Part One: The Man Who Invented The Military-Industrial Complex

Robert is joined by Alison Stevenson to discuss Alfred Krupp.

Footnotes:

1. https://www.amazon.com/Torpedo-Inventing-Military-Industrial-Complex-Britain/dp/0674725263/?tag=saloncom08-20 
2. https://worldcrunch.com/world-affairs/egypt-where-colonialism-meets-military-industrial-complex  
3. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26061939?read-now=1&seq=11#page_scan_tab_contents 
4. https://www.dw.com/en/the-krupp-dynasty-glorified-and-vilified/a-15867835 
5. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/ex-army-contractor-vows-to-overthrow-egypts-sisi/1647390 
6. https://www.wired.com/2011/04/0426alfred-krupp-birthday-germany-cannon-king/ 
7. https://salemcc.instructure.com/courses/451/pages/eyewitness-account-of-the-siege-of-paris-1870-71 
8. https://www.amazon.com/Arms-Krupp-Industrial-Dynasty-Germany/dp/0316529400

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's uh, it's this What's happening now? Is the podcast
that this is? I'm Robert Evans. Another introduction in the bag?
How do we do? Sophie? Are we? Are? We? Are
we solid? Is that one gonna three? Out of time?
Are we gonna win? A potty? I wish that's what
it was called. Yeah, that's the Imaginary Podcast award I invented.

(00:25):
I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, a terrible
podcast about terrible people. Um that's made incompetently by me. UM.
I hope everybody's doing all right. Our guest today is
Allison Stevenson. Allison is a writer, a comedian, and creator
of the Audible original Like Mother. Alison. How are you
doing today? I'm doing not so bad. Not so bad

(00:49):
is excellent in it literally is as good as you
can be doing. Yeah, Allison, how do you feel about Germans?
You know not? Let's just say this. I am a Jew,
so let me be more to the point. How do
you feel about the existence of the German state? No?

(01:14):
I mean, you know, I've been dying to go to Berlin.
It's a great town. Great town, had some rough, rough
patches a while ago. Um, some sort of wall or something. Yeah. Yeah,
we're gonna be talking today about a lot of stuff.
The guy that we're chatting about is a fellow named
Alfred Krupp. Does the name Krupp mean anything to you, M,

(01:35):
I don't know. I don't think so, does it? Yeah?
Without Krupp, there's no Germany. Um, Like, no German state
ever comes into existence without Alfred Krupp. UM. And also
no World War One, and also probably no World War
two h and also maybe no international arms trade today.
He's that guy. He's that kind of dud um. Yeah,

(01:58):
he's a he's a fascinating character. Um. And today we're
going to chat about him. But we're gonna start by
talking about something that happened on October first, two thousand seventeen,
when a submarine built in Germany by the Tyson Krupp
shipyard in Kiel, North Germany, set sail for Egypt. It
was the fourth submarine the Egyptian government had ordered from

(02:18):
Tyson Krupp since the start of the Arab Spring, and
its total cost was one point four billion euros. On
its way to Egypt, had stopped at the port city
of Emden, where it met a French made Corvette class
attack ship, which was also built for the Egyptian Navy. Now,
the hundreds of millions of euros in profit that these
boats represented came from the taxes in natural wealth that
on paper ought to belong to the people of Egypt.

(02:39):
But they don't because Egypt is owned by the dictator
who took power there in two thousand and fourteen after
a military coup, Abdul Fata Alcisi. During his six years
in power, CC has brutally cracked down on free speech,
fought an unsuccessful but horrifically bloody counterinsurgency against Islamic extremists,
and repeatedly murdered moderate protesters. Under his reign, food prices
have risen and poverty in Egypt has sword. Three percent

(03:00):
of the country is now in poverty. UM. So things
aren't going great in Egypt, and one factor is that
the country is basically owned by the military, which is
grafting tax money in order to buy weapons from Germany. UM.
And of course, a significant amount of the money that's
paid to Tyson Krupp winds up in the pockets of
ALCSI and of his his his buddies, Because that's just

(03:23):
the way that military appropriations work in the global south. Um.
This is happening not just in Egypt but all over
the world, but particularly in Egypt, because no country on
Earth buys more German weapons than Egypt. Um. And this
actually has been going on a lot longer than you
might think. We'll talk about that a little bit later. Also,
as a note, Tyson Krupp makes all of the elevators

(03:43):
you've ever been in. Um. So, yeah, this is freaky.
But like I was, for some reason, I was thinking
about elevators, but I was thinking about Schindler. Yeah, I mean,
it's it's, it's it's We won't be talking about it
per much this episode, but Alfred Krupp's descendants absolutely, Uh,

(04:04):
we're responsible for tens of thousands of slave laborers in
concentration camps to make German submachine guns. They're cool dudes,
the Krups. Um. Yeah no, this this family's this family's
got some history to it. Um. And Yeah. So I
started with that story because I think it illustrates kind
of a weird continuity because the relationship between Germany and

(04:26):
Egypt and the selling of weapons actually started in the
eighteen hundreds, and it's continued without break ever since, through
two world wars and like three or four different regimes. Um.
And it's kind of a mark of how even though
you know you've got guys like the Kaiser, guys like Hitler,
the leaders at the top change, the people actually making
the weapons and in a lot of ways driving the

(04:47):
conflicts don't change because, for one thing, the Krupp, who
was in charge of German arms production during World War
Two got arrested and sentenced at Nuremberg and did three
years of a twelve year sentence and died the wealthyest
man in Europe because the Allies needed him to make
weapons for the Cold War. Um, these are the guys
who are who never get punished. Like right, we we

(05:09):
throw all the blame at the Hitler's and the Girbels
and stuff, and like, obviously those guys are fucking monsters.
But the dudes who made the weaponry that allowed them
to do what they did, and the same thing with
World War One, those guys never get punished because everyone
wants them to make guns that they have a posse,
and everybody wants what they have, which is the ability
to make more fucking guns. It's good ship Yeah, it's great. Yeah,

(05:31):
I was like, great that sounds That's exactly how I
described that. Yeah, it fucking rules. So Alfred Krupp, it
would be fair to call him like he's kind of
like the real Tony Stark, right, if you want the
actual guy like he's he's he's a brilliant engineer, inventor,
innovator who sold weapons to everyone on the planet um
and who had and who was like a visionary. He's

(05:51):
not just a businessman. He's a guy who's able to
like innovate killing machines and in fact, after a certain point,
the only thing he was really capable of thinking about
was how to build our guns to murder people with.
Um That's basically all this man ever did. Yeah. Yeah,
he's got some musky quality to him, although unlike Elon Musk,
Alfred was talented. So yeah, um, before we talk about Alfred,

