I hope I have done them justice in my endeavor to capture the psuchē of the German Mittelstand.¹

To Bielefeld, I’m glad I can confirm that the city does indeed exist.

Chairs and the Czech Republic

There is a chair you will find at cafés across Europe—and perhaps have even sat in—called Chair Nr. 14. This “coffee shop chair” became the first mass-produced piece of furniture and was invented by Michael Thonet, a German carpenter. But before number fourteen, Thonet introduced the Boppard chair, and with it, a novel technique: wood bending. By softening solid wood with heat and steam, he could coax it into curves impossible to carve by hand, and then let the wood set permanently into its new shape.

This advancement allowed furniture to progress from an era of primitive aesthetics to a modern level of sophistication that caught the eye of a more affluent clientele. At the Koblenz trade fair of 1841, Austrian Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, upon seeing Thonet’s work, invited Michael to Vienna to present his chairs to the Imperial Family.

At the behest of the Austrian court, Michael relocated to Vienna and opened a shop with his sons—Franz, Michael Jr., August, Josef, and Jakob—under the name Gebrüder Thonet. There, alongside decorating the Stadtpalais Liechtenstein, he continued refining his art, receiving the silver medal at the 1855 World’s Fair in Paris for his Vienna bentwood chairs. Then, in 1859, he unveiled Konsumstuhl Nr. 14.

What was revolutionary about Nr. 14 was that its design made it the first truly manufacturable chair. Its construction allowed it to be disassembled into just a few components, simplifying packaging and enabling export around the world. After earning the gold medal at the 1867 Paris World’s Fair and claiming its throne as the “chair of chairs,” the Konsumstuhl became the standard for European restaurants and cafés.

Soon after the breakout international success, demand for Thonet furniture surged, and as ownership shifted from Michael to his sons, they looked to scale fabrication. Offering expansive beech forests, a substantial skilled workforce, and lying in a location favorable for logistics, they selected Bystřice pod Hostýnem, in Moravia—what is today the eastern Czech Republic—to be the flagship manufacturing site.

When Gebrüder Thonet established the Bystřice factory it became the center of gravity of their operations, serving as the core research and development hub and main production facility. By 1913 the plant employed 2,000 workers who produced 500,000 chairs per year. Beyond the company gates the Thonets drafted the blueprints for an early factory town; they built houses for the workers, schools for their children, and routed the first major railway through the village. August and Jakob Thonet even went on to serve as mayors of Bystřice and maintained Czech as the primary language despite being German.

The twentieth century, however, would drastically reform Gebrüder Thonet. The economic strain of WWI forced a merger with competitor Kohn-Mundus in 1924, creating Thonet-Mundus—the world's largest furniture manufacturer. Then in 1939, the Nazi occupation, through the Kroměříž Oberlandrat, installed state-appointed overseers and repurposed the factory to meet wartime demands, producing ammunition crates, rifle stocks, hospital beds, and wooden wings for aircraft.

The postwar period proved no kinder to the Bystřice manufactory: in 1945, the Thonet property was confiscated and placed under national administration through the Beneš decrees in the first wave of Czechoslovak nationalization. Confronted with expropriation and mounting political pressure, Victor Thonet, representing the third generation, fled the company and the town, severing the founding lineage from the factory entirely. From that moment on, the future of Thonet was permanently halved, forced to take separate paths.

On one path, in Germany, Georg Thonet, Michael’s great-grandson, rebuilt manufacturing facilities in Frankenberg, Hessen, and granted a new life to the furniture enterprise. Today, the Thonet family, now in its sixth generation, continues to run this legendary Mittelstand firm.

On the other path, in Czechoslovakia, the Bystřice factory was rechristened in 1953 as TON, an acronym for Továrny na ohýbaný nábytek, meaning “Factories for bentwood furniture.” As the years progressed, and as the country was drawn firmly behind the Iron Curtain, the factory became a socialist state enterprise led by politically placed directors. It wasn’t until 1989 and the fall of communism that the TON brand had the opportunity to retake its place in the world of furniture. Slowly but surely, it did, once again becoming a world-renowned brand, now separate from that of Thonet. The same town, the same factory, the same people—just a different name.

It was over a year ago that I spent a weekend in Bystřice pod Hostýnem with one of the former state-appointed directors of the TON factory. Walking with him through the picturesque streets of this quaint Czech town, something occurred that I have not forgotten since. Everyone we passed knew him, and he, them. Shop owners, retirees, young families, they all stopped, greeted each other, and exchanged pleasantries. It was through him that I first learned the story of TON, and what it signifies to the 8,000 people of this village tucked away in the Czech Republic.

I hold onto this memory fondly, and it was only recently that I realized there existed a collection of similar stories that brought it vividly back to the forefront of my mind; this time in the form of the German Mittelstand. Over the course of my year in Germany, what became clear to me was that the industrial and cultural pattern I had found in Bystřice, was repeated across the country in family firms whose histories stretched back centuries.

Guilds and the Gründerzeit

I first learned of the German Mittelstand around two years ago during my bachelor studies while interning and working on a global merger and acquisition in the pharmaceutical manufacturing space. As we supervised the divestiture of an American company from its German subsidiaries, I was tasked with analyzing factory blueprints and mapping organizational structures. Eager to grasp the full scope of these assignments, I began researching German engineering and soon found myself peeling back the layers of German history and the Industrial Revolution.

It is down one of these rabbit holes that we can begin to unearth the line linking the medieval guilds to the Gründerzeit and, in turn, today’s Mittelstand; specifically through the story of one of Germany’s oldest family-run businesses, now in its seventeenth generation. To locate this firm, we must head to Kreuztal, a dorf nestled among the wooded hills of the Siegerland.

The Siegerland has over 2,000 years of ironworking heritage, with evidence of iron ore mining dating as far back as 150 B.C. By the 14th century, Hammer‑ und Hüttenwerke—hammer mills and smelting works that processed iron ore into bars—had become the foundational commercial units in which local craftsmen honed their trade. In the 16th century, as the city of Siegen, just south of Kreuztal, grew in wealth under the House of Nassau within the Holy Roman Empire, Count John of Nassau formalized the social structure that organized the iron smelters, blacksmiths, and metal workers into the Bruderschaft der Massenbläser und Hammerschmiede guild. Tracing the members of this guild leads to a 1502 record preserved in the municipal archive listing the name Heylmann Dresler as a Meister der Zunft. As a master of the blacksmiths guild, Dresler paid his feuerschilling—a licensing fee to the Count for the rights to use the communal fire pit, operate his own hammer mill and workshop, and train apprentices—marking the symbolic founding of The Coatinc Company.

Guilds (Zünfte) like the Bruderschaft der Massenbläser und Hammerschmiede first took shape during the High Middle Ages (ca. 1000-1300 AD) as professional communities of artisans and merchants, emerging from the need to oversee crafts and regulate markets within specific realms.² They upheld product quality, protected their associates’ economic interests, and transferred skills through an apprenticeship system. Beyond facilitating economic advancement, guilds also fulfilled vital social and administrative functions. Guild representatives often held roles within municipal governments, maintained welfare funds, organized festivals, and reinforced religious traditions. Following this pattern of guild member turned civil servant, the Dreslers had, by the second generation, begun a long-standing tradition of holding public and ecclesiastical roles. From the fifth to the tenth generation, members of the family even assumed the office of Mayor of Siegen.

Yet, as the guilds matured, they began to resemble powerful monopolies of craftsmen and merchants more than simple trade associations. Developing strong political influence and rigid internal hierarchies, they organized themselves around the three-rank structure of apprentice, journeyman, and master, with initiation strictly controlled. A prospective apprentice had to prove legitimate birth, pay an entry fee, and gain the approval of the master who would tutor him. Upon completing his apprenticeship, the journeyman faced a long and arduous path as he wandered Europe in search of masters to further refine his techne. Finally, the journeyman would culminate his travels with the presentation of a magnum opus marking the transition to master within the guild. Through this system of social filtration—and through a revolving door into government—they guarded trade secrets, defended their constituents’ markets, and accumulated authority across their domains.

Leveraging the standing and privileges of the guilds at their peak during the 1600s, the seventh generation Dreslers transformed the modest workshop into a full-scale iron-producing and trading concern, operating multiple hammer mills and forges. By the tenth generation, Johann Heinrich Dresler II had expanded upon his forefathers’ successes by investing heavily in metal production and acquiring a controlling stake in the Sieghütte ironworks, then among the most important iron-producing facilities in the Siegerland. This venture into the Sieghütter Hammer during the 1700s solidified the family’s foothold in the iron industry, a position that would prove critical as the 19th century brought both the decline of the guilds and an inflection point in blacksmithing techniques.

At the turn of the 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte’s victory over Austria and Russia at the Battle of Austerlitz marked the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the reorganization of the German states. At Napoleon’s behest, the 1806 États confédérés du Rhin converted sixteen German states into French-aligned territories, with the Siegerland falling into the Grand Duchy of Berg. Three years later, in 1809, under French sovereignty and stripped of their liberties, the region’s guilds ceased to exist with the sole exception of the weakened ironworkers. Yet even this diminished association of blacksmiths would soon dissolve as the 1830s introduced the industry-altering Siegerländer Eisenhütten- und Hammerordnung.

These disruptive ironworks regulations revoked or heavily modified many guild charters in an effort to open markets, consolidate operations, and stimulate innovation. Just as significantly, the progressive policies sought to eliminate outdated manufacturing practices and curb deforestation by forcing ironworkers to transition from wood-based to coal-based production methods. In parallel, the Hammerordnung opened a strategic window of opportunity for Johann Heinrich Dresler III, the twelfth generation of the family, to acquire the Heinrichshütte and the Kreuztal rolling mill. Beyond these acquisitions, he constructed wire mills and coke-fired blast furnaces, assembling an early puddling plant—the 19th-century metallurgical facility designed to refine high-carbon pig iron into wrought iron and ultimately steel. This mechanized complex advanced the metalworking technologies that laid the groundwork for modern steel operations, positioning firms like The Coatinc Company to capitalize on the coal-and-steel economy that would power Germany’s continental ascent.

One cannot discuss the Industrial Revolution without first acknowledging Britain, for it was Great Britain that birthed industrialization.³ This 18th-century Island of Industry found itself caught in the perfect maelstrom: cheap fuel, rising wages, surging intercontinental trade, rapid population growth, industry-aligned political and economic incentives, and above all enterprising projectors. Together, these forces uprooted Britain’s agrarian society and overhauled it into the world’s first manufacturing superpower. Yet while textile-driven England pioneered the first locomotives, railways, and steamships, Germany emerged thirty years later at the forefront of Europe’s heavy industry and as the cradle of the chemical, electrical, and pharmaceutical industries.

The watershed moment came in the latter half of the 19th century, as the German states were reordered once again—this time at the muzzle of Bismarck’s Krupp cannons rather than at the tip of Napoleon’s bayonets. Through a sequence of wars against Denmark, Austria, and France, the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck united thirty-nine German states into the Deutsches Kaiserreich in 1871. German unification replaced a patchwork of tariffs, legal codes, and currencies with a single national market, modern legal infrastructure, and common currency. Flush with five billion gold francs in French war reparations and propelled by a strategic railway initiative, the freshly formed German Empire ushered in the Gründerzeit, the “Founding Era” of socio-economic explosion from 1871 to 1890. Germany’s most feverish entrepreneurial years, the Gründerjahre, from 1871 to 1873 alone saw the founding of 928 firms, as industrial giants such as Siemens (1847), Bayer (1863), BASF (1865), ThyssenKrupp (1811/1867), Bosch (1886), and Daimler (1890) etched their names into this monumental period.

