and Langen started their own internal combustion engine company and were already making a profit. Otto no longer needed new partners or investors.
Berlin Energy & Power Company also hired a group of fresh university graduates as a talent pool. University students at this time were genuinely elite, and with their expertise, the company looked more substantial. Ernst's first directive to them was to build on Alphonse Beau de Rochas' patent to develop a better four-stroke engine. Historically, Beau de Rochas' patent never produced a prototype and was soon forgotten, but Ernst planned to buy it and perfect it. With Lenoir, an early pioneer in internal combustion, to assist, the goal did not seem far-fetched. They might even beat Nikolaus August Otto to making a truly practical four-stroke engine. Since Lenoir was the first to invent the internal combustion engine—albeit a primitive version with poor efficiency—there might be few people in the world more familiar with it than he was. Coupled with the youthful Karl Benz waiting in the wings, Ernst could start laying groundwork for the future automobile industry.
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On October 3, Carl von Linde, a young man, was appointed by the Hexingen Development Bank as the first general manager of Berlin Electric Company. Compared to the internal combustion engine sector, which built on steam engines, electrical theory was still quite new, and much of it was untested. Ernst searched across Europe before settling on Carl von Linde as a suitable candidate. In later history, Linde would invent the refrigerator, laying the foundation for modern cooling technology. As for other talents in the electrical field, they were very hard to find. The famous Siemens family in Germany already enjoyed noble status and was heavily supported by the Prussian government, leaving Ernst no room to intervene. Besides, Siemens was practically unstoppable in this era. The only comparable names Ernst could think of were Edison and Tesla in the United States. Theoretical giants aside, if they had already earned success or were tucked away in some unknown corner of Europe or America—or even not yet born—Ernst had no real way to recruit them. After ruling out those either too old or uninterested in investment, finding suitable people was like fishing a needle from the sea.
At least these two areas—internal combustion engines and electricity—had not yet shown their full potential. They were cutting-edge technologies, and only a few even worked on them. With a little digging at companies already in that line of work and at leading universities, Ernst found one or two promising figures. For Berlin Electric Company, Ernst had no magic solution; all he could do was let it develop with the times and hope it made minor innovations. In the future, they would mostly follow in the wake of Siemens and some American firms, possibly profiting by using licensed patents.
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On October 20, while the Vienna conference was underway, Ernst arrived at Amsterdam in the Netherlands. This time, he aimed to find reliable partners for developing markets in the Far East. Ernst had never stopped thinking about East Asia, which had been his homeland in a previous life. It was also too tempting as a market. Besides resource-rich lands, the areas with huge populations—like India and East Asia—were prime targets for Western colonizers. India, however, was Britain's lifeblood, and Ernst had little desire to meddle with such a mysterious place. East Asia was different. Ernst felt certain that no European understood East Asia as well as he did. Unlike India, which often submitted when faced with a strong foe, East Asians showed more backbone. Though Western powers had forced open the doors of one large East Asian empire, fully taking over was far from easy. Even if all the powers joined hands, they could not completely control the region. For a Prussian slipping in to make money, it would draw little attention—a perfect chance for Ernst to profit in the chaos.
Of course, Ernst wasn't about to swim to East Asia on his own, so he needed a partner with ocean-going commercial fleets. Recently, he had signed agreements with several long-established Dutch overseas trading companies. He planned to dispatch his own people to set up purely commercial outposts in East Asia, while the Dutch would make money from the middleman's cut. As for shipping goods and relaying commercial information between Europe and East Asia, he would have to rely on the Dutch. By contrast, Ernst did not trust Britain, and as a high-ranking German noble seeking partnership, the British government might keep a special eye on him. Ernst preferred avoiding official entanglements, lacking any real connections there. The Dutch, though overshadowed by the British, still placed great importance on business reputation, knowing that overseas trade was their economic lifeline. They couldn't afford to tarnish their standing in Europe.
Amsterdam, for the moment, was Ernst's best choice. In the future, however, he planned to shift his focus to ports around the Mediterranean. Once the Suez Canal opened in a few years, he could use that advantage to organize his own shipping routes. After Germany unified, trade could pass through Austria. Prince Constantin still had friends in the Austrian Empire, especially since Hexingen wasn't far from Austria; geographically, Vienna was closer to Hexingen than Berlin was. That route would also be safer. Finally, shipping goods via Venice and other Adriatic ports through the Suez Canal avoided circling half of Africa's west coast, cutting the trip to East Asia in half and lowering transport costs.
Even for now, any cargo departing from the Netherlands could travel by way of the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal to reach its final destination. One possibility in Ernst's mind was Hamburg in Germany, though it remained only a temporary option until unification. Germany at present lacked robust long-range maritime experience, and its ships were behind those of the Dutch or the Venetians. Hence, Ernst wasn't in a rush to build shipyards in Hamburg. He still wasn't handling the kind of heavy-volume trade that demanded ocean freight. His main business wasn't yet in raw commodities, so land shipping from Berlin to Austrian-controlled Venice, while more costly, remained affordable for him.
One day, with bigger-volume goods to trade, he could still build a Hamburg-based fleet. But first, establishing a presence in the Mediterranean and scouting things out made sense. After finishing his trip in the Netherlands, Ernst planned to tour the Adriatic region.
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