(06:17):
we've got to learn a little bit about his family,
because the Crups go back quite a bit in Germany.
The first information we have on the family, the first
Crup that we know about, was a fellow named Aren't Krupp,
who moved to a city called Essen sometimes in the
late fifteen hundreds now Essen is located in the Ruhr,
which is a coal rich region that's the center of
German industry. UM. But at the time it was a sleepy,

(06:38):
small city and we know very little about aren't because
but that he was a man of means. We know
it was rich because he signed his name in a
book that was held in the city like Hall and
if you had a signature back in the hundreds, you
were rich. Like nobody was signing ship unless you had
money back then. Um. Our most important source for this
episode is the book The Arms of Crup which was

(07:00):
written in the nineteen sixties by a guy named William
Manchester who was a british Man who had actually fought
against Krupp guns as a young English soldier. And I
don't normally gush about the books that we have on
this show, but I feel the need to hear because
the while The Arms of Krupp is preposterously long, it
is a massive, massive book. It's very readable. William is
a really, really funny writer, and I enjoyed every page

(07:20):
of this book and I absolutely recommend reading it if
you want to learn about the arms trade that currently
dominates the world because it's it's kind of about how
it all got started. Um, And for an example of
William's writing style, I'm gonna quote here how he explains
that he knew Aren't Krupp was probably fat, because this
is this is fun. Well, the record indicates nothing beyond
a faceless blob. It is safe to hazard something about

(07:42):
the first Crup's physiognomy. First, Almost certainly he lacked the
gauntness of later krups. Aren't was a sixteenth century German merchant,
and we know quite a lot about the customs of
that class. They were, above all dedicated. Glutton's girth was
proof of prosperity. The man who could out eat his
neighbors was admired everywhere. One performer devoured thirty eggs, a
pound of cheese, and a large quantity of bread in
a single sitting. He then fell dead and became a

(08:04):
national hero. Seven hour meetings were not uncommon. It has
been estimated that the well to do spent half their
waking hours either masticating or defecating. And these circumstances, only
an abnormal metabolic rate could prevent a rich man from
becoming obese, which I did not know and find fascinating
that's so weird. I kind of feel like we should
bring that back a little. Just yeah, it would be

(08:28):
easier to chase down Jeff Bezos if he wasn't strong.
You're right, I just find that amazing. That, Like becoming
a national hero back then was like, yeah, he ate
himself to death? What a guy? Uh died a hero?
I hope my kids grow up to eat themselves to

(08:50):
death one day. So what little we do know for
sure about Aren't suggests that he embodied what would come
to be one of the key Krupp family characteristics, the
ability to profit from tragedy. Twelve years or so after
he moved to Essen, the bubonic plague stuck struck, and
about half the town died. Corpses were piled up with
no one to bury them. Whole neighborhoods became graveyards. All

(09:11):
the good plague. Should you know the good plague ship
we're there now? Yeah, classics, this is extra meaningful for us. Yeah,
classic plague. Uh So, while other men sold their property
and drank themselves to death before the plague could get them,
Aren't bet that he would live through the plague, and
he bought up their abandoned properties. So all these guys
are like, we're all going to die, let's sell our
homes and buy liquor, and aren't like, y'all buy your

(09:31):
fucking houses. I don't think I'm gonna die. And that's
how the Crupp family first ends up super rich because
they buy up all of these people's property when they
plague gets it's it's always property, it's always lands, the
only thing that's valuable. Oh my god, I say, ignoring
the real estate collapse that happened like ten years ago. Yeah,

(09:51):
I just like the first Superman movie. Anyway, we don't
know much about the Crups who immediately followed, aren't, other
than that they survived the Thirty Years War of eight
into sight with their wealth and property. Intact, this would
not have been easy. The area Essen was in was
invaded by Danes, Swedes, Spaniards, Bohemians, and worst of all,
the French um and about two thirds of the population

(10:12):
of Germany died during that war. So again, and also,
there's no Germany during this Like I'm saying Germany because
people roughly know the geographic area Germany doesn't exist at
this point, Like it's a bunch of warring kingdoms like
you've got the Prussians and the Austrians and the Fans
and Bohemians filthy bohemians. Yeah, um, all these different all

(10:32):
these different people, they're all and they're always shooting each
other too, and they're getting shot by everybody else, and
they're they're they're kind of One of the things that's
interesting about the Germans in this period is that they're
like famously um, famously polite and humble because they get
their asses kicked so much um, which is a reputation
that changes because of the things that we're about to
talk about in this episode. I think I know they

(10:55):
stopped being humble after a while. Yeah, yeah, uh so
the Crep family basically, yeah, despite all of this disaster,
they managed to expand their land holdings and expand their wealth,
and that suggests that they all kind of inherited, aren't
strait of profiting from disaster. We know that one of
Ourn's sons was a fellow named Anton Krupp, who was
the first member of the family we have decent documentary

(11:18):
information on. We know, for example, that at one point
he received a significant municipal find for quote, beating doctor
Hasselman in the street, which I think rules you just
got to a fist fight with a doctor. I think
he got like a bad diagnosis or something. Yeah, I
mean doctors then weren't really doctors. They were just they
were drug dealers, which only about half of doctors aren't

(11:41):
out today, so penicillin pushers. Back then it was just
it was just and Scotch in Mercury. They were like
the original seven eleven. Yeah, well they were the original
guy in front of the seven eleven who has a
really bulgy coat, so he's In sixteen twelve, Uh, Anton

(12:07):
married a guy who was at the time one of
Essen's most prominent gunsmith's, and Anton got into the gunmaking business.
He was selling about a thousand barrels per year during
the Thirty Years War, and he was described in the
town council meeting as our highly honored patriot Lord. Now,
the Crups didn't get straight into the arms business from there,
and in fact, after Anton they stopped for decades. Uh.
The family made most of its money because they owned

(12:29):
a large store and they collected rent from properties, and
this was enough to make sure that the family's wealth
grew every year. In the mid sixteen, hundreds of crupt
named Matthias bought fields east of the town wall would
become the site of the crupt gun works that later
armed Germany through two World Wars. By the late sixteen hundreds,
one writer described the family as the uncrowned kings of Essen.

(12:49):
When Matthias died in sixteen seventy three, the town left
his position the office of town clerk, unfilled until his
oldest son was old enough to take the jobs. That's
how big a deal this family is in late sixteen hundreds.
Now corrupt fortunes waned throughout the seventeen hundreds as frivolous
family members and bad luck whittled them down from the
family that owned the town to just another kind of
rich family who weren't as rich as they used to be.