Within this Founding Era, Heinrich Adolf Dresler found himself well positioned to rework the Kreuztal rolling mill into a wire mill equipped with modern wire-drawing facilities. With the additional purchase of a galvanizing plant alongside the renovated factory, the Siegener Verzinkerei Actiengesellschaft was incorporated. These modernizations signaled the Dreslers’ shift away from traditional wrought-iron processing toward the steel-based manufacturing that would fuel the buildout of Germany’s railways, steamships, bridges, and factories. Firms in the metalworking sector occupied a fortunate position to harness the momentum of German industrialization. Riding this wave of progress, Heinrich further strengthened the business by joining the boards of the Eisenzeche mining company and Geisweid ironworks while co-founding the Eisern-Siegen railway and the Siegen bank. In doing so, Heinrich embodied what it meant to be a founder and industrialist of the Gründerzeit.

Across centuries, the Dreslers survived the collapse of the guilds, the Napoleonic Wars, imperial Germany and industrialization, and would later withstand two world wars, globalization, and the transition into the modern corporate age—the latter reflected even in the renaming of the Siegener Verzinkerei Actiengesellschaft to The Coatinc Company. As regimes rose and fell, empires gave way to republics, and borders were repeatedly redrawn, one common thread endured and subtly wove through it all: the German Mittelstand.

The German Mittelstand

Recounting the historical lineage of these firms only tells part of the story. The more intriguing realization was that the Mittelstand is not simply a category of company, but an ethos. Before discussing what I encountered inside these factories, it is worth first attempting to define the German Mittelstand and emphasize the pivotal role it plays in shaping the country’s economic and industrial identity.

Mittelstand is often used liberally as a label to describe Germany’s “small-to-medium sized businesses.” However, this interpretation is insufficient; Mittelstand resists translation the same way Schadenfreude or Wanderlust does.

To quote the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:

“Mittelstand cannot be measured by size. Mittelstand is an attitude. The billionaire screw manufacturer Würth can generate as much turnover as it wants, it can never exit the Mittelstand...There are [German] entrepreneurial families whose ancestors did business in China when Mao was working in a library...As difficult as it is to define the Mittelstand, its effects are palpable.” (2013)

Acknowledging this difficulty, I would claim that what distinguishes the Mittelstand falls broadly into three causally related categories: (1) ownership structure, (2) values-based culture, and (3) industrial significance.

In 1962, in his seminal treatise Wesen und Begriff der mittelständischen Unternehmung, Klaus-Jürgen Gantzel evaluated the German Mittelstand through both a structural and sociological lens. Gantzel theorized that the essence (Wesen) and concept (Begriff) of the Mittelstand were based on ownership and control, governance structure, and communal impact. Later extrapolations of his work delineate two entrepreneurial archetypes: first, the Kapitalist, who views the firm primarily as a tool for short-term financial gain; and second, the Mittelständler, who views the firm as an intrinsic extension of self, motivated to preserve its “soul” across generations.

This distinction in ownership philosophy also reveals one of the defining structural characteristics of the Mittelstand. Since the 1930s, much of modern corporate governance literature has centered on what economists call the “principal-agent problem.” Though not formally named at the time, the issue was identified as early as 1776 in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations through his observations on the separation of ownership and control within joint stock companies.

“The directors of such companies, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private company frequently watch over their own…It is upon this account, that joint stock companies…have seldom been able to maintain the competition against private adventurers.”

— Excerpt from Wealth of Nations. Book V, Chapter I, Part III

This dynamic can be illustrated through the modern publicly traded corporation, in which shareholders own the company while professional managers wield operational control. The shareholders (principals) entrust decision-making authority to management (agents), whose incentives may not always align with the interests of the owners. For example, a manager whose compensation depends on quarterly performance may prioritize short-term gains, aggressive cost-cutting, or financial engineering even when such decisions weaken the corporation’s long-term health.

Within the Mittelstand, this structural separation is eliminated because shareholders and managers are often one and the same. Owners commonly remain involved in the day-to-day operations of the business as multi-generational managers. Decision-making is therefore not dictated by earnings reports or swayed by external market pressure, but exercised prudently by families that think in decades.

This mindset profoundly influences the internal character of the firm. Gantzel posited that the Mittelstand is driven not solely by bottom-line performance, but by fundamental values such as solidarity, stewardship, and trust. A proverb shared with me by one Geschäftsführer sums this up well: “Kultur ist der gute Geist im Haus”—roughly, “Culture is the guiding spirit of the house.”

The embodiment of this culture begins with recruiting talent and instilling these values. Many employees join the Mittelstand in their teens through an Ausbildung—the modern successor to the guild apprenticeship system. Through this process, apprentices receive not only technical training, but also professional and personal mentorship from the firm. Upon completion of the program, there is no contractual obligation to remain, yet remarkably, 60-80% choose to transition into full-time roles, frequently staying for the rest of their professional tenure. This intentional investment creates a profound mutual loyalty, anchoring the workforce to both the collective spirit of the firm and the social fabric of their town.

Rooted in the same thread of responsibility, the company simultaneously promotes the wellbeing of the broader community around it. Many Mittelstand have chosen to remain headquartered where they were founded, foregoing global capitals like Berlin, Paris, or London. Consequently, the vitality of the village becomes intertwined with the fortunes of the firm. It comes as no surprise, then, that the family name displayed proudly on factory walls is also found on local buildings and sponsorship plaques. More than just a producer of capital goods, the Mittelstand effectively becomes patron of the arts, sponsor of public works, and benefactor of civic life.

Dually devoted to their towns, these owners do not disappear to distant corporate offices, but instead live and work alongside their employees, customers, and suppliers. Decades of repeated interaction naturally cultivate trust as businesses and families become household names. Deeply embedded both socially and commercially, personal reputation becomes inseparable from professional.

Concentrated in high-precision engineering, bespoke industrial machinery, and tailored mechanical components, these low-transaction-cost relationships are the handshake confirming dependability in industries characterized by long sales cycles and operational complexity. Under these conditions, engineering solves problems collaboratively; patient capital is allocated thoughtfully; labor markets are sustained seamlessly; and customer service becomes a vocation, not a business function.

Together, these principles underpin the extraordinary significance these companies have attained within the German economy. The Mittelstand accounts for roughly 55% of Germany’s GDP and 70% of its exports, with many firms generating revenues ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of euros. Their economic footprint is so substantial that, on a one-to-one basis, Mittelstand firms employ roughly twice as many people as Germany’s publicly listed, non-family corporations; when taken as a whole, they employ roughly five times as many. This comes even after the fact that it cost Germany €2 trillion to integrate its eastern post-communist states following the fall of the Berlin Wall. All things considered, it is arguably justified to say that the great majority of Germany’s economic stability rests upon the shoulders of the Mittelstand—just look at Brod’s illustration one more time.

Even more captivating is the degree to which these firms dominate specialized global markets. Many Mittelstand are dubbed “Hidden Champions,” holding leading or top-three positions within highly specific industrial niches despite remaining largely unknown outside of their sectors. Of the world’s manufacturing superpowers, Germany is uniquely home to approximately 1,500 Hidden Champions—multiples more than any other country. For comparison, the U.S. trails in second with a meager 350. Whether it is Ottobock (prosthetics), Claas (agricultural machinery), Enercon (wind turbines), Herrenknecht (tunnelling equipment), or Flexi (dog leashes), almost the entirety of the physical world, in one way or another, traces back to a factory in a small German town.

Yet there was only so much I could learn from browsing economic statistics and reading organizational theory. To truly comprehend the Wesen und Begriff of the Mittelstand, I also needed to walk the factory floors and pass through the small industrial towns.

From the Factory Floor

Taking advantage of the breaks in my engineering post-graduate studies and current internship, I hopped on the Deutsche Bahn, and trekked across the country from Nordrhein-Westfalen to Oberbayern to learn from the masters of manufacturing themselves. Over the course of several months, I conducted over twenty interviews with owners and operators, toured ten factories—from a pencil-and-paper machine shop with a double-digit workforce to a global technology titan with tens of thousands of employees—and spent a handful of days shadowing the shop floor of a Hidden Champion to deepen my understanding of the Mittelstand methodology.

From my time spent with these manufacturers, the core takeaway here was that the moat is the tacit knowledge and intuitive engineering judgement behind the processes, and the processes are executed with an uncompromising operational excellence. Put bluntly, when I cheekily asked why I couldn’t just buy the same injection molding machines and open my own shop, a Production Leader chuckled and silently walked me into the next room. Pointing to a 56-year-old tool and die master at his workbench, he stated that I could never “buy” the generations of tribal knowledge captured within the purpose-built molds that slotted into those machines.

This mastery he was alluding to first became apparent to me during the opening dialogue I had with the CEO of a turbomachinery manufacturer. When I inquired about talent development, he explicitly referenced the firm’s inaugural vocational teaching workshop. It was founded in 1910 on the principle that quality products can only be produced by a highly trained specialist workforce. This premise that education is the foundation of every long-standing institution is found repeated across the Mittelstand as dedicated Ausbildung programs and centers.

During a tour of one of these training campuses, the Director of Education explained the first step of nurturing the firm’s technical know-how. Potential hires are engaged as early as 16 years old through field-trip factory tours, live demonstrations of day-to-day work, in-class presentations, and printed flyers posted around the local community. After a successful transition from candidate to apprentice, the new joiner can choose from a list of critical competencies identified by the educational leadership. Each year the committee meets to detail hiring needs and align programs to necessary internal expertise spanning, for example, mechatronics, metal forming, materials testing, and robotics. Once matched to a track, apprentices spend three to four years splitting their time between hands-on shop floor instruction and theoretical classroom coursework—a dual structure that culminates in certification as a Facharbeiter. This function is so core to the firm’s livelihood that the Director highlighted the €6 million investment they had made in 2025 to build their new Bildungscampus.⁴ Walking through the state-of-the-art facilities that put my university’s Manufacturing Teaching Laboratory to shame, it dawned upon me that control over workforce development is a strategic manufacturing asset in and of itself.

“The beginning is the most important part of the work…for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken…”

— Excerpt on education from Plato’s Republic Book II

Attempting to decipher what structurally kept Azubis at a company for their entire career, I had to reflect on what had initially led me to walk away from the industry. The primary reason was the feeling that I would never be able to change anything from within, and definitely not from the factory floor. Additionally, when assessing my career progression, I had noticed that those who rose within the ranks always had to move into business administration, whether by an MBA or a lateral external hire-in. Yet, the Mittelstand had architected a subtly different incentive structure that acted as employee retention infrastructure. Through my questioning, I learned that pay parity between functions and internal promotion were often safeguarded.⁵ There was a transparency that a production department lead earned no less than an administrative department lead; a Head of Quality was viewed no differently than a Head of Accounting on the P&L. The majority of the manufacturing management I spoke with had actually begun as CNC machinists or industrial mechanics. Here, the ladder to reach one of these production-side leadership positions was climbed up from the shop floor, not handed down by a university degree. I found this to effectively solve several systemic challenges I had encountered: friction between cubicles and craftsmen was reduced; a skilled worker was no longer underpaid relative to a parallel track; and the glass ceiling that only paper credentials can shatter was removed. The end result is an environment allowing a single person to stay in the same factory for 30-40 years, forging tempered lore, like that of the 56-year-old tool and die master whose abilities I could never emulate.

Once the bedrock has hardened and fealty pledged to the floor, it is the manner in which processes are executed that differentiates good from great. This is typically done through some form of Lean Manufacturing—for example, Kontinuierlicher Verbesserungsprozess (KVP) and Reichsausschuß für Arbeitszeitermittlung (REFA)—but these are widely-recognized frameworks and have their counterparts in the U.S., Japan, and other industrialized nations. Therefore, getting to the heart of the Mittelstand’s operational excellence required looking past the production playbooks and dissecting the intangible conventions and characteristics that certify “Made in Germany.”

