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According to Reuleaux's family tree, his father and grandfather were machine builders with roots in Liege, Belgium in the 18th century. There was a small German- speaking area east of Liege close to Aachen. Family French-sounding name reflects the multicultural heritage of Belgium. Franz Reuleaux was born in Eschweiler, a suburb of Aachen, in 1829.
One of the keys to Belgium's industrial progress was its coal and iron industry, which dates from the 16th century in the Ardenne and Meuse valleys running from the city of Mons east to Liege. In Great Britain, coal mining inspired the invention and use of the Newcomen and Watt steam engines. Belgium was the first European area to be industrialized after England in the last 18th century, perhaps it had an active mining industry that utilized steam engines for pumping water out of deep mines. Steam engines were also used as blowing pumps for coke and iron furnaces. Thus Reuleaux's family connection to machines had its roots in the industrial and political milieu of Belgium.
Around the beginning of the 19th century, his family moved their business about 40 kilometers east of Liege to Eschweiler, a village near Aachen, originally occupied by France but later ceded to Prussia after the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. Reuleaux received his technical training at the Polytechnic School of Karlsrue (1850-1852), when he studied with a major machine theorist, Professor Ferdinand Redtenbacher (1809-1863) who is sometimes called "the father of mechanical engineering" in Germany. The program at Karlsrue was influenced by the French L'Ecole Polytechnique. After two years in Karlsrue, Reuleaux went to universities in Berlin and Bonn to study philosophy, logic, natural sciences, and other liberal arts. After the death of his father, he returned to work in the family business. In 1856, at the age of 27, he received an invitation to become a professor of mechanical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich and after eight years took a position in Berlin. In 1856 he married Charlotte Overbeck (1829-1908).
Franz Reuleaux began his academic career with the publication of a machine design handbook in 1854 with a former student colleague, Carl L. Moll, Constructionslehre fur den Maschinenbau (Design for Mechanical Engineering). In this book Reuleaux calls himself "civil engineer". At the time mechanical engineering was beginning to emerge as a separate discipline. At the Polytechnic School of Zurich (ETH), in 1856, Reuleaux and Gustav Zeuner created a new program in mechanical engineering. After the publication of his 1861 book Der Constructeur, (The Designer) and his success at Zurich, he was called to Berlin in 1864 to develop a mechanical engineering program at the Royal Industrial Academy. He was serving as its director from 1868-1879. This Academy merged with the architecture-based Bau Akademie in 1879 to become Konigs Technischcen Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg. Reuleaux was elected Rector of this new institution during 1890/91, at that time one of the major technical universities in the world with more than 3000 students and 300 professors. He worked in this role advocating new educational programs in Germany. He also received the title of Royal Privy Councilor in the government. Reuleaux was a member of the Imperial Patent Office for eight years.
Reuleaux was not a major inventor in the mold of James Watt, nor was he an entrepreneur in the style of the Siemens brothers. He was not a pure scientist, as we imagine Einstein to have been. Reuleaux personified a new figure in the industrial age, the engineer-scientist; professor, kinematics theorist, head of a university, industrial consultant and confidant to capitalists, government expert and technical ambassador to the emerging global industrial world, someone like Theodore von Karman a century later. Unlike James Watt, who was an instrument maker and craftsman, Reuleaux and his fellow engineer scientists were trained in science and mathematics, philosophy, and literature, as well as in "mechanical arts" with strong mathematics and mechanics base. Unlike the craftsman-engineer who believed in trial and error method, hands on education, the engineer scientist believed that machines could be created and designed using scientific principles guided by rigorous mathematics.
Reuleaux life spanned the period of enormous growth in travel spurred by the development of powerful steam engines that carried people across oceans and continents by steamships and railroad. He traveled to World Exhibitions in London (1862), Paris (1867), Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876), Sidney (1879), Melbourne (1881), and Chicago (1893), often as German ambassador to these fairs. His professional life coincided with the new communications such as overseas mail and the telegraph that linked growing industrial world with the first internet. Records show he had regularly communicated with colleagues in North America such as Gibbs in Yale, Thurston in Stevens, later in Cornell, Bovey in Mc Gill, and many of the founders of ASME (American Society of mechanical Engineering).