(13:10):
They bought a large steel foundery at one point, but
they sold it in the early eighteen hundreds, and this
leads us to Friedrich Krupp. In short, Fredrick was ambitious,
but either dumb or unlucky. He liked to spend money,
and he had no real talent for making more of it.
In eighteen ten, he inherited the modern equivalent of a
million dollars uh Friedrich had other siblings but the Krupt
family tradition was for the oldest son to get everything,

(13:30):
and this is how the family succeeded in holding onto
all of their wealth and influence over the years, but
it put them at a disadvantage when a real dummy
happened to fall out of a corupt ladies womb first,
And that's what happened with Fredrick. Yeah, his first decision
was to scrap the business like the store that his
ancestors had made all of their money with, and instead
invested in an exciting new venture cast steel. Now, at

(13:51):
the time, people are real shitty at making metal, Okay,
So like metals hard, right, Like you've got bronze, which
is pretty easy to make and kind of durable, but
it's it's sucks when it comes to making cannons. Like
if you're trying to blow things up through bronze, you
can only make shoot things that are like projectiles so large.
It can only handle so much powder without exploding. Um,
So it's yeah, it's just not a great thing to

(14:14):
make cannons out of. It was the only thing to
do it. Yeah, So like at the time, steel had
existed for a while, and in fact, some people will
suggest like you know, the Spartans. Everybody talks about how
they were like famously good warriors. Um, there's actually a
school of thought among historians that's just like they weren't
any better at fighting than anyone else, but the nature

(14:35):
of the iron that was in there, uh, that was
like in near Sparta was very easy to kind of
accidentally turn into steel. And steel is a thousand times
better than any kind of like ancient metal, than bronze
or than just straight iron. It's just much more durable.
And so the Spartans had steel blades and that's why,
like they were famous because just because they had better technology.

(14:56):
And that's kind of what everyone was looking for in
the Napoleonic era, right, Like, no one's good at metal yet.
People have started to figure out how to make steel, um,
but they haven't gotten good at it. And cast steel
is like modern steel. It's like the ship that you
can make skyscrapers with. It's the ship that you can
make battleship cannons with. It's it's like kind of the

(15:17):
necessary precursor to the modern world. You can't have the
modern world without quality steel. And people had started to
figure it out, particularly the British had kind of started
to figure out how to reliably make modern steel, which
again is cast steel. When I talk about cast steal,
that's what I'm talking about, but no one was very
good at it. And Friedrich Krupp becomes obsessed with making

(15:37):
cast steel. He thinks that's how he's going to revive
the family fortunes. And then a quote now from a
passage in the arms of Krupp and the Napoleonic eraic
cast steele had a special cash a. It was the
nuclear fission of its day, mysterious, glamorous, seemingly limitless in
its possibilities. Steel, low carbon, iron, tough and malleable is
not a natural phenomenon, and in a time when chemistry

(15:58):
was poorly understood, it was regarded as a marvel. In
the past, smelters had produced small quantities of it by
manipulating ore and carbon with rods, meantime regulating the flow
of air through bellows to produce the metal. They worked
on its field, on its appearance, on hunches, and on
slights and arcana, handled down from fathers to sons. Until
the nineteenth century. These hit or miss methods were good enough,
but now in the spring of the machine age, Europe

(16:20):
was crying for big chunks of high quality steel. The
old smiths couldn't help, nor could the operators of blast furnaces.
Furnaces produced only cast iron, which, with its high urban
carbon content, was too brittle to be satisfactory. Attempts were
made to fuse several small ingots of steel and cast
them as a single block. The smiths were frustrated because
the oxygen in the air combined with the carbon and

(16:40):
the steel, ruining the whole batch. Yet some men could
bring the thing off. The secret existed and had been discovered,
to the great annoyance of Napoleon. The discoverers were Englishmen.
Not only had the British cornered cast Steele, they held
their monopoly of it for seventy years. So the British
figure out cast Steele and no one on the continent
has it. And this is one of Britain's main military
advance edges, as they have good steel, and Napoleon wants

(17:02):
it because he's still fucking around with brass cannons, which
are trash um. And so you know, Napoleon is at
this point, fucking Napoleon. He's the he's the Emperor um
and Germany is just like a bunch of little warring states.
So everyone kind of is looking to Napoleon, even the
people outside of his borders. Young Friedrich Krupp became obsessed
with the idea of figuring out how to cast steal

(17:23):
for himself and his people. And yeah, Napoleon announced a
prize to whoever could figure out how to cast steal
for continental Europe. He was going to give them like
thousands and thousands of pieces of gold, and it was
just a fortune worth of fucking French money. And so
in eighteen eleven, Friederich Krupp founded the cast Steel Works
with the ambition of like winning the prize that Napoleon

(17:45):
had set out. Now, this was an ambitious goal because
Friedrich had no idea what he was doing. He grew
increasingly obsessed with trying to puzzle out the secrets of
cast steel and burnt through his entire inheritance to buy
property and equipment, while at the same time neglecting the
store that had brought his family most of their wealth.
His eyes were always on the prize the Emperor had promised,
and he began making loud public boasts about he how

(18:06):
he basically already figured out how to make cast steel.
In December of eighteen eleven, he declared his loyalty to
the Emperor of France. This was bad timing since it
was at the precise moment that Friedrich declared his fealty
to France that the Emperor lost his entire army in Russia.
So Fredrick like declares himself loyal to the French crown
and then the French crown loses all of its power
by getting massacred in the frozen steps of Russia. Bad

(18:29):
timing for Friedrich. Yeah, uh, so he basically his loyalty
wound up guaranteeing him a doomed job digging trenches for
a French army that got its ass handed to it
by Prussia while Napoleon was running away from the Cossacks.
And the good news is that nationalism didn't exist back then,
so most people in s and felt as much loyalty
to France as they did to Prussia, because again, no
one's really German then, so as soon as Prussia took

(18:50):
over in Napoleon's empire collapsed, nobody like got revenge on Friedrich,
which is what would have happened later so he got
to core. Now he's got no money. Yeah he's broke. Now,
yeah he's broke his ship. Um he gives. Yeah, he
loses all of his money trying to make cast steele.
He fails. The emperor he was hoping to get a
reward from is no longer the emperor, and it's just

(19:11):
yeah trash luck and also kind of a dumb guy.
Um so, yeah, Fredrick wasn't completely like a failure. He
succeeded in getting the Krupt families first military contract, but
which was just like supplying steel bayonets uh and he
sold quality tools and dies, but he was never able
to make enough money fast enough to like make up
for all of the debts he had incurred trying to

(19:31):
figure out how to make cast steel, and of course
the other family business failed. Uh So Fredrick did throw
a bunch of money into making a big machine shop
which was finished in eighteen nineteen, but only worked about
half the year because he fucked up on like it
would rely on the local river in order to be
able to function, because you don't have like electricity then,
so people will use rivers to like move the different

(19:52):
wheels and ship that need to anyway, it's a bad
He makes a bad bet and his fucking machine shop
doesn't work, and he spends the last two years of
his life poverished in bedridden, ranting and coherently about his
ruined life and fortune. He dies at age thirty nine.
Uh yeah, so kind of a bummer of a story.
Uh yeah, So, don't always chase your dreams. Don't don't