Reviewing a production schedule with a maintenance technician, I noticed several shadow boards stacked with untouched parts ahead of an assembly line. Asking how they fit into the work plan, he tersely answered that they followed a “No 80% Rule”: nothing is started that cannot be finished in full. The boards and benches, he said, were already kitted and ready to go, but what they lacked were the fabrication rigs the final assembly would be fixed to. Those baseplate frames had to be built to absolute completion before the line could begin integrating its application-specific joining technologies. Coming from a culture whose motto is “move fast and break things,” I initially found the logic backwards. But half-finished products behave differently in the world of atoms than the world of bits. Straying from the Rule introduces work-in-progress that clogs floor space, search-and-wait motions that drain labor hours, and micro-misalignments that throw off tolerances downstream. Through my naivety I perceived this to be idleness and an opposition to speed. Through the German Mittelstand I came to see this as a wall erected to defend against chaos, context-switching, and fragmented quality control.

Yet no amount of adherence to the hundred percent comes without some entropy seeping back in. An Assembly Team Lead thrust his hand toward me and, counting off three fingers, said the greatest waste on any shop floor is time lost looking for parts, tools, or information. Tying this back to the shadow boards: work materials arrive pre-positioned in foam-lined trays so assemblymen never search for parts. Moving across the line, each workbench held only the tools necessary for that specific step, labeled and hung within arm’s reach. Binders with detailed pictures and instructions hung at every station; and the most tech-forward stands even had tablets running query-able software for instant search and recall.

This radicalized approach to waste elimination showed up everywhere I looked. Stepping through two packaging operations—quite amused to find Marlboro boxes being printed alongside the familiar Pringles cylinder—the Managing Director couldn’t stop pointing out waste: a pallet a centimeter over its taped zone; a single cardboard edge protruding from a stack of a hundred labeled goods; a worker flipping aimlessly through a service manual for the machine he was hunched over. “Waste, waste, waste,” he kept muttering and signaling as we moved section to section. The same instinct for orderliness showed up at firm after firm, well beyond the floor itself. Over lunch, one Geschäftsführender Gesellschafter wrapped the philosophy across his entire company: the Kantine’s daily menu is pushed to every employee’s phone each morning so no one wastes time deciding what to eat or by cooking at home; Strauss uniforms with names embroidered on the breast pocket spare employees the hassle of picking an outfit or recalling a coworker’s name; an instant quoting tool lets sales team members have a price ready before the call ends, cutting out the back-and-forth of contract negotiation. Together, the No 80% Rule and this near-militant war on waste produced some of the cleanest, most tightly-run manufacturing operations I had ever seen.

By the end of my time with the Mittelstand, it was clear their approach to process optimization was without equal. Having spent time as a manufacturing engineer, I knew optimization is the lifeblood of any well-oiled machine, but the engine these companies ran on was calibrated differently. At one factory, a CEO who’d spent eight years cutting his teeth in the specialty chemicals industry verbalized the model I kept observing repeat across German factories. He christened this fusion of engineering judgement and operational discipline “The Greenfield Mindset.” First applied to plant design, he’d since carried it into every process across his career, on the factory floor and in the business’s core functions alike. The method: start from the theoretically ideal new process, then apply real-world constraints and work downwards from there. Its opposite, “The Brownfield Mindset,” starts from the existing process and pushes incremental improvements upwards. The claimed effect is that working from an ideal lands you meaningfully higher than any marginal modification could ever achieve.

Once it was explained to me, I began to recognize the pattern throughout my tours. At one factory, I sat in on the live onboarding of a new product being transferred from a French subsidiary to their German headquarters. The original build process had been photographed, supplemented with 3D CAD drawings, and thoroughly documented in a LEGO-style step-by-step workbook. Sitting down at the meeting, I expected the point of the exercise to be standardization: align the German approach to the French one, so that the same product came out identical no matter which factory it was manufactured in. However, instead of copying and pasting the template from France, the production leader, automation leader, and full floor team were recreating the process from scratch: workbenches, staffing, line direction, part placement, which existing components could carry over, what would need to be built internally, etc. They were treating the fully documented version as a reference, using this opportunity to rethink the entire process and land on something better than either factory already had.

At a textile manufacturer, an engineer described how one of the Industriemechaniker had found a better way to build a dryer component; rather than fold the change directly into a live line, the team cleared a dedicated space to trial and error the new approach before rolling it out across production. In a final example, a CNC machinist walked me through a recurring scrap-and-rework problem with an externally sourced part. Their fix was to bring the part in-house, redesign the process around it, and machine it themselves. This change dropped part costs by 70%, enabled on-demand integration, and finally held tolerances consistently to their quality benchmarks. Each case demonstrated a step-function gain that a Brownfield improvement is functionally unable to deliver.

Leaving these factories, the gap between recent narratives around German deindustrialization and what I had witnessed was difficult to reconcile. The “conservative, change-averse” Mittelstand commanded high talent density, profound tacit knowledge, proprietary tooling, custom-configured machinery, and ruthlessly optimized processes. Their appetite for modernization was apparent: from piloting AI chatbots across workstation terminals; digitally mapping their supply chains end-to-end; running fully automated material flow through their warehouses; to at least one facility pushing toward a full 'Lights Out' configuration. Virtually every owner quizzed me about what new technologies I had seen that might be worth investigating. I did not hear any alarm bells, warning the crew to jump ship and board the lifeboats. No, in fact the posture reflected calm, collected calculation for how they were going to weather the next 50 years. Climbing the steps of each Hauptbahnhof, I was departing with a rekindled Leidenschaft for the industry. Yet, I had a lingering sensation that what these institutions had internalized ran deeper than the slab-on-grade foundation below the factory floor.

Concentric Circles

Right before crossing the Atlantic, I grabbed a coffee with one of my closest friends in a Los Angeles beach town. As the surf broke in the background, we exchanged thoughts on our final year of university, summer internships, and a broad variety of topics that steered us toward our guiding principles. In this branch of the winding conversation, he explained the concept of the circles of concern.

This second-century model, developed by the Greek philosopher Hierocles, was anchored on oikeiôsis (Greek: οἰκείωσις)—the cognitive act of recognizing something as one’s own or akin to oneself. Applied to ethics, it becomes the natural process of affiliating others with ourselves and being morally obligated to extend our sphere of concern to encompass them.

Hierocles mapped this idea onto concentric circles, labeling each zone from the innermost self to the outermost ring of all humanity. He asserted that it is our duty to draw each group a layer inward: treating strangers as friends, friends as family, and family as if they were ourselves. The result, ideally, is the reduction of the gap between the concern we show for the ‘self’ and that which we show for the various categories of the ‘other.’

Mulling over this discussion, I struggled to piece together how a single person could ever project concern beyond the second or third ring. Yet, what kept resurfacing in my thoughts was the realization that this was not the case for the Director of TON or the Mittelstand families I spent time with. What differentiated them was that they had crafted and upheld institutions capable of extending their reach far beyond the limits of individual action.

Mirroring Hierocles’ geometry: Workers are treated as family; their households, as friends; the town is drawn into tighter communal bonds; regions reap the fruits of social responsibility; and industry is advanced through shared progress.

To illustrate this structure concretely, we need only turn again to German history. Tucked into North Rhine-Westphalia, headquartered in Essen, lies the archetype of the factory town: Friedrich Krupp AG.⁶

Founded in 1811 by Friedrich Krupp, the steel conglomerate began as a humble foundry with five employees, yet only one generation later the lone workshop was radically transformed. Taking the reins from his father, Alfred aggressively scaled the firm into the largest industrial company in Europe employing over 20,000 people. Strained by the subsequent growing pains, the village desperately needed a solution. Whether driven by paternalism, pragmatism, or genuine concern, Alfred established an in-house construction office, erected four residential communities, modernized Essen’s infrastructure, and pioneered a corporate welfare system nicknamed “cradle-to-grave” for the “Kruppianer.”

Much more than the traditional welfare housing supplied during industrialization, the Krupp Arbeitersiedlungen offered extensive amenities and comforts to the employees, their families, and the broader community. The Kronenberg Kolonie, Alfred’s last and largest residential project, reflected the manner in which he tended to his people. The nineteen hectares of land accommodated 8,000 individuals in over 220 houses surrounding a communal marketplace and beer hall. In addition to the cooperative, the colony offered a bowling alley, beer garden, post office, pharmacy, playgrounds, and even supported three schools. In its prime, Krupp was building 500 new houses a year; managing a hospital; maintaining the local theatres, sports grounds, and social clubs; and even running its own grocery stores. Advancing the precedent set by Alfred, generations of Krupps would continue to develop the region through various private and public works, for almost a century into the 1920s.

With their basic needs addressed and the workforce inculcated with the “Kruppianer spirit,” the firm crossed the fifth ring. They forged an empire that, by the late 1950s, employed roughly 90,000 workers across more than 60 factories; churned out trains, ships, trucks, and industrial machinery; constructed much of the infrastructure that knit back together the postwar continent; and booked close to a billion dollars a year in sales. Outside Germany, Krupp engineers worked out a deal to expand the steel plant in Turkey, doubling its capacity to 400,000 tons; in Greece the company engineered a $23 million oil refinery; in India, it helped construct a $178 million steel-producing center, alongside 100,000 houses for the new workers; and in Spain, Thailand, Bolivia, South Africa, and Indonesia it embarked upon projects, spanning from bridges to entire industrial parks.

Perhaps the best documented instantiation of this pattern, the trend was not isolated to Krupp; each firm that I spent time with mirrored the Essen steelworks. Walking through the factories, without fail, executives stopped to greet each coworker by name with a handshake and a cheerful “Mahlzeit.” Sitting in Kantinen, I enjoyed friendly conversation and the same freshly-cooked meal as the veteran Production Leader and the brand-new apprentice. Back on the floor, when I asked the employees questions, they exuded a clear sense of pride as they walked me through the weld they had just laid, the part they had finished certifying, or the production schedule they had finalized. Probing as to why they had decided to work at the firm, I was pleasantly surprised by a recurring theme: they had chosen to join a family business, not a corporation. The name stitched into their Strauss work jackets was one they felt stood by them just as faithfully as they stood by it.

Moving to the Lehrwerkstatt, where this culture first left its mark, picture boards of the current Azubi class portrayed the transformation from tabula rasa into a Gemeinschaft armed with skillsets that enabled them to find their place in the firm. Always crowning the training center was a stand proudly displaying generations of master projects marking the successful completion of one Ausbildung after the next. On more than one occasion, my guide shared a fond memory of their time as an Auszubildender and mentioned that their son or daughter was in the current class. Impressed upon me was the notion that what I was observing wasn’t the ownership handed down over generations, but the undercurrent of belonging that passed along with it.

The tours always continued beyond the shop floor, as Mittelständler revealed the nuances of their Heimaten, recounting stories that reached beyond the founders who had laid the cornerstone of the first workshop. Near Salzburg, a Head of Quality narrated the ways the salt industry had shaped the landscape we gazed upon, pointing to his house on the horizon that had borne witness to it all. Dropping me off at the train station, a machinist was beaming as we passed the house he was currently building for his new family. En route to his second plant, a Managing Director drew my attention to the new kindergarten they had endowed as children ran by squealing with joy. Roaming across a town square, another Mittelständler nodded toward the renovated opera house atop the nearby hill. On a walk with a Geschäftsführer, we peered into the three ateliers he commissioned art from, where the very canvases adorning the walls of the firm had been painted.⁷ Every street I strolled bore some sign of the Mittelstand that had come to care for it.

These scenes were not merely displays of corporate philanthropy; by interlinking their fortunes with the well-being of their communities, these firms also crossed the threshold of the fifth circle. The economic stability of a region, the dignity of a multi-generational craft, and the mutual trust between worker and owner compounded into Hidden Champions. Among others, I had seen clocks wound by hand in Saxony that have kept the time, first in our pockets, and then on our wrists, since the 1800s; fasteners molded in North Rhine-Westphalia that secure the frames of the trains, planes, and automobiles that take us from the office to our holidays; textile machines engineered in Bavaria that spin the threads that clothe us and the fibers that carry our calls; lenses ground in Baden-Württemberg that capture our photos, study our cells, and guide our surgeons’ hands. These Mittelstand logos line the sheets of trade Bibles tucked into work cabinets, and sit humbly on shelves, engraved on Global Excellence awards for markets we’ve never heard of. Yet it is in these overlooked corners of the country that the mysteries of manufacturing edge industry ever onwards.