Franz Reuleaux was one of the optimists of the machine age who believed in the power of technology to free mankind from the slavery and prejudices of peasant life, in spite of the terrible toll on the industrial worker. In his time, machines were viewed with awe and marvel. He and his generation saw the age of the machine as a continuity of progress reaching back to the Greeks and Egyptians as part of the destiny of humankind. Machines were the embodiment of the man's knowledge and control over the nature. He viewed the evolution in the development of the machine as an analog to the development of advanced societies in which education, crafts, manufacture, and government are linked in chain of mutual dependency for the common good.
Aside from his scholarly contribution, Reuleaux was a player in the political world of the machine age. He was the German ambassador to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 as well as to other world expositions. In Philadelphia he wrote letters that were published in Berlin newspapers and appeared as a book, Briefe aus Philadelphia (1877), on how cheap and shoddy German manufactures were compared to English and American produced goods. In this book he proposed an economic design principle; when faced with competition, one should raise the quality, not lower the price. Later this principle became a hallmark of German manufacturing. Reuleaux was active in revamping the German patent system. He was also a consultant to the development of the Otto-Langen internal combustion engine (circa 1867) as well as to the industrialists Mannesmann (circa 1889) who had developed seamless pipe manufacturing. At the Chicago Columbian Exposition (1893) he created another controversy in Germany by praising American precision manufacturing methods.
Reuleaux believed there were scientific principles behind invention and the creation of new machines, what we call synthesis today. He attempted to posit principles of design theory, a subject that has come into vogue a century later. This belief in the primacy of scientific principles in the theory and design of machines became the hallmark of his worldwide reputation, particularly in the subject of machine kinematics. Reuleaux was the first engineer to use topological ideas in kinematics to expand a kinematic chain into a family of related mechanisms. He developed methods of 'kinematic synthesis' based on the idea of equivalent rolling of relative motion between parts. Reuleaux also clearly enunciated a basic set of 'constructive elements' in machine design that was largely followed into twentieth-century texts on machine design. Combining his technical and artistic interests, he espoused an aesthetic in machine design by analogy with the optimum design of structures, namely that an aesthetically pleasing shape in a machine structure will have an efficient use of mass. Following Willis and Redtenbacher, Reuleaux developed an interest in the application of kinematics to animal motions.
Finally, Reuleaux believed in the use of demonstration models to express mathematical and kinematic ideas. He built a large collection of 800 mechanism models in Berlin and marketed 350 of them to universities around the world. Unfortunately much of this collection was destroyed during World War II, but some originals and reproductions of these models can be found in the Deutsche Museum in Munich, the University of Hanover, Kyoto University, Moscow Bauman Technical School, Karlov University in Prague and possibly in some other places we do not know yet. But the largest collection of these models is in Cornell University that has 220 Reuleaux models and you can explore these models on our website.
However his advocacy of scientific principles in engineering design also gained him critics, who believed he had placed too much emphasis on theory and who after his death (in 1905) tried to reverse the educational structure Reuleaux had helped to build in German engineering institutions.
Sources for Further Information on Reuleaux:
Also see in our digital books:
Kennedy, The Berlin Kinematic Models (1876) Reuleaux, Briefe aus Philadelphia (1877) Reuleaux, The Constructor (1894) Reuleaux, The Influence of the Technical Sciences upon General Culture (1885) Reuleaux, Kinematics of Machinery (1876) Reuleaux, Lehrbuch der Kinematik, V.1 - Theoretische Kinematik (1875) Reuleaux, Lehrbuch der Kinematik, V.2 - Die praktischen Beziehungen... (1875) Schröder, Catalog of Reuleaux Models (1899) Voigt, Kinematische Modelle nach Prof Reuleaux, Part 1 (1907) Voigt, Kinematische Modelle nach Prof Reuleaux, Part 2 (1907) Zopke, Professor Franz Reuleaux, A Biographical Sketch (1896)