(20:16):
ever chase your dreams. Never ever chase your dreams. If
there's one lesson of this podcast is that dreams are
a bad idea. Um. Yeah, if everyone would just sit
alone in a dark room until they died, we would
have no Hitler's, no Stalin's nod, no penicillin either. So
it's a mixed bag. Um yeah, but we're not leaving

(20:38):
our houses. How are you going to get sickin syphilis? Yeah? Yeah,
yeah anyway. Uh Alfred So, Alfred Krupp was Friederich's son,
and he was fourteen years old when his dad died.
But that was enough to make him a man by
the standards of the time, and he was, to say
the least, an odd child. He was terrified of fire,
which is like not unreasonable, but if your entire family

(21:01):
business is operating a forge. It's kind of weird that
you're scared of fire. Um. He was fascinated by smells,
and particularly the smell of horseship, which he loved more
than anything in the entire world. This dude, his entire life,
loves horseshit like candle get enough of it. Thinks that
it like inspires him and like sets his mind going

(21:21):
and gives him his best ideas and it's great for
his health. Like, he absolutely loves horseshit. Is there anything
behind us or is it just we don't I don't know,
but it's his entire life. We'll talk about horseshit a
few times in this episode because he's fucking loves horsepoop. Damn. Yeah,
it's very strange. He was equally insistent. As much as

(21:43):
he loved horsepoop, he was insistent that his own breath
was poisonous, and so he moved around constantly in order
to avoid breathing it in. He was convinced that if
he stayed in the same room for too long, he'd
breathe in all the oxygen and die. He's very weird dude.
As a result of this, sleep was a nightmare for him.

(22:05):
He couldn't really sleep. He had chronic insomnia his whole life.
Like he's just a miserable, neurotic wreck of a man
who loves horseship. It's awesome, damn. Yeah, yeah, he's he's
a very strange dude. And I'm gonna quote William Manchester
writing a little bit more about him here. What can
I ask ye? How so was he like carrying horseship

(22:28):
with him? He just made sure horseshit surrounded all of
his homes and also later in life, made sure that
his homes had specific like ducks to take the smell
of horseship up into his rooms. He wanted everything around
him to smell like horseshit at all times. He loved.
He could not get enough horship. This is really making

(22:48):
me want to smell horseship. It's great. Like it's not
as bad as normal ship because they're vegetarians, right, Like
they don't eat meat, like I've I grew up with
like cows and horses and ship on like pastures and
like it's not as bad as you know, dogshit or something.
But it's not a pleasant smell. It's ship, you know,

(23:11):
all right? Yeah, anyway, here's William Manchester writing about this
weird ass poop love and dude. Yeah, his chronic insomnia,
which would have crippled another executive, actually may have made
Alfred more efficient. He was such a bundle of neurotic
quirks that they seem to have supported one another at night.
For example, he wrote business memoranda. A compulsive writer. Over
thirty thousand of his letters and notes are excellent. He

(23:32):
trained himself to scribble in the dark, crouched sweating under
his eyder down after dawn flushed his workers from their beds,
they would find scrawled praise or scorn he propped on
their benches to them. His energy was a marvel to us.
The greater marvel is that he kept this up for
over fifty years without once being institutionalized. So he's a
bizarre man. And Robert fu anyway, this is the man

(23:59):
who helps in vent the military industrial complex and creates Germany. Um,
he's a fun, fun dude. Quite a fantastic way to
introduce this episode. I meant so Alfred inherited a tremendous
amount of debt in a broken business because again, his
dad was kind of a dumbass, but Alfred was not
dumb the one thing you like. Again, Unlike Elon Musk,

(24:21):
he's legitimately a genius, uh. And he was very shrewd enough.
He was shrewd enough to see what assets he had.
The forges he'd inherited were substantial, and while his father
never unlocked the secrets of cast steel um, they were
good enough to make stuff people could use and for
So for four years Alfred toile, learning through trial and
error how to make stronger and more useful steel, and
also developing an eye for business. He broke even for

(24:43):
the first time in eighteen thirty, and from then on
his career moved steadily upward. He'd inherited four workers from
his father, and thanks to a family loan in eighteen thirty,
he hired five more employees. That year Alfred was inherited workers. Yeah, yeah,
workers go come with the company. The they're still kind
of like like their peasants still at this period, so

(25:04):
it's kind of like it's it's it's not you don't
quite own them, because they can quit and go find
other work. But it's really uncommon. You tend to work
for the same people your dad worked for, right, Like
that's kind of the norm. This is not that far
from medieval times, right, Yeah, Alfred actually is responsible for
kind of turning Krupp into one of the first like

(25:24):
modern style businesses in the world. Like he inventced the pension,
among other things. Um, yeah, he's a weird dude. Uh so. Yeah,
Alfred was obsessive. He wrote his workers relentlessly to ensure
the steel they produced was as close to perfect as possible.
He toured with samples of his products all through central
Germany and returned home after three months with pockets filled
with orders. In his first sales trip abroad. Alfred had

(25:47):
found his first true talent salesmanship. In eighteen thirty four,
when the thirty six Germanic States of Europe established their
first common market, which abolished all the internal tariffs. Alfred
pompously sent the government a letter declaring that he would
meet all the German Union steel needs on his own.
This was a lie. He couldn't do anything near this,
but as got it, got his name and people in
government's ears, and that was his goal. So as Alfred

(26:09):
developed new methods of making better and better steel, he
grew equally paranoid about corporate espionage. He started requiring all
of his employees to swear personal oaths of loyalty, and
he started locking them into the works when they were
doing their job. Um, he's again kind of a dick.
That seems to be a theme. Is like paranoia with
these types of people. Yeah, I mean, one could argue

(26:31):
it's not doesn't make them bad at their jobs. Yeah,
you know. Uh So he hired a bunch more people.
He brought in his close relatives to help him manage
the growing plant, and in eighteen thirty eight he felt
comfortable enough to leave on his first international sales trip
to France and England. France had a lot of business
to offer corrupt in most days, he returned to his
hotel Triumphant with more steel orders to send back home,

(26:52):
but on the rare occasions when he was turned down,
Alfred collapsed entirely. At one point, he was bedridden for
five days after a French company refused to buy his product. So, yeah,
he's neurotic again. On the whole, the trip was a success,
but when he left France for England, his goal was
not to make more sales. Because English steel was still
the best in the game. Alfred was kind of verging

(27:13):
on cast steel but he wasn't as good or consistent
as what the English could make. Um In England was
the most industrialized nation in Europe at this point. Krupp
had nothing that they wanted, so he couldn't sell anything
to them. But he wasn't there to sell. He was
there to engage in corporate espionage, and thankfully for the
English steel industry, he was terrible at it. His first
plan was to England, enter England on a fake passport