I had arrived on this continent with the goal of uncovering the secrets of German engineering, expecting to improve my understanding of how factories were operated. Instead, departing each town, what struck me was that I had unintentionally answered the outstanding question from the previous summer. The Mittelstand had not simply mastered manufacturing; it had also managed to draw Hierocles’ circles closer together.

Nicht das Ende sondern ein Neuanfang

As my time in Germany and my technology investment internship come to a close, I have much of the broader discourse to reflect on. There are conversations about a shifting transatlantic relationship, the reawakening of the Western industrial base, and above all, the concern of mass labor displacement—if not erasure altogether—by artificial intelligence.

It is comforting, then, to know that our troubles are not entirely new. The ides have seen kings replaced by democracies; empires rise and fall; borders redrawn, states reorganized; and the notion of man being replaced by machine debated since Aristotle’s time.

“For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others…if the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.”

— Excerpt from Aristotle’s Politics Book 1, Part IV

Closer to our own era, the farmers and craftsmen of the Industrial Revolution likely shared many of our same worries. While social and political upheaval did occur, I find solace in the fact that humanity always finds its way—even when that path led to factory floors.

In our contemporary society, we find ourselves walking along a similar road; only our agricultural and artisanal professions have traded overalls for white collars, swapping hammers and plows for emails and spreadsheets. If turbulent times and an industrialization of our trades are likewise inevitable, the more interesting and opportune question becomes: what will be our factories?

Admittedly, I don’t yet have an answer.

Boarding the plane to New York City to begin my professional career, I can already imagine myself lost in thought. This time perhaps, turning not back to Bystřice, but to the cobblestone alleys of Bielefeld or Braunschweig, nestled among Fachwerkhäuser with chimney stacks silhouetted in the background.

Drifting through these memories, I’m compelled to remember that the Mittelstand were here before the first Glorious Revolution, and they will certainly remain standing after the next. If there is one thing I’m taking home with me, it is that whatever factories we build next, they should probably resemble the Mittelstand.

Appendix

Notes

Cover art: Das Eisenwalzwerk (Moderne Cyklopen) by Adolph Menzel ca. 1872

1. I use capture here the way a child, running through a summer field at dusk, gently encloses a lightning bug in his cupped hands, marvelling with wide eyes at the yellow-green light emanating from in between his fingers.

2. Etymologically, guild denotes a brotherhood funded by members’ payments, from the Proto‑Germanic geldą (“payment, contribution”). Today, Geld is the German word for money, derived from the same origin.

3. First Industrial Revolution (ca. 1760-1840) primarily in the U.K., introduced steam power and mechanization, core industries were iron and textiles. Second Industrial revolution (ca. 1870-1914) primarily in Germany and the United States, introduced electrification and mass production, core industries were steel and chemicals.

4. While every firm I toured had their own Ausbildungsprogramm—this is already well documented as standard across the Mittelstand and Germany more broadly—not every firm had their own dedicated building. What then also impressed me was the willingness of those with education campuses to use their extra training capacity to take on apprentices and help develop them for their neighboring firms. Yet another example of the Mittelstand taking care of their region and crossing Hierocles’ 4th circle.

5. I’m aware of the argument that pay parity and internal promotion can be a second order effect of German/European labor laws. An adjacent argument for how this hinders European innovation is articulated in the essay “Why Europe doesn’t have a Tesla.” For the purpose of my writing, I’ve chosen to frame it in a more “glass half full” manner.

6. Friedrich Krupp AG is today the publicly traded ThyssenKrupp AG, from the merger of Thyssen AG and Krupp in 1999. It remains one of Germany’s and Europe’s largest industrial groups, with over 90,000 employees and annual turnover exceeding €30 billion.

7. In my previous piece “On Art and Industry” I detailed the impact industrialization had on impressionism. I was greatly pleased to stumble upon the following anecdote during my tours:

“Claude Monet, one of the fathers of Impressionism, suffered from shortsightedness and, later in life, from cataracts. A Paris-based optician was able to help with special eyeglass lenses from [the Mittelstand] for post-cataract surgery patients. With his eyesight restored, Monet decided to rework some paintings from his water-lilies series. In 1925, he wrote to a friend saying that since he had regained his vision, he was able to work as never before.”

Sources

In order of appearance:

+-160: The Emergence and Expansion of Bended Furniture from Bystřice pod Hostýnem

Bystřice pod Hostýnem Pays Off Another Debt, Returning Honorary Citizenship to the Thonet Family

Beneš Decrees (Peter Haslinger, Collegium Carolinum)

The Henokiens International Association of Bicentennial Family Companies – The Coatinc Company

Germany’s Oldest Family Company: Why the Siegen Steel Dynasty Was Almost at an End After Nearly 500 Years and Is Now Flourishing Again

History of Ore Mining and Iron Production in Siegerland

Industrial Culture in Siegen

Heinz Bensberg History of Siegen

Craftsmen in German Cities, 1600-1800

Guilds in Germany

European Iron Industry from the Late 17th to the Middle of the 19th Century (Rainer Fremdling, ResearchGate)

How Markets in Europe Opened Up as Guild Monopolies Declined in the Sixteenth Century

Why the Industrial Revolution Started in Britain (World History Encyclopedia)

The Role of the State: French and German Railroads (Harvard Business School)

German State Action and Railway Policy During the 20th Century

Industrialization in Germany

Britain and Germany 1800 to 1914: Two Developmental Paths Towards Industrial Society (Wolfgang J. Mommsen, German Historical Institute London)

European Grunderzeit: When, If Not Now? (European Startup Initiative)

500 Years of The Coatinc Company, Siegen

Heinrich Adolf Dresler

How Much Did Reunification Cost?

The Secret Behind Germany’s Thriving Mittelstand Businesses is All in the Mindset

How Germany’s Family Firms Power the Mittelstand

The German Mittelstand: Antithesis to the Silicon Valley Entrepreneurship Model? (IFM Bonn)

Germany’s Industrial Family Firms: Prospering Islands of Social Capital in a Financialized World? (ResearchGate)

Wesen und Begriff der Mittelständischen Unternehmung (K.J. Gantzel, Semantic Scholar)

On the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations)

Patient Capital Will Eat the World (Will Manidis, Minutes)

Relationship Between Economics of Trust And Transaction Cost: A Brief Exposition (International Journal of Business and Management Studies)

Principal-agent Conflict in United States of America and Germany (Central European University)

The Principal-Agent Problem

The German Apprenticeship System

How to Deal with a Deindustrialising Germany (Lundgreen’s Investor Insights)

In Danger of Being Left Behind? — Media Narratives of the Digital Transformation in the German Mittelstand (Taylor & Francis)

Ideological Differences in the Expansion of the Moral Circle

Orion Philosophy — Oikeiosis

Oikeiosis — Stoic Ethics and the Unbreakable Connection Between Self-Interest and the Interests of Others

Enlightened Paternalism: Krupp Factory Housing in Essen

The Margareth’s High in Essen: Improvement of Worker’s Dwelling in the Ruhr Area (UCC Geography Research Project)

Vanished Krupp Company Workers’ Colonies in Essen

Remnants of Krupp Company Workers’ Colonies in Essen

Arbeiterkolonie Kronenberg

Business Abroad: The House that Krupp Rebuilt (Time Magazine)

Nothing They Wouldn’t Do — Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm (Richard J. Evans, London Review of Books)

Social Welfare and Business: The Krupp Welfare Program, 1860-1914 (JSTOR)

The Coming Clash Between China and Europe (Thorsten Benner, Foreign Affairs)

Places & Spaces: Germany’s Fairytale Fachwerk Houses

The Secret Cause of the Industrial Revolution (Ben Southwood, Works in Progress)

As I began to educate myself on the Impressionist artists and their canvases, I noticed a trend: each painting reflected an age remade by factories, machines, and nouveau inventions. The Impressionists were not simply painters of the modern world; they were the visual vessels translating steam, steel, and infrastructure into emotion, color, and atmosphere. Industrialization didn’t just change society; it changed the very composition of art itself.

Manet not Monet

As the Industrial Revolution had Richard Arkwright, “The Father of the Factory,” the Impressionist movement had its own Father. And so, I learned, in Paris, France, on January 23^rd, 1832, Édouard Manet—“The Father of Modernism”—was born. (“Not to be confused with Claude Monet, another painter of the same era.”—a mistake so common that this note appears at the top of his biography.) Born into an upper-class household with strong social and political connections, Édouard was expected to become a lawyer like his father, a prominent French judge married to the goddaughter of the Swedish Crown Prince. However, trips to the Louvre with Manet’s uncle, Edmond Fournier, set young Édouard on a different path. Before Manet committed to this calling as an artist, he honored his father’s wishes by serving in the Navy. After failing the examinations to become a naval pilot—not once, but twice—his father relented, allowing him to pursue painting. Nevertheless, this episode in Manet’s journey would deeply inspire his maritime scenes, which I count among my personal favorites.

Thus, at 18, Manet made a consequential decision: to study under the academic painter Thomas Couture rather than join the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts. Founded in 1648 as the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, the Académie des beaux-arts in Paris is a grande école—one of France’s elite institutions, whose mission is to provide the highest level of fine arts education and training.

The Académie des Beaux-Arts favored systematized training and rigid subjects: history, mythology, and religion. As its name implies, academism was the art form that rose within the walls of academies established under the state rules and church clergy to cultivate artists who would preserve familiar classical forms. In contrast, Thomas Couture, though himself an academic painter, approached art more liberally, offering a middle ground between traditionalism and experimental expression. Young Manet chose Couture’s studio over the prestigious École for this encouragement to develop his own style. Yet that independence came at a cost: without the Académie’s institutional backing, he was effectively shut out of the Salon de Paris.

The Salon de Paris was the official art exhibition of the Académie, which between 1748 and 1890 was arguably the greatest art event in the Western world, and essentially the only way for an artist to earn a living, gain prestige, or secure commissions in 19^th-century Europe. The Salon, held in the Palace of the Louvre, exhibited artworks from floor to ceiling, covering every available inch of space, yet somehow had no room for any of Manet’s submissions until eleven years later. Finally, in 1861, at twenty-nine years old, the Salon displayed two of his works. While the first painting, Portrait of Monsieur and Madame Auguste Manet, went unnoticed, The Spanish Singer was awarded the Salon’s honorable mention. Despite the award, his hopes for continued success were dashed in 1863 when the Salon rejected two-thirds of all submissions, including all of Manet’s.

These rejections sparked public protests, and in response, Emperor Napoleon III—known for his sensitivity to public opinion—ordered the creation of the Salon des Refusés (“Salon of the Rejected”). Édouard finally had his breakout moment when one of the two paintings considered the exhibition’s best was his controversial Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Over a thousand visitors a day flocked to the new exhibitions, mostly laughing, but more importantly, looking. This ridicule only amplified the public’s curiosity. Satirical newspapers printed caricatures of the rejected works, and critics debated them with an intensity the official Salon could no longer command. Although the Salon des Refusés would only be held twice more in 1864 and 1873, it marked the beginning of the end for the Salon de Paris. The jury had become its own judge and executioner: by placing the art it once considered distasteful in front of the public, it relinquished its authority and allowed French society to decide what art truly signified. Thus, with Manet leading the charge, an artistic revolution mirroring the social and technological upheavals transforming France and the Western world began.