(27:34):
with the name that he thought based on nothing nothing
sounded English, uh Alfred Croup Crup instead of care upp like.
He thought that that would make him pass. He bought
a pair of spurs, which English gentleman wore in those days,
and he teamed up with another Germanic merchant, with the
idea of that that they would pretend to be British
people looking to learn the secrets of fine steel production,

(27:55):
have some sort of accent give him away. Well, the
other thing that would give them the way is that
neither of them spoke English. It wasn't even that they
had an access They only spoke German. Alfred had memorized
a couple of pleasantries from a phrase book, but he
could not talk to people. Um. He had figured that

(28:16):
the dozen words he knew and his fake name would
let him pretend to be an Englishman who just spent
time on the continent for a while, and it did
not work. Everyone who met him immediately realized he was German,
but they didn't care either, like they weren't scared that
he would spy on them. Um. And he was so
bad at espionage that some of the English steelmakers he
met even figured out that he was Alfred Kruoke without
saying him saying a word, and they still gave him

(28:37):
tours of their factories because they're like, he's not going
to figure it out by just walking around the factory floor,
and he didn't. He was terrible at spying on people.
He stayed there for five months and he learned nothing,
and he also sold nothing. And it didn't matter anyway,
because before much longer Krupp figured out how to make
cast steal of their own, and once he was home,
he set to work figuring out how to take advantage
of the fact that now he made pretty much the

(28:59):
best steal out side of England, and the obvious answer
was the armaments industry. On his way home from England,
Alfred had developed a dream of making a new steel cannon,
and this was very controversial at the time. At this
point in Europe, all cannons were bronze, and for complex
metallurgical reasons. I don't understand bronze cannons. Number one, we're
only really short range cannons. Like the big guns that

(29:19):
you had in World War One that could bombard cities
from miles away. You couldn't make those out of bronze.
They had to be steel because they would explode under
the pressures that those big guns did, and bronze cannons
couldn't be breech loading cannons. This is an important but
kind of like I don't know, nuanced gun different. So,
barrel loading cannons work the way they sound, right. You
you jam a bunch of powder into the barrel, then

(29:40):
you shove a cannon ball in there, and you light
it from behind and it shoots the cannon ball out right.
That's the cannons you see in all the pirate movies. Yeah,
a breech loading cannon loads the way that like a
double barreled shotgun does today, where you put the round
in at the back of the gun. This has a
bunch of advantages. It makes it fire a lot faster,
allows for more advanced kind of gunnery. It allows for

(30:02):
like shells that are instead of just like a cannon ball.
It allows for explosive shells to be fired. It's kind
of in order to have a modern artillery, you have
to have a breech loading gun. Um. People have been
dreaming about them for a while. Leonardo da Vinci had
sketched breech loading guns and they tried. People have tried
to make them for centuries, but they'd always exploded and
killed the people manning them. So folks have just figured

(30:22):
it's impossible to date. Yeah, So Krupp has a dream
that he can make this like a steel cannon that
will allow him to do all this fun kind of
canon stuff that he wants and envision your your future. Yeah,
I mean it makes sense that I'm going to get

(30:43):
this gun, right. Yeah, I'm gonna make the best gun
anybody's ever made so that Europeans can kill each other better.
That that's that's this whole this guy's whole entire life. Um,
And yeah it was. You couldn't really have like because
brass cannons were the only le cannons that existed. You
couldn't really have big guns even Napoleon. Like Napoleon was

(31:05):
a famous artillery man, but his guns actually were pretty
tiny compared to like what we now consider modern artillery.
To beat well, they were big, they were big compared
to him. Yeah, they were. That's that's very fun. Actually,
you know, so much go Ahead tried to do in

(31:27):
his masculinity. I mean, he had, he had reason to
be he did. He did almost beat all of Europe
and in several wars. Um, so you know what, you know,
you know who didn't beat Europe in several wars? It's
time for an ad break, and that's not really bad?
Are we not sponsored by the brun Napoleon? No? No, no,

(31:50):
he is not sponsoring this episode, unfortunately, with us unfortunate,
I have geared this entire episode to winning the Bruce favor. Um. Well,
I guess we'll try to get Czarist Russia as a sponsor.
Until then, here's some ads. We're back, and I'm being

(32:14):
informed that some tragedy seems to have befallen the Romanov dynasty.
So I don't think we're going to be getting a
sponsorship from the Czar either. And that that is a
real bummer. I'm hearing good things about this Linen character, though,
so we might be able to I think he might
like adds a lot. It seems like a real products
and services kind of do. We'll figure it out. So,

(32:38):
uh yeah, bronze cannons are kind of the standard in
Europe at the time. And this dream of like the
fact that uh that Alfred Kripp wants to make steel
guns is not just like it's it's not just seen
as like it's not seen as like a revolutionary thing.
It's seen as madness because people had tried to make
steel cannons and wrought iron cannons and they've always been disasters.

(32:59):
And in fact, in eighteen four for the United States
had built a twelve inch wrought iron smooth bore canon
for the USS Princeton Um and on the ship's Gala voyage,
they tried to fire it and it exploded, killing the
Secretary of the State and Secretary of Navy. UM. So
people aren't just like this won't work. People are like,
it's reckless to even try to make these guns, you
fucking idiot. Um. And another reason why people are obsessed

(33:23):
with bronze cannon at the time is that Napoleon had
been beaten by Wellington with bronze cannons, right like Wellington
like bronze guns had beaten Napoleon forty something years ago,
and people are like, why would we need to change
It was good enough to fight Napoleon, It's good enough
for anything we could possibly use it as. And it's
kind of worth noting here that at this point, you know,
it's been decades since Napoleon's defeat, like more than a generation,

(33:48):
and artillery had not changed at all. Like if you
could imagine if we were still using the exact same
weaponry that like we'd used in Vietnam or Korea. Um, Like,
that's kind of the situation Europe is in in in
eighteen fifty, um, because things just didn't advances quickly back then. Um.
So it's it's it's seen as kind of odd. In
eighteen fifty Krupp and his workers put together a three

(34:11):
pound cannon for an exhibition in London. And these exhibitions
were like the arms trade shows of the day. There
were places where all of the rich industrialists and scientists
would come and bring all of their latest innovations and
achievements and stuff. This is like the birth of the
This is the industrial revolution, the birth of the steel age.
So people are figuring out new ship every year, and
like every year so they'll gather in a new city

(34:31):
to show off the cool ship that they've invented. And
most of it's like like a violent science fair. Yeah,
it's not all guns. A lot of it is like agriculte.
People are showing off plows and ship, but the guns,
like in CREP is kind of the first person to
realize that, like, well, most of the products there are
like tractors and plows and light bulbs, the thing that
people asking that feeds people. Yeah, it guns are what

(34:54):
people care about. Journalists don't write about the boring ship,
they write about the guns. Everybody thinks the guns are neat.
So he built this cannon a little bit earlier, this
first steel cannon, and nobody wanted to buy it. But
he figured, like, maybe if I take it to this exhibition,
because people just fucking love weapons, that will build up
enough buzz that ILL can start selling some of this ship. Now,

(35:15):
he brought more than just a cannon to show off
his company's new capabilities. He's had his workers slathered together
what has been the largest bar of cast steel ever produced.
It weighed thousands and thousands of pounds. Um. And yeah,
so he just like he brought this giant lump of
metal and a cannon to this show. Um, and his
enormous steel ingod actually won the expedition because that was
like for years in the eighteen fifties, every one of

(35:38):
these exhibitions, the product that would win would be like
an increasingly large lumps of metal because people are just
look at how much metal I can make? Now I
can make more metal. And most of this is because
like railroads the big thing at the time, right, So
by making like, by making like a ten thousand pound
piece of steel, you're saying like I could make a
fucking railroad for your ass. Real goddamn quick, that's the

(35:58):
whole that's the whole deal, you know. Yeah, it's a
weird time. Um. So he wins the exhibition because of
his steel ingod, and the judges completely ignore his steel cannon,
and Alfred was frustrated at first because again his cannon
had been ignored by all the people he'd wanted to
buy it too. But journalists were drawn to the gun
and At first, the press piled on about what a

(36:19):
bad idea a steel cannon would be, the Observer's The
London Observer wrote, the brittleness of steel is so great
that we doubt whether it would resist any successive charges
of powder. But pressed within the London News and the
Daily News had to admit that the cannon was almost
hypnotizing lee beautiful. One reporter regretted that Krupp hadn't shown
devices for quote, grinding corn, or surgical instruments or something

(36:40):
more appropriate to this peaceful age and to the exhibition
than a modern field piece. I mean, did he test
it out? Yeah, yeah, yeah, they fired it and stuff.
Oh yeah yeah. I mean like people just kind of
doubted that it would continue working and stuff. But like
again he most of them like came around because they
just thought it was so beautiful. And there's this one
British journalists who writes that, like it's kind of fucked

(37:02):
up that we're trying to do the show about like
the advance of technology, and like you don't come here
with like new farming implements or new surgical tools, but
you bring like a giant gun. Um. But that guy
was actually kind of the one who misjudged what people
wanted at the time because the United States section of
the fair to show you how different things were the US,
all we brought was a massive plow. No, we brought

(37:24):
like farming equipment, Yeah, farming equipment, a bunch of paintings
of farms and ship. Uh. And everyone ignored it. Everyone
ignored it in favor of the big german gun. Um.
And that taught Alfred a lesson, which is that people
only let people don't give a ship if you make
stuff that will improve their lives. They like killing machines.
Yeah it's good, it's good. Yeah, it's absolutely Um. I

(37:49):
don't buy a bunch of old cannons, you know, or
a bunch of old I don't buy a bunch of
old farming implements. I buy antique German handguns. It's weird,
that's what people do. Huh. If I could afford it, Yeah,
they're beautiful and fucking plows are lame. You want to eat? Yeah,
I got put a plow in my apartment. And talking

(38:10):
about so, Alfred Krupp was the only man at the
time who really like realized this that like that you
could basically at this point in time, weapons technology was
entirely driven by militaries, and like there were there were
outside firms who would make weaponry for them, but it
was basically like, hey, we need this kind of gun,
and they'd figured out how to they try to figure

(38:32):
out how to make it. Alfred was the first person
to be like, I'm going to make something they don't
want and I'm going to force them to want it.
That was new and he was the first guy to
figure this out. Okay, okay, it was slow going at first.
Generals and admirals and secretaries of war are inherently conservative men,
and changed frightened them. They wanted to stick with what
had worked before, and brass cannons had worked before. It

(38:53):
was almost impossible to get a new weapons system going.
But journalists love new shiny things and they love weapons,
and so to their readers. And basically, Krupp figured out
that he could stoke in nations demand for guns by
playing to the fact that people are drawn to guns
kind of inherently, and he took a lot of advantage
of that. Um, people suck. Yeah, they're not great. It's

(39:14):
kind of a bummer, but it works very well for him. Um.
Although it is a bit of a slow burn. So
at the time, advertising was not really a thing that
existed in its modern concept, Like there were ads, but
like the ad industry did not exist. Um and so yeah,
Krrupt like knew that these exhibitions, like even if no
one bought his product bringing it there could still be

(39:36):
a success because it would generate interest and that would
generate buzz and that would eventually lead the sales. Now,
by this point in the eighteen fifties, Crupt became a
had become a fairly large and successful steel company. He
had thousands of employees by this point, and what they
made their money on was making cast steele axles and
springs for trains and and train tires like what are

(39:56):
called train tires, which is basically like like the roly
wheels on trains. Like he could make very like the
best steel to make trains possible. All of the early
train tracks in the United States are made with crub steel. Um. Yeah,
like that's that's how he gets rich. Like they're not
making any money off of guns at this point. They're
making guns, but nobody's fucking buying them. Like governments want

(40:18):
trains and ship and that's what they're making their profit
off of UM, and so Alfred's commitment to weaponry was
was kind of weird. UM and his new like he
gets increasingly upset obsessed with it, and for whatever reason,
his kind of growing obsession with guns comes at the
same time that his mom dies and he finds himself single.
See now it's sounding very like edible something some falon like,

(40:42):
you know, some penis thing going on. I don't know,
because he's a weird guy. When it comes to his
relationships with women, you could desperately. Yeah, that's that's why
easy to come on. His money is basically his wife.
Not that he like had sex with her or anything,

(41:02):
but his mom cooked his food and kept his house
clean and made his bed, and he had no desire
for a wife while he had his mom because he
wanted he wanted a mommy wife like that was his
His His priority was having a coming another. Yeah, he
wouldn't have been wild about it. He met the love
of his life after writing into town from a long

(41:23):
work trip and spotting her in the audience at a play.
Her name was Bertha, and she was less than half
his age and not at all interested in him, But
he was in love with her and he was rich,
and that was all that mattered to the people who
got to make decisions on whether or not Bertha got married.
She could barely stand Alfred, and it's kind of hard
to blame her. The man was frightened to stand near
his own breath, and he loved the smell of hoorship.