An Engine, an Easel, a Baron, and a Chemist Walk into Paris

While Manet and the Impressionists were redefining the boundaries of modern art, France itself was coming into its modern age, shrouded in the manufactured clouds of steam-powered industry. The second half of the 1800s saw a surge of industrial progress: railways, steam engines, and factories that rewired the nation’s rhythms of work and life. Notably, the primarily agrarian French society bore witness to the connection of its rural countryside through an extensive railway transportation network. Machinery, labor, and produce flowed from beyond their immediate regions, enlarging markets and allowing for greater specialization, which in turn reduced the number of farmers needed. This decline in agricultural dependence freed thousands of rural laborers to leave the fields for cities, where new forms of work awaited in workshops and foundries. This migration did more than fill factories; it changed the scale and pace of daily life. Cities swelled with new arrivals, and for the first time, engine-enabled mobility became a defining feature of modern existence.

As these railroads multiplied, so did Paris’s population, but without any accompanying expansion of the city’s area. Noticing his country’s growing pains, Napoleon III realized the city was long overdue for a massive urban renewal program. Together with his Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann, they devised a plan for rapid urbanization known as Haussmann’s renovation of Paris. Between 1853 and 1870, Haussmann modernized Paris with wide boulevards, lush parks, open city centers, and new real estate for the masses moving to the city. This “Haussmannization of Paris” not only reconstructed the city itself but also catalyzed the very subject matter that would define the Impressionists’ focus. Under the urban renewal initiative, engineers created a network of wide, straight boulevards with streetlights, benches, and trees—as seen in the 14 different canvases of Boulevard Montmartre that Camille Pissarro painted from his room at the Grand Hôtel de Russie. Haussmann also outlined a set of architectural guidelines requiring buildings to feature ornamental façades, balconies, broad windows, and to rise at least five stories high—as demonstrated in Gustave Caillebotte’s Un Balcon, Boulevard Haussmann. As a final regulation, shops were limited to the ground floor, a restriction that, when coupled with lush parks and open squares, helped popularize the modern European café and leisurely Parisian lifestyle romanticized in Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette.

Along with the renovated Paris came a new openness that let light and air flood a city previously cloaked in shadow. Yet the Impressionists depended not only on new landscapes, but also on new tools. Industrial inventions enabled the defining characteristic of the movement—painting “en plein air”—with two breakthroughs in particular changing how and where artists could work.

The first of these inventions, a metal paint tube, was patented in 1841 by American John Rand, the same year Auguste Renoir was born. This tube, which rolled up at one end and closed with a screw cap at the other, was anything but trivial. Renoir captured the gravity of this technological advancement, stating bluntly, “Without tubes of paint, there would have been no Impressionism.” The second key invention (while the exact inventor remains unconfirmed) was the French or box easel. Before these foldable easels, art materials were hoisted into place or required an army of attendants to prepare outdoor environments. Because of this excessive effort, previous generations naturally preferred to create from the convenience of their studios. Untethered from their predecessors’ restraints and armed with paint tubes, field easels, and train tickets, these artists ventured to paint the new, interconnected world that industry had built.

While tools and trains liberated where the Impressionists painted, chemistry introduced new pigments, colors, and palettes that would soon appear on their canvases. The leading chemical industrialists of the era produced soaps, candles, textiles, and dyes—but among them, bridging science and art, none proved more influential than Michel-Eugène Chevreul. Born in 1786 in Angers, a city in Western France, to a family of surgeons, Chevreul was fortunate to attend a new scientific school in his hometown. After completing his early education, he entered Paris’s Museum of Natural History in 1803 to study under the renowned chemist Nicolas Vauquelin. His early work laid the foundation of modern organic chemistry: he developed methods to split fats into alcohols and soaps and to purify chemicals from natural sources. These techniques revolutionized French chemical manufacturing, standardizing the production of candles, soaps, and textiles. Yet Chevreul’s influence on the art world came not from what he made, but from what he observed, uncovering the visual principles that would forever change how painters understood color.

This discovery came about in 1824, when Chevreul was serving as Director of Dyeing at the Gobelin Manufactory, a world-famous enterprise for their tapestries, which are an art form in their own right. The manufactory had received complaints from the weavers about the quality of their colors, prompting Chevreul’s investigation. The grievances centered on the black wool used to shade blues and purples. Through Michel’s research, he discovered that the root cause was not chemical but optical. The black itself was sound; the distortion arose from a visual phenomenon related to the colors placed beside it. This revelation led to what Chevreul termed la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs—“the law of simultaneous contrast”—the tendency for a color to visually take on the hue and tone of its neighboring color. In 1839, after years of experimentation, Chevreul published his findings in a book of the same name, now recognized as the foundation of modern color theory. In it, he offered guidelines for achieving desired visual effects by arranging all hues of the visible spectrum within a circular system that defined their relationships.

To illustrate his theory, Chevreul demonstrated to the weavers how it could be applied directly to their craft, and by extension, to art itself. When black threads were woven beside blue, the black appeared tinged with orange, blue’s complementary color; when placed next to violet, it seemed yellowish. His color wheel revealed these relationships clearly: each hue had its counterpart positioned directly opposite, its complement.

The Impressionists quickly absorbed these discoveries, using them to intensify light and atmosphere in their work. Among those exploring the laws of simultaneous contrast were Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac, and Georges Seurat. Pissarro, recalling a conversation with Seurat, captured how deeply the industrialist mindset had permeated the movement when Seurat described their aim as “the modern synthesis with scientifically based means founded on the theory of colors discovered by M. Chevreul.”

With this framework in mind, the interplay of blues and oranges in Monet’s Impression, soleil levant below can be understood not only as artistic intuition, but as a deliberate experiment in the chemistry between color, contrast, and perception.

By embracing the industrial world—its renovated cities, technological inventions, and scientific colors—the Impressionists distinguished themselves from the previous generations. The prosperity of this new age also raised a class of patrons whose curiosity and wealth would help secure the movement’s legacy. And just as factories and railways transformed production and exchange, so too did they reshape how art was bought, sold, and seen.

Engineering the Modern Art Market

Gagosian, Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth are all names that dominate today’s art scene, but the 19^th century was subjectively defined by one man who wrote the modern art dealer’s playbook. Reflecting on the importance of this frequently glossed-over figure in art history, Monet would recall, “Without [him], we would have died of hunger, all us Impressionists.” Paul-Marie-Joseph Durand-Ruel was born into the art world, the son of Jean Marie Fortuné Durand and Marie Ferdinande Ruel, proprietors of an art gallery in Paris. At thirty-four years of age, in 1865, Paul inherited his family’s gallery and its high-performing stock from Salon des Paris choice painters, notably William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier. The Salon’s champions provided Durand with a stable income, but eager to prove himself, he made riskier investments in emerging Romanticist profiles such as Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. Learning how to turn a profit from these lesser-known figures, Durand-Ruel honed his skillset as a marketer and dealer, garnering a reputation for selling works of high-caliber inventiveness. Having risen to prominence early in his career, Paul might have pledged the remainder of his time to his new clientele if not for a series of fortuitous events.

In 1870, Napoleon III’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War forced many French citizens to flee across Europe, sending Paul and his gallery to London. Among those displaced to England was painter Charles Daubigny, who introduced the refugee dealer to Claude Monet, prophesying, “This artist will surpass us all.” Durand was enthralled by Monet’s creative style and immediately began acquiring his pieces. Word quickly spread that the Impressionist had found a buyer, and others began to follow suit. After Monet came Pissarro, and upon his return to Paris in late 1871, Durand began procuring from Renoir, Sisley, Degas, and Manet, buying 20 to 30 canvases annually for as much as 35,000 francs—an inconceivable sum in an era where the average French laborer earned roughly 900 francs per year.

Next in the string of travesties came the Panic of 1873, a financial crisis in Europe and North America that forced Durand-Ruel to halt his large-scale purchases. Venturing into new frameworks that would become the foundation of the modern art market, Paul shifted his focus to promoting the Impressionists. As mentioned earlier, the Impressionists were among the first group excluded from the Salon, which uniquely positioned Durand to launch an independent series of exhibitions. Organizing other dealers, he orchestrated a new business model where artists would retain the proceeds from their sales, therefore putting the success of an exhibition on market demand rather than the Jury’s critiques. This dealer-artist relationship and independent gallery model became two pivotal strategies Durand refined—approaches that remain central to the art world today. Moreover, he systematized modern art dealing tactics: publishing catalogues for each show, charging entrance fees, and weaving unknown pieces in with high-priced art to drive the former’s value upwards.

The 1880s would bring both crisis and redemption for Durand. The dealer would launch a series of shows, each lasting a handful of weeks, devoted entirely to a single artist, which, while earning favorable reviews, would fail to line Durand and the Impressionists’ pockets. Financially unsuccessful and on the verge of bankruptcy, Durand-Ruel relentlessly pursued foreign markets—Austria, Belgium, England, Germany, and Russia—throughout the seventies and eighties. However, with the implosion of the Union Générale bank and the Paris Stock Exchange in 1882, Paul was forced to scramble once again. In the spring of 1886, stretching his reach across the Atlantic Ocean, he exhibited 289 Impressionist paintings at the American Art Association and the National Academy of Design in New York—selling a record 49. Subsequent to this breakthrough showing, he would open a satellite gallery on Fifth Avenue, New York, which served as a lifeline for his business and would last another six decades. Citing his success in America, Durand-Ruel would recall, “Without America, I would have been lost, ruined…”

Americans Don’t Laugh They Buy

What prevented the downfall of the Parisian art dealer was the rise of new social classes, and of the Industrialist, shaped by the free-market economy and the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. Just as the French had embraced the factory, Americans welcomed their own industrial boom, fueling the expansion of the middle class and blossoming a fresh market for art. This emerging class could now afford luxuries once reserved for the “well-to-do”, spreading wealth into new tiers of society. As a result, painters were no longer constrained to producing for kings and bishops. Instead, the Impressionists were free to depict landscapes and scenes of daily life that resonated with their contemporaries. Meanwhile, the inflated prices and excessive size of Salon paintings pushed dealers and buyers alike toward the smaller, more intimate Impressionist canvases. This new set of patrons that made its money through industrialization and manufacturing had disposable income and wanted art they could understand, that fit on their walls, and that displayed images they appreciated. Elevated by both economic prosperity and cultural freedom, the middle class eagerly acquired these works as reflections of their modern lifestyles. Yet it was ultimately not the bourgeoisie but the American Industrialists who would play the most decisive role in shaping taste, driving the influx of Monets, Renoirs, and Pissarros into the United States.

Tutored by Camille Pissarro and having a close working relationship with Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt is undoubtedly more renowned in the art world than her brother. Yet it was Alexander J. Cassatt, the American Industrialist in the Cassatt family, who garnered more public recognition at the time. Born on December 8^th, 1839, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the civil engineer worked his way up from a surveyor for the Georgia Railroad to become the Pennsylvania Railroad’s (PRR) first vice-president by 1880. In 1889, he was appointed president of what had become the nation’s largest and most powerful railroad company. When Alexander wasn’t doubling PRR’s total assets from $276 to $594 million (roughly $21 billion in today’s dollars), he was supporting his family and sister, a gesture that would prove instrumental in sparking the Impressionists’ ascendancy across the Atlantic. Mary began advising Alexander on the purchase of works from her Parisian colleagues just six years before they would appear in New York in a familiar dealer’s exhibition. Known more for his love of horses than for paintings, Alexander grew to appreciate Degas’s jockey scenes, such as The Races and At the Races in the Countryside.

Charmed by Degas’s works, Alexander went on to adorn his estates with over thirty Monets, Renoirs, Pissarros, and Morisots. As a popular host of lavish gatherings, Cassatt’s guests began to take notice and develop a similar liking. For example, the railroad president’s associates followed his lead, linking the PRR and Impressionist movement together through their purchase of train scenes by Monet. Beyond influencing his colleagues, Cassatt loaned his paintings to exhibitions across America, helping introduce the public to the new art movement. This fateful convergence closed the circle: in Durand-Ruel’s 1886 exhibition, 7 of the 289 paintings on view came from Alexander’s private collection.