(41:43):
It was kind of a hard sell falling in love
with Alfred krupp. Uh. His opening quick up, Yeah, definitely quirky.
His opening pickup line to her was where I supposed
I had nothing but a piece of cast steel, I
had a heart, which I guess is kind of sweet. Huh. Yeah,
it's not a terrible opening line for the age. Wouldn't

(42:06):
get me going, but no, but like you know, it
was a different time. Yeah, I mean it, and it
didn't work on her, to be fair, Ye's probably what
he followed that up with. Yeah. Yeah. Now. William Manchester
notes quote, given Alfred's temperament, domestic happiness was impossible. No
one could live with such a man. He could barely
stand himself. The match was doomed, and all that remained

(42:27):
was to define the exact nature of the distress. Yeah,
it's not a good relationship, but oddly enough, Bertha was
the cold one in the couple. Whatever else you can
say about Alfred, he was absolutely in love with his wife,
and he would spend his life obsessed with Bertha. Now,
it was a love that knew nothing about her and
like was absolutely uninterested in actually understanding her needs in

(42:51):
order to please her, because again, he was kind of
incapable of understanding other people in any way, shape or form.
But he was madly in love with her, and she
kind of despised him. It's a bummer. Huh. That sounds
like the perfect relationship to me. Yeah, that's like the
kind of guy I'm looking for. Yes, I don't. I
don't think that you are. I don't think anybody wants

(43:13):
to be with Alfred grow not specifically, but so in
order to woo her after getting married, he constructed a
massive and completely insane house for her, the Garden House,
which was a gigantic, mostly glass building that incorporated incorporated
a number of greenhouses into it, which were meant to
grow beautiful hot house flowers. It also held habitats for peacocks,

(43:37):
grape vines, pineapple groves, all on this giant glass castle
in the middle of Essen, which doesn't sound terrible. So far,
that sounds lovely, um, but there were some weird aspects
of it. Well worse than that, actually, because he built
the garden house directly in the center of his giant
steel factory, and if you've never been in a steel smelter,

(43:58):
they put out an enormous amount sutain pollution, and as
a result, within months, every window of the garden house
was permanently stained brown and caked in filth. All of
the plants died. I have to assume the peacocks did too.
He had basically moved his wife to a glass mansion
in the middle of a smokestack god ideot, and to

(44:18):
make matters worse, the house had one other feature I
haven't mentioned yet. There was a glass crow's nest peeking
out of the top of the roof, so that Alfred
could spy on his workers at all times. So it
was kind of a nightmare. In other words, I'm gonna
quote from the Arms of Crook here. Alfred was installing
heavier and heavier machinery, and the grunt of his steam

(44:39):
hammers rocked the foundations of his home. Bertha couldn't keep
glasses on her sideboard if she put them out after breakfast,
all would be cracked by lunch. Alfred didn't seem to mind.
He was proud of the house and who his wife's annoyance.
He became a homebody. When she complained about the dishes,
an admiring friend jotted down her husband's reply, it's only
a few porcelain plates. I'll make the customers pay for them.
And when she countered with a plea that he take

(45:00):
away for just one evening to a concert, he answered sharply, sorry,
it's impossible. I must see that my smokestacks continue to smoke,
and when I hear my forge tomorrow, that will be
music more exquisite than the playing of all the world's fiddles.
So terrible man to be married to. Yeah, it is
probably not surprising that Bertha left him as soon as
she possibly could. And obviously she couldn't leave him, leave

(45:23):
him like there was no getting divorced as the wife
of a rich woman in the eighteen fifties in the
center of Europe. But she claimed to be sick with exhaustion,
and maybe she might have been a hypochondric, but basically
she she played well enough at being ill um or
she actually got ill because they did live in a
poison box in the middle of a factory that Alfred
just kind of would spend send her off to different

(45:44):
spas and health cares and stuff in various fancy towns.
Like that's what you did if you were rich and sick,
you would go off to some spa to get to heal. Um,
so he sends her. Yeah, it's not wildly different. They
get a private island just to unwind. Yeah, and that's
basically what Bertha spends the rest of her life doing. Um.
She's almost never home, only did for like appearance's sake.

(46:06):
Every now and then Alfred would visit her, but it's
incredibly awkward and she clearly doesn't want him there. Um,
And I mean fair enough horseshit. Yeah, it's not unfair
on her part, but it is very sad because Alfred
never stopped being in love with her. He wrote her
constantly laying out every detail of his life in business
and agonizing, like granular detail, which is why we know

(46:28):
so much about him everything everything. Question, do we know
what she did? She smell like horseship? Like what's my
what's the Like? No, I don't think so, would you
mean like, oh, I got you a new candle, and
it would just be like a horse can. He just
liked having horses all around wherever he lived, so that
they would ship around where he lived and it would
smell like horseship because that was his favorite thing. It's

(46:51):
very strange you're saying things, but I'm still stuck on
the horse ship. It's it's kind of impossible not to
think about because I've never heard of any one having
that particular I mean, it seems like a kink at
this point, right, it's got to be like his biographer
even described it as a fetishistic devotion to poop, like
it's very weird. Um now, uh So, Alfred again wrote

(47:15):
out every detail of his life to his wife, and
these this constant stream of letters, and Bertha clearly did
not care and barely responded. She would occasionally justify her
lack of response by saying she was too exhausted by
her illness to write. Alfred solved this problem for her
by providing her with a series of form letters that
she could just fill in the blanks on in order
to respond to him. And we have these form letters

(47:37):
and they are the cringeest documents I've ever read in
my entire life. Oh my god. Yeah, here's one of
the form letters that he gave his wife. I received
your note of blank and note they're from with parentheses
pleasure dash sorrow, and she could just kind of check
whichever one she was feeling that things are going not well.

(47:58):
As for myself, I am very well, thank goodness, and
yet certainly uh and certainly not yet plump and fat,
but hope this will remain so soon Like these are
all like different fill in blanks and stuff, and then
it continues for like, since my last letter, I've been
for a drive regularly every day through the delightful Tier
Garden and go twice a day for one hour walking
there in the most charmful company, which a king would
give millions to see. And again, this was not what

(48:20):
she had actually done. This is what Alfred had written
out for her to send back to him, because this
is what he assumed she was doing every day. He
was kind of trying to direct her life by having
this letter and the hope that she would do exactly
what he'd written in the letter if she was going
to be sending the letter back to him. It's very straight,
it's very strange. Yeah. The letter ended with I am

(48:41):
longing to be back with my dear husband and hope
above all else that he will be pleased with me. That. Yeah,
he wrote that for her, and then he ended it
with only do not write me too often. That embarrasses
me because I cannot reply yours has ever birtha That
is one of the saddest things I've ever read, old man. Yeah,
that's pathetic. It's really a bummer, Robert. You know what

(49:04):
isn't one of the saddest things you've ever read? The
products and services that support this podcast. Yes, yeah, they
are fully devoted to their husbands, which happened also to
be Alfred Krupp. But thankfully he's been dead for decades,
so more than a century. Really products, all right, we're back, Okay.