Mary Cassatt would continue to nurture the rise of Impressionism, this time as fine arts advisor to her friends Louisine and Henry Havemeyer. While studying abroad in Paris at nineteen, Louisine met Miss Cassatt, whose keen eye and intimate knowledge of the Parisian art world would shape her taste for decades to come. Under Mary’s guidance, Louisine acquired works by Degas and Manet, beginning a lifelong passion that would grow into one of America’s most distinguished private collections. Mrs. Havemeyer once joked about their dynamic: “Miss Cassatt ever ready to recommend and Mr. Havemeyer to buy, and I to find a place for the pictures in our gallery.”

Her husband, Henry Havemeyer—the American industrialist and entrepreneur who founded the American Sugar Refining Company—built the nation’s most powerful sugar enterprise while amassing, alongside Louisine, an extraordinary collection of modern art. By the late 19^th century, the Havemeyers had become among the foremost patrons of French painting; their holdings were “enough to furnish a museum itself.” Indeed, they did: their donation of 142 works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including En bateau, La Grenouillére, and Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley, helped define the museum’s Impressionist collection.

This union of industrial wealth, cultural ambition, and aesthetic conviction, embodied by Americans like the Cassatts and the Havemeyers, cultivated the transatlantic market for modern art as we know it today. As Paul Durand-Ruel later acknowledged, “The Americans do not laugh. They buy.”

Bring Back Beauty

Living in Germany, I often find myself walking the streets of European cities shaped equally by centuries of industry and centuries of art. It feels fitting, then, to turn to the German playwright and philosopher Friedrich Schiller and his essays on beauty. Schiller, who called beauty our “second creator”, argued that it is more than pleasure. Beauty is a bridge between reason and emotion, a force that can harmonize a fractured society. In his letters Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man), Schiller poses arguments to Immanuel Kant’s claim that “beauty” and “taste” are purely subjective. In his sixth letter, Friedrich argues that the separation of harmonious pairs—church and state, laws and customs, labor and art, sense and spirit—has alienated humanity from its own harmony. “The businessman,” he warns, “has a narrow heart” when he does not look beyond the horizons of his enterprise into the world to see the whole. In his ninth letter, he writes, “As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.” Here Schiller posits that the improvement of society depends on the “refinement of character” and the instrument for such refinement is “fine art”. Artists, he urges, must avoid falling victim to the errors of their age and instead follow the idealism of the heart, setting the direction for society to march towards good.

“The West has learned how to scale technology and wealth, but forgotten morality and beauty.” — Unknown and unattributed

Reflecting on the last two years I spent in America, and the time I now spend in Europe, I can’t help but feel a quiet optimism and a subtle push toward renewal—both industrial and cultural. Across the West, a growing urgency is palpable. Movements are emerging to answer the call to reindustrialize and usher the 21^st century into a new enlightenment. But reindustrialization cannot mean new factories alone. To rebuild industry without reviving beauty would be to repeat the sterility Schiller warned against. The Impressionists remind us that the industrial revolution ignited artistic revolutions, that the smokestacks of one guild can give rise to the canvases of another. Their stories show that beauty and industry have always been intertwined: each age retools not only its machines but its imagination.

What is needed now is not merely a revival of manufacturing but a parallel revival of culture: a reindustrialization of beauty, creativity, and shared meaning. The challenge lies in resisting a purely utilitarian vision of progress. If we build only for function, we risk forgetting the soul. If we weave aesthetics into our physical world—factories, cities, libraries, universities, theatres—then industry can once again influence art, and art can once again guide society towards harmony in a new Belle Époque. As the next generation of Industrialists rise, may they, too, bring back beauty.

Clarifications + Notes I Found Interesting While Researching

1. The First Industrial Revolution primarily took place in Europe from around 1760 to 1840, and the Second Industrial Revolution primarily took place in the United States from around 1870 to 1914.

2. Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet served together in the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War.

3. Durand-Ruel followed 7 principles: 1. Protect and defend the art above all else 2. Earn the exclusivity of access to the artists’ production 3. Hold individual exhibitions and galleries 4. Create a network of international galleries 5. Give access to the works not only in his galleries but in his personal residences 6. Promote artists via new methods such as the press 7. Associate the art world with the finance world.

4. “As a gallerist, his manifold innovations made him, arguably, the first modern art dealer. Initially, like an ardent capitalist, he attempted to gain a monopoly on emerging artists’ work. In exchange for monthly stipends, he attained exclusive rights to new work. Then like a venture capitalist, he held out for long-term return [on his high-risk investments], storing his stock, which eventually reached around 5,000 works, for decades before selling.” – excerpt describing Paul Durand-Ruel from a Momus art publication.

5. Learning about art dealing, I noticed a few similarities with venture capital investing. This is wonderfully articulated here by art collector and venture capitalist Ramtin Naimi, founder of Abstract Ventures.

6. Andrew Cassatt was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society – always find the blending of engineering and philosophy fascinating – wrote a little on this in my last piece.

7. Another American Industrialist who contributed heavily to the rise of Impressionism came from the Midwest instead of the East Coast. Ohio iron industrialist Alfred Atmore Pope would transform the Cleveland Malleable Iron Company into the National Malleable Castings Company, expanding across various manufacturing industries. In the late 1880s, Pope would acquire a modest but high-quality collection of Manets, Monets, Renoirs, and Pissarros. Unlike the Cassatts and Havemeyers, Alfred did not rely on art advisors and created his collection based on his own judgment and taste, which coincidentally happened to be Impressionist artworks. #Based.

8. The Belle Époque, French for “Beautiful Era,” was the cultural flourishing tied to Impressionism, Paris, and industrial modernization that saw revived optimism, advances in art, technology, and society in Western Europe from 1871-1914.

Citations in the Order of Which They Were Used

Édouard Manet (1832–1883) – Rebecca Rabinow

Academism – Elina Bahmet

The Salon des Refuses – Britannica

Rejects: The Salon That Changed The Art World – Rehs Galleries

Edouard Manet, Between Impressionism and Realism | Documentary

What is Impressionism? | YouTube Video

Industrialization in France – advanced concepts – Alloprof

Profs d’Histoire Lycee Claude Lebois

Georges-Eugène Haussmann – Wikipedia

Paris Was Rebuilt: How Baron Haussmann Created the Metropolis We Know Today – My Modern Met

Camille Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre – Impressionist Art

Impressionism would have been impossible if not these five inventions – Arthive

John Goffe Rand Invents Paint Tubes – History Today

French (Box) Easels, Field Easels, and other Plein Air Painting Systems – Lines and Colors

Michel-Eugene Chevreul – Britannica

Gobelin Family – Britannica

Chevreul’s Colour Theory And Its Consequences for Artists – Georges Rogue

Paul Durand-Ruel – Wikipedia

Paul Durand-Ruel: Champion Of The Impressionists – Incollect

The First Modern Art Dealer and the Movement He Incited – Carol Strickland, Momus

The American art trade and French painting at the end of the 19^th century – Madeliene Fidell-Beaufort, Digitale bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse letteren

How the Free Market Created Impressionism – David Smith, Learn Liberty

Impressionism and the rise of consumer culture – Katie Feeney, Penn State

Becoming modern in 19^th century Europe, an introduction – Dr. Parme Giuntini, The Center for Public Art History

Alexander Cassatt – Wikipedia

How Mary Cassatt’s Brother Introduced French Impressionism to Americans – Karen Chernick, Artsy

Mary Cassatt’s Impressions, Assembling the Havemeyer Art Collection – Shelburne Museum

Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection – The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art

Henry Osborne Havemeyer – Wikipedia

Alfred Atmore Pope – Wikipedia

Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man) – Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller – Wikipedia

Even so, you would not have caught me willingly opening a work of classic literature or philosophy—let alone writing for fun as I’m doing with this Substack. My reading interests have always gravitated toward the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. As a kid, I spent my time with Percy Jackson and Harry Potter, and now in college, I’ve moved on to the more complex worlds of Dune, His Dark Materials, and Atlas Shrugged.

That all changed after a conversation with a close friend this past summer, who recommended Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Skeptical but intrigued, I gave it a try and, over the past five months, have plunged into an obsessive journey through the works of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Plato, and Rilke, among others.

On My Experience with Engineering

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines engineering beautifully as “the application of science to the optimum conversion of the resources of nature to the uses of humankind.” The word “engineering” itself is rooted in the Latin ingenerare, meaning “to create.”

When I decided to study engineering in college, I reasoned that it would lead to job security, a steady paycheck, and build on the intellectual rigor I enjoyed in my high school mathematics and physics classes. Unfortunately, by the end of my sophomore year, I had become disillusioned with this choice. My coursework felt outdated, and my internships left me questioning whether engineering truly led to working at the cutting edge of technological innovation.

During my junior year, yearning to fall in love with engineering again, I took a step back to understand what truly mattered to me. I wanted my career to reflect the core values that constituted my identity. After months of reading, research, journaling, and introspection, I distilled the essence of why I had chosen this path into a single word: creation.

Returning to the Encyclopedia Britannica’s definition, I saw engineering as never before. The “application of science” now extends far beyond what I had been exposed to. Today, engineers are designing algorithms to detect diseases, pioneering sustainable energy technologies, launching reusable rocket ships, and building humanoid robots. Similarly, the “resources of nature” have expanded to include not just physical materials but also intangible sources such as information, computation, and human behavior. We now engineer a world where data flows like rivers, networks form the infrastructure of society, and the new frontier of innovation lies at the intersection of atoms, bits, and minds.

This intersection of technology and humanity led me to join my university’s human-robot interaction (HRI) lab to work on designing HRI systems. With HRI as one example, more than ever, the creations of engineers blur the line between technology and human experience. This has inspired me to pursue a deeper truth to understand why and how we build. These thoughts began to spill over into my life outside the lab, perhaps driven by my simultaneous immersion in works like Plato’s Symposium, Rilke’s Letters To a Young Poet, and Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. The reciprocity between creation and engineering invites us to look beyond technical capability, prompting us to examine the intrinsic forces that drive us: the human desire to create, the process that transforms ideas into reality, and the ethical responsibility of choosing what we build.

On My Interpretation of Philosophy

From Plato’s Symposium

Mankind’s calling to create

Plato’s Symposium is a philosophical dialogue exploring the nature and purpose of love through a series of speeches delivered at a dinner party in ancient Athens. Each guest engages in a contest, presenting their perception of love. Ultimately, Socrates “wins” through his recounting of teachings from the priestess Diotima through “the science of things relating to love.” Together the speeches explore love as a multifaceted and transformative force that drives both human connection and the pursuit of creation.

Love as a force that drives us to create and build beautiful things

Central to Socrates’s dialogue is the “Ladder of Love,” an ascent outlined by Diotima. The “Ladder of Love” divides love into six stages, placed on rungs of a ladder. At its highest rungs, love compels humanity to create.

The fourth rung, the “Love of laws and institutions,” reflects a love for the creations that shape and organize society, recognizing how these creations benefit humanity. Diotima describes this as the love for the systems and structures born of the previous rung—beautiful souls:

“…he will be content to love and tend him, and will search out and bring to the birth thoughts which will improve the young, until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws…”

For me, this rung mirrors the foundation of engineering itself, both as a discipline and a profession. Engineering truths establish the laws and regulations that outline creation. Such regulations such as those established by IEEE and ASTM, develop the codes and standards that engineers must adhere to. Its institutions define the technical knowledge, professional guidelines, and educational systems that guide society’s builders. Renowned educational systems like MIT and Stanford define this leading technical knowledge for engineers to wield.

The fifth rung, the “Love of knowledge,” expands on creation further. Diotima explains:

“…and after laws and institutions, he will go on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty…he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom…”

This resonates deeply with the engineer’s journey. The pursuit of knowledge leads to intellectual curiosity, exploring, and tinkering. In a field where technological advancements seem to occur every day, it is this love of knowledge that allows engineers to upskill repeatedly and, in turn, drive the wheel of creation forward themselves. Even today, engineers are grappling with walking the fine line of mastering emerging AI tools (e.g. Cursor, Windsurf, Replit, Zoo) while remaining independent thinkers.

The final rung of the ladder culminates in “Love of beauty itself.” Here, Diotima describes the paramount of love revealed through beauty:

“…at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere.”

Beauty has always been at the center of humanity’s creations—from the Pyramids and the Parthenon to the stunning aesthetics of Apple devices and Tesla EVs. Even in the simplicity of Substack’s UI/UX (which I have come to thoroughly enjoy as I write), beauty reveals itself in the marriage of aesthetics and functionality. At its best, engineering channels this love of beauty into the systems and structures it architects. Thus, in a roundabout manner, striving for beauty results in the drive to create because love pushes individuals toward producing beauty.

Creation as a form of immortality

Diotima also proposes that creation offers humanity a path to immortality—whether through physical or intellectual contributions. She explains:

“I am persuaded that all men do all things, and the better they are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious fame of immortal virtue; for they desire the immortal.”

Creation, in this sense, takes many forms. For some, it is the legacy of children who carry their name. For others, it is the artistic or intellectual achievements that endure long after their creator’s time.

“Those who are pregnant in the body only, betake themselves to women and beget children—this is the character of their love; their offspring as they hope, will preserve their memory…and immortality.”

“But souls which are pregnant…conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or contain. And what are these conceptions? —wisdom and virtue in general. And such creators are poets and all artists who are deserving of the name inventor.”

Engineering merges both forms of creation. It enables the physical—planes, trains, and automobiles (yes, referencing the movie)—and the intellectual, from the algorithms that shape our digital lives to the artificial intelligence models dominating conversations on X. Figures like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk have become, in a sense, immortalized by their feats of physical and intellectual creation that marry mind and matter to transform science fiction into actuality.

Thus, engineering, at its core, equips us to climb the ladder of love and immortalize the human race’s endless march through time. Whether in the pursuit of beauty or immortality, mankind is called to create.

From Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet

The creative process

Rilke’s Letters To a Young Poet is a collection of ten letters written to Franz Xaver Kappus, a young officer cadet who sought Rilke’s advice on his poetry. Rather than limit himself to literary criticism, Rilke offers profound words of wisdom on love, suffering, creation, and even the nature of advice itself. Beginning in 1903 and spanning five years, these letters reveal key components of the creative process that continue to resonate with anyone seeking to create.

Solitude as a fundamental construct of creation

Rilke’s personal life was marked by solitude, but instead of resisting his aloneness, he embraced it as essential to his work. As proof, his most critically acclaimed work, the Duino Elegies, began during his time in Duino, Italy, and was completed in near-total isolation at Muzot, Switzerland. There, miles from the nearest village, without electricity, a phone, or running water, Rilke honed his craft.

It’s no surprise then, that in his first letter to Kappus, Rilke writes:

“Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest regions of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write.”

“Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if it should be affirmative…then construct your life according to this necessity…”

Rilke’s words feel especially relevant in an age dominated by distraction. Attention itself has been commoditized—bought, sold, and harvested by the very algorithms engineers have helped create. How many original thoughts can emerge when every spare moment is filled with scrolling, swiping, and notifications? (I am guilty of this myself!) How many inventions remain unrealized because we fail to carve out time to sit alone with our thoughts?

Reflecting on my journey with engineering, it was only through intentional solitude that I discovered my calling to create. The steps I implemented included daily journaling, reading, and stepping away from screens and noise for an hour or two to simply sit with my thoughts. (Shoutout BRICK—shameless plug for the best purchase of 2024) In these quiet moments of introspection, I’ve found new ideas and inspiration, answers to problems I had spent hours grinding away at, and even renewed a sense of purpose in my work.

While collaboration lies at the heart of engineering, solitude is its often overlooked foundation. Engineers must step away from the bustle of teams and tools, creating space for uninterrupted thought. In these quiet, deliberate moments of deep reflection and critical thinking solutions emerge that risk being drowned out by the noise of daily demands.

As Rilke reminds us:

“It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.”

His lesson is clear: if we wish to create, we must find the courage to be alone.

Love the questions themselves

As I reflect on Rilke’s fourth letter to Kappus, it strikes me that his advice is what I need to embrace most. In this letter, Kappus does not seek opinion on his poetry but instead brings forward his “fine concern for life.”

Rilke writes back:

“…be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue.”

“Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them.”

Too often I find myself attempting to control every facet of my life, expecting immediate results, and feeling overwhelmed when even the smallest element falls outside my grasp. Nowhere is this more evident than in engineering. For instance, in my current project, I’ve spent four days attempting to set up a software framework to connect to a flight control system and run it in a simulation environment—but to no avail. (P.S. I got it to work by the time I posted this blog…I just had to fall in love with the question…)

At times like these, Rilke’s advice alleviates self-induced stress: pause, embrace the uncertainty, and learn to love the questions themselves.

“Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.”

The best engineers I’ve met incorporate this mindset into their work. They are not obsessed with finding the solution instead, they find genuine joy in the problem itself. They discover fulfillment in the journey, in the questions that lead them gradually to an answer. This trait—of embracing curiosity and uncertainty—is not only an indicator of engineering prowess but also a lesson in being fully present. It is about engaging with the process rather than being consumed by the outcome.

From Kafka’s In The Penal Colony

Ethics of engineering design

As we enter the reality of social media images becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from AI-generated content, it feels fitting to turn to the author whose surrealism and absurdism needed a term of its own: “Kafkaesque.” Specifically, his short story, In the Penal Colony, follows a traveler sent to meet with an officer of a remote settlement to learn about it. The story primarily focuses on a gruesome execution device which the officer enthusiastically explains that they have engineered to inscribe the criminal’s crimes onto their bodies. Over 12 hours, the person first feels only pain, then in their final moments grasps an understanding of the message written in their flesh. Through this ghastly tale, Kafka poses the question: just because something can be created, must it?

The engineer’s responsibility

Towards the beginning of the story, there is a dialogue between the officer and the voyager that reveals the unsettling lack of transparency surrounding the justice system that the members of the penal colony have. The voyager asks, “Does he know his sentence?” The officer reveals that he does not. Pressing further, the voyager probes, “But at least he knows that sentence has been passed upon him?” Again, the officer shares that he does not. With mounting concern, the voyager asks, “Do you mean that the man still doesn’t know how his defence was received?” The officer admits that he does not, explaining that he alone serves as judge, jury, and executioner.

This exchange emphasizes the dangers of systems that operate without oversight or accountability. Similarly, as technology progresses, the general public is often left without knowledge of the advancements that are occurring until they hit their daily life—at a point where it has progressed beyond their control. For those immersed in tech, the latest breakthroughs seem commonplace. If you’re on X you are bombarded with updates on foundation models, AI tools, and NVIDIA’s discourse on physical intelligence, for example. However, the moment you step off the platform you realize the reality that most people are still living with either no interest or awareness of these advancements, and thus no say in their development.

I remember when consumer-facing biometric technology first arrived on my iPhone 6, followed by the facial recognition technology pioneered by the iPhone X, which now we take for granted. This technology, unsurprisingly, faced significant backlash upon its release. Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), renowned for its involvement in historical legal battles such as Brown v. Board of Education and Tinker v. Des Moines, have long fought for freedoms when they come under fire. In 2021, when senators introduced legislation to ban government use of facial recognition technology for citizen surveillance, the ACLU led a movement defending privacy rights and civil liberties against the unregulated use of this innovation. This example reinforces the broader issue: while engineers and technologists marvel at their creations, it also raises ethical concerns concerning their applications. Society is left to navigate how these developments might shape their, or their descendants’ lives. Just as the condemned in the penal colony were oblivious to their sentence, many today remain unaware of the “sentences” being handed to them as the never-ending progression of technology forges ahead.

Become a Philosopher-Builder

While this section may not sound it, I am a passionate supporter of technological advancement—a techno-optimist if you will—firmly believing that technology will inherently solve human problems. I would never advocate for engineers to stop inventing groundbreaking technologies like the bioinformatics or facial recognition systems I shamelessly use to log into all my apps. I do, however, spend quite a bit of time questioning how checks and balances will be established. In this, I believe it is the engineers’ responsibility, who whether knowingly or not, act as de facto policymakers. As such, engineers are uniquely positioned to design systems with sustainability and accountability in mind. To illustrate, look to social media where, as engineers design recommendation algorithms, they make choices around what content is amplified or suppressed. And yet, we are only just beginning to understand the effects of these algorithms on shaping and forming human behavior.

Imagine a world where every engineer embraces the role of a Philosopher-Builder (thanks Joe Lonsdale for the term). A creator who is deeply mindful of the broader ramifications of their work. Who asks themselves, “How can my creations advance humanity?” Engineers who design their technologies to cure uncurable diseases, make life interplanetary, create green energy, automate dangerous jobs, the list could go on! To do so, today’s engineers should aspire to pursue more interdisciplinary learning and exposure. Working with ethicists, policymakers, regulators, psychologists, behavioral scientists, you name it! The ideal engineer should possess T-shaped skills: deep expertise in their field complemented by broad knowledge across other disciplines. This approach allows them to comprehend how all the parts come together to form the puzzle while inventing. The modern engineer should adopt ethical design principles, share their opinions, add to public discourse on technology’s role in society, and create transparent systems. By embracing this archetype, engineers can bridge the gap between creation and ethical responsibility, ensuring that technology serves humanity and safeguards our fundamental values and freedom.

Fin

As I wrap up this reflection, Plato explains that love calls us to pursue beauty and immortality, and I’ve learned how engineering provides one way to answer that call. Rilke has taught me the importance of seeking those moments of solitude and falling in love with the questions themselves as I build. Kafka reminds me that with the power to create comes a profound responsibility—to consider its impact on those around me. Moving forward, my goal is to incorporate these learnings as I create, whatever shape this “creation” may take, and to grow into a leader who embodies the Philosopher-Builder characteristics. Ultimately, whatever problem I end up devoting my life to solving, it will be to improve this already beautiful world that I’m lucky enough to exist in :) As a good friend shared with me: “Once you have found your life’s purpose, you have until death to keep trying.”

I firmly believe that anyone can learn a new subject, all you have to do is start, and reconcile with yourself that you are going to be horrible at the beginning. Envision the long-term goal, break it down into a series of steps and substeps, and tackle one part at a time. Build, get stuck, troubleshoot, advance then iterate. Keeping this in mind, I spent the past four months learning robotics engineering from scratch.

Overview

Human-robot interaction (HRI) is a rapidly evolving field that emphasizes intuitive and user-friendly methods for controlling robotic systems. Gesture recognition has emerged as a natural and effective approach to bridging the communication gap between humans and robots.

The primary objective of this project was to create a hand gesture recognition system for remotely controlling a LIMO robot. The system leverages real-time video input from the operator’s camera to interpret three pre-defined gestures—stop, forward, and backward—to then translate them into corresponding movement commands. The report outlines the step-by-step development process, beginning with the appropriate tutorials and resources and progressing through the creation of gesture recognition algorithms and their integration with LIMO’s movement API.

This document highlights the effectiveness of combining software tools in a structured approach to achieve seamless human-robot interaction in mobile robotics.

Tools and Technologies

• Ubuntu: Linux distribution for the development environment.

• Robot Operating System (ROS): Framework for robotic applications.

  • Specifically, ROS 2 Noetic.

• Python: Programming language used for all code development.

• VSCode: Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

• Cursor: AI-assisted code editor.

• OpenCV: Library for image processing.

• Mediapipe: Framework for hand tracking and gesture recognition.

• LIMO Robot: AgileX Robotics’ mobile platform.

Project Outline

Phase 1: Tutorials and Familiarization

To establish a foundation for this project, it was essential to gain an understanding of basic robotics concepts and Python programming. Key steps included:

1. Robotics Theory: Tutorials covered topics such as kinematics, dynamics, perception, navigation, manipulation, planning, and controls

2. Python Programming: The Learn Python in 5 Hours full course covered fundamental concepts such as

   1. Data types, variables, and functions

   2. Conditionals, loops, and modules

   3. Object-oriented programming

   4. Three projects to apply the learned concepts

3. ROS2 Installation and Tutorials

   1. Official guidelines to install ROS2 Noetic on Ubuntu 20.04.6

   2. Completed ROS2 Tutorials on setting up a workspace, creating Python packages, and understanding core ROS concepts (e.g., nodes, topics, publishers, and subscribers)

Phase 2: Setup and Environment Preparation

Once ROS has been installed a workspace needs to be created.

Workspace Setup

1. Create workspace:

   1. Command: mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src

2. Navigate to workspace:

   1. Command: cd ~/catkin_ws

3. Initialize workspace:

   1. Command: catkin_make

4. Source setup file:

   1. Command: source devel/setup.bash

This will create a new workspace named catkin_ws in the home directory that can store the appropriate packages, and the appropriate nodes can be built within.

IDE and Library Installation

1. Install and configure VSCode with ROS-specific extensions

2. OpenCV typically comes included in the ROS installation

   1. Verify command: sudo apt-get install libopencv-dev

   2. Install command: sudo apt-get install ros-noetic-opencv3

3. Install Mediapipe.

   1. Command: pip install mediapipe

Package Creation

Finally, create a package within the workspace that will include the meta information about the package and the source directory where the source code will be placed.

1. Navigate to the catkin workspace’s src directory

   1. Command: cd ~/catkin_ws/src

2. Create a package

   1. Command: catkin_create_pkg (package name) rospy roscpp std_msgs sensor_msgs cv_bridge image_transport

      1. I named mine limo_gesture_control

   2. This package includes dependencies for ROS and image processing

   3. This package structure includes

      1. package.xml which contains the meta-information about the package

      2. CMakeLists.txt which is used for building the package

      3. src directory which is where the source code will be placed

3. Build the workspace again with the new package

   1. Command: catkin_make

4. Source the setup file to integrate the package into the ROS environment

   1. Command: source devel/setup.bash

To integrate the camera, gesture recognition system, and robot movement integration a node needed to be created for each function.

Node Creation

1. Navigate to the package src

   1. Command: cd ~/catkin_ws/src/your_package_name/src

2. Create the new node file

   1. Command: touch camera_node.py

3. Make the file executable

   1. Command: chmod +x camera_node.py

4. Repeat steps 1-3 for the gesture_recogniton_node.py and control_node.py

5. Build the package

   1. Command: cd ~/catkin_ws

   2. Command: catkin_make

6. Source the workspace

   1. Command: source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash

Now that each node is created, the code for the nodes can be developed. When creating the nodes, the communication diagram below was followed to ensure proper information flow between nodes.

Phase 3: Camera Integration

Open the IDE with Command: code (or cursor or windsurf depending on the IDE).

Within the camera_node file, write the following code.

Phase 4: Gesture Recognition

Within the gesture_recognition_node file, write the following code.

Phase 5: Robot Movement Integration

Within the control_node file, write the following code.

Phase 6: System Integration

To execute the code together, integrate each node into one launch file.

Launch File Creation

1. Navigate to the package

   1. Command: cd ~/catkin_ws/src/your_package_name

2. Create a launch folder

   1. Command: mkdir launch

3. Create a launch file inside of the folder

   1. Command: touch launch/launch_file_name.launch

      1. I named mine limo_gesture_control.launch

4. Open the file and add the following content

   

5. Make the launch file executable

   1. Command: chmod +x launch/launch_file_name.launch

6. Build the package

   1. Command: cd ~/catkin_ws

   2. Command: catkin_make

7. Source the workspace

   1. Command: source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash

Phase 7: Network Connection Between LIMO and Operating Device

The final step was to connect the LIMO Robot to the operating device from which the code is executed. This tutorial walks through setting up remote development for the LIMO Robot.

For my project, I followed the Linux Secure Shell Protocol SSH setup. To configure a connection to the LIMO Robot I created a setup script to set up ROS environment variables to communicate with the LIMO Robot, test connectivity between the operating computer and the robot, and finally provide instruction if the connection fails.

Remote Connectivity

1. Navigate to the package scripts

   1. Command: cd ~/catkin_ws/src/your_package_name/scripts

2. Create the setup file

   1. Command: touch setup_limo.sh

3. Make the file executable

   1. Command: chmod +x setup_limo.sh

4. Write the following code within the setup_limo.sh file

   

5. Setup the ROS environment variables

   1. Command: export ROS_Master_URI=http://ip_address:11311

   2. Command: export ROS_IP=ip_address

6. Replace the ip_address with the LIMO Robot and remote computer IP’s

   1. It is important to have both the LIMO and computer on the same WiFi before doing so

7. To SSH into the LIMO Robot, follow the instructions in the above tutorial from this point onward.

This setup allows the user to monitor and control the LIMO Robot remotely while running the main ROS nodes on the robot itself.

Results

Upon completion of this project, I was able to successfully control the LIMO Robot simply by moving my hand, as shown in the following videos.

Next Steps and Improvements

To further enhance this project, one key area for improvement is expanding the range of recognized gestures to include more complex commands, such as turning or rotating. The current code only allows for forward motion (one finger recognized), backward motion (two fingers recognized), and stop (closed fist/no fingers detected). Additionally, integrating machine learning models for more robust gesture recognition could improve system accuracy, especially in varying lighting conditions or with different users. Incorporating safety mechanisms, such as obstacle detection and collision avoidance, would also make the system more practical for real-world applications. Finally, optimizing the overall system's latency and performance, especially in the gesture-to-command pipeline, could ensure smoother and more reliable control of the LIMO Robot.

Thank You!

As a personal note, this is by far one of the coolest engineering projects I have undertaken, and would like to thank Dr. Srivastava for sponsoring me in his lab. I would also like to thank Ankur and Dong Hae for answering all my questions and taking time out of their PhD research to troubleshoot issues with me.

The next project is already in the works…

Cheers,

Kieran

A deal is brought in. That leads to a 1st coffee chat with a partner(s), a 2nd coffee chat with a different partner(s), and finally, an investment committee consisting of a full live pitch to all the partners after the due diligence process.

Disclaimer: We are a pre-seed/seed stage firm, and this is my first month working in an investment role. The ideas below are completely my own, and I am sure they will change as I continue to work in this role. After all, I am learning in public.

I want to preface this by saying that these are not necessarily outright questions I am asking. A coffee chat with a founder should feel like a natural conversation and less like a Q&A/interview. The following outline concerns the questions and themes I am trying to bring to light naturally throughout the conversation with the founder(s).

The 1st Coffee Chat

The overarching question being answered: Is this the team that can solve this problem?

I structure my coffee chat notes in the following style to answer this question.

Outline:

[Startup Name]

[Startup Description]: 1-3 sentences describing the startup based on their submission to our data center.

Golden Rules of Speaking with Founders: Keep top of mind while chatting.

1. Your entire attention is directed to the founder during this call.

2. They are the experts here; treat them as such.

3. The founder’s job is 100x harder than the investors’. Maintain this humility.

[Story] Who are you, and what led you to want to solve this problem?

I want to understand how their path in life has led them to be the singular person(s) who can solve this problem.

[Problem] What is the problem without any technical jargon? Why do you want to solve it?

I should have a fundamental understanding of the problem and a better idea of the convictions behind solving it.

[Solution] What is the solution without any technical jargon? What unique insight do you have to solve it in this manner? Why is your solution the one that will solve this problem?

I aim to understand that this team has a unique way of solving this problem that no one else has thought of/attempted/executed before. As such, the problem and their solution in their most distilled form should be clear to me without having to be an expert in their field.

[Vision] What is your thesis on this space — what does the future look like, and how are you a part of that future?

I want it to be clear that this team has spent significant time envisioning the future. While they are certainly not there yet, they have a clear picture of what that future looks like and how they will still be around in 5-10 years, showing they have the potential to be a venture-backed company.

[Team] What is each member’s role and skill set? How did the team meet, how long have they known each other, how long have they been working together? How is each member complementary to each other’s strengths and weaknesses?

Here, I hope to better understand the team’s dynamics, working and non-professional relationships, and how they have positioned themselves to execute in the manners that best serve the company and each other.

If these questions are answered by the end of the first coffee chat, I should understand whether this team can solve this problem, execute its solution, and ultimately be the team I want to work for. After all, at the pre-seed/seed stage, so much of the evaluation and investment is a bet on the founders.

The 2nd Coffee Chat

The overarching question being answered: Is this the startup that can solve this problem?

While at the pre-seed/seed stage, some of these data points will often be difficult to truly assess and will change as the company grows, it can reveal how thoughtful the founders have been in planning to build around the following.

Outline:

[Startup Name]

[Startup Description]: 1-3 sentences describing the startup based on their submission to our data center.

Golden Rules of Speaking with Founders: Keep top of mind while chatting.

1. Your entire attention is directed to the founder during this call.

2. They are the experts here; treat them as such.

3. The founder’s job is 100x harder than the investors’. Maintain this humility.

[Market/Competition] What is the TAM/SAM/SOM, and how did you get there? Who are the other players, and how does your offering differ?

This explores how they sized the market and confirms that it can lead to venture-sized returns. Furthermore, they should understand their competitive landscape and how they will win.

[GTM] What is your ICP? What channels will you use to acquire customers, and how scalable are they? What is your distribution insight?

Quoting Julian Shapiro of Julian.capital and DeepChecks.vc: “If you build something good, often they will simply not come.” I want to understand the unique approach to scalably getting in front of customers and acquiring + retaining them. Most startups die because they can’t figure out how to grow them.

[Business Model] How will you generate revenue, and what is your pricing strategy? What are your key costs, and how will you achieve profitability? Is your business model scalable, and what adjustments do you foresee will need to be made as you grow?

Self-explanatory. Arguably not as important as most likely this early in the process, this business model will change.

[Product] What is your MVP, and how does it solve the problem? What is your product development roadmap, and how will you iterate based on user feedback? Are there any technological barriers or IP considerations?

This highlights the startup’s ability to solve a real market need, understand its target customers, and highlight potential technological advantages or barriers. Deeper due diligence can often garner more insights if your background is not in this founder’s area.

[Traction] Do you have any early adopters or pilot customers, and what has been their feedback? What key metrics/KPIs demonstrate your product’s potential for growth? Have you achieved any significant milestones or partnerships that validate your concept?

This aims to provide concrete evidence of market validation and the team’s ability to execute its vision while offering insight into growth potential and customer adoption.

[Fundraising] How much capital are you seeking to raise, and how will it be allocated? What is your projected runway, and what milestones do you aim to achieve with this funding?

This should detail the startup’s financial planning and resource management skills, which are crucial for a founder. Furthermore, it can provide insights into the founders’ long-term vision and strategy, building upon the vision section in the first CC. Finally, this can help us understand if the investment aligns with our criteria.

It is also worth mentioning that I do not adhere rigidly to these templates. There is often a lot of overlap between the content in both CCs, so I tend to keep my notes flexible and write in the direction of the conversation's flow.

Next Steps

After successfully completing the two coffee chats, enough information should be collected to begin filling out an investment memo and ramping up the diligence process. With a significant picture of the team and startup painted, the investment committee brings in the founders to answer its most dire questions and assumptions and vet as a team whether this investment makes sense for the firm or not.

Cheers - Kieran