(49:28):
So Alfred's cannon business at this point was going no
better than his marriage. By eighteen fifty two, he still
had not received a single contract for his new artillery,
and so Alfred experimented with another revolutionary advertising tactic, the
freeze sample, better known for little plastic cups of snacks
at Sam's Club and we little coffee cups a trader
Joe's crupt did the same thing with field cannons. He

(49:49):
sent the whole cannon for free to the King of
Prussia because he couldn't sell it, and he also had
another one made and sent off to Czar Alexander of Russia. Well,
the King of Prussia couldn't have cared less. The Czar
immediately se to testing the cannon, firing thousands of shots
through it and then example examining the barrel for imperfections.
When he saw it was untouched, the Tsar declared the
cannon a freak of nature and ordered his men to

(50:10):
preserve it in the National Artillery Museum rather than ordering
more or something. Which is a bit of a bummer.
So like he can't catch your break and selling people
killing machines, which really fucks up. Um, starting to feel
bad for this guy. Am I supposed to hate him? Yeah, eventually,
but he is a sad character. Yeah. So there was

(50:31):
clearly no money in guns, but Alfred couldn't stop making guns.
He and his team designed and built a new twelve
pound cannon, and they brought three of these. And when
I say a twelve pound cannon, that's the size of
the weapon at fire of the ball that it fires
is twelve pounds, like the gun is hundreds and hundreds
of pounds um. So they brought three of these gargantuan
weapons to Paris for eighteen fifty five for the Universal Exposition,

(50:53):
which is another one of these big technology expositions. And
again at this point Krup had made a grand total
of zero dollars on cannons. The company made its money
by this point selling revolutionary railway tires for which Krup
had a patent, and by making machine tools. Krup brought
another gigantic steel ingot to this exhibition two, and this
one was so large that it collapsed the floor it
was standing on and nearly killed all the judges because

(51:16):
it's like tens of thousands of pounds. And he won again,
of course his tet one again. Yeah, yeah, well I
almost killed everybody, like that's got like clearly this is
the best piece of metal. It nearly killed us all.
Yet oddly enough, they're not at all interested in the
killing machines that he makes. But of course, as usual,
the press and the actual people who attend the show

(51:37):
are fascinated by his guns, and Alfred had divined devised
like a beautiful way to show them off. A special
display with three steel cannons and six polished steel breastplates.
It was the talk of the exhibition, but after six
months on display only one order came through, twenty six
steel cannons for said Pasha, the Wally of Egypt. And
this is what I was talking about at the beginning.

(51:58):
This is the start of the Germans selling arms to Egypt,
and it continues in twenty Egypt imports more German guns
than any other country. So the starts under Alfred Rupp
and it has not ended since. But selling a few, yeah,
it's it's weird, how how and it's the same company.
It's Krupp in the modern era selling them submarines. It's
crupt selling them cannons in the eighteen fifty two. Uh yeah, yeah, interesting.

(52:23):
But selling a few guns to Egypt was not enough
to make a meaningful amount of money for a company
the size of CRP. As the eighteen fifties drew to
a close, Alfred was still subsidizing his canon habit by
selling train parts. He nearly sold an order of three
hundred twelve pound guns to the Emperor Napoleon the Third,
but the deal fell through because a French family, the
Schneider's had just started a new gun works at the Crusoe.

(52:43):
They lobbied the king to not buy German guns, and
the first salvo would would become an incredibly competitive international
arms market. So yeah, the three big gun companies in
World War One and World War Two are Krupp, Schneider, Crusoe,
and UM Armstrong, which becomes Vickers. And like that's all cut.
Like Krupp is the first of them, Schneider forms next,

(53:03):
and we're about to get to Armstrong. But like, these
are the companies whose arms race is why we have
World War One, because they're all selling guns to each other.
And like, the thing that makes World War One happen
more than almost anything else is there's a provocation. You know,
the archstud gets shot, but that stuff like that had
happened before. The reason that they actually wound up fighting
is that there was this interlocking series of rearming schedules

(53:25):
and everyone was convinced that they were in the best
position as opposed to their rivals, and then if they
waited to have a war in another couple of years,
their rivals would have better guns. So that's like why
the fucking war happens. And this is this is the
start of that process. So Krup's first major international success
came courtesy of Russia. After years of admiring Krup's cannon
in his museum, the z Are finally started buying crupt

(53:47):
guns in bulk. They started buying thousands of these weapons.
And this sets international arms dealers of fire trying to
crop copy Krup steel cannons. And it sets there the
governments of these countries equally on edge out of fear
of falling behind. Alfred designs a breach loading cannon in
the late eighteen fifties, and when he tries to sell
it to the English because his own company didn't want it,
another firm called Armstrong edges him out and promises the

(54:09):
Crown they can make the same gun, but better in English.
And this was this is really the start the first
arms race. Is this like like Alfred starts selling guns
to the Russians. That freaks out the English and the French.
He's trying to sell guns to those governments, but they
build up their own firms and they all start competing
as to who can get the best guns fastest. That
starts now, um, yeah, from the arms of quote, the

(54:30):
arrival of Armstrong completed Europe's deadly triumphranate krupt, Schneider and
Armstrong over the next eighty years, were to be celebrated
first as shields of national honor and later, after their
slaughtering machines were hopelessly out of control, as merchants of death.
So that's pretty cool. But yeah, that's good stuff. And
it all comes from this guy who just like is
obsessed with making cannons and wants people to like his cannons,

(54:53):
and it it leads to the killing fields of World
War One. It's pretty sweet. It's like a real admirable,
Like I could see me in like a classic American movie.
Yeah he is. He's this bootstraps figure, you know, his
dad leaves him in debt and like nobody takes him seriously.
Everybody laughs at his guns, and then his guns wind

(55:14):
up killing people. Yeah, and it's funny. In World War One,
a bunch of the shells that the British were firing
at Germans and killing German boys with um had Krupp
markings on them because they Krupp had the patent on
the type of explosive shell that was most common in
World War One. So all of the foreign countries who

(55:34):
were using like shells with Crupp patented like explosives in
order to kill German kids. Those shells had Krupp written
on them because that was part of the legal contract
they signed. Damn, isn't that fucking cool? I don't know
if that's the word i'd use, but I think it's
fucking sweet. I think it's awesome. I think that's that's

(55:56):
just great because again, you know, people talk about the
deep state, this is an actual example of that kind
of thing. You've got, you know, these different governments. You've
got the French king in the war that we're about
to talk about, You've got the Republic of France and
World War One. You've got you know, the Great Britain,
and you've got you know, the fucking the Imperial Germany

(56:17):
and the Nazi Germany. But behind it all are the
same arms companies run by the same families that are
to this day, in a lot of cases still selling
guns to people. Jesus, it's awesome. It fucking rules. It's
so good. Again, not the word I would use for
but yeah. By eighteen sixty two, Krupp was at kind

(56:39):
of almost the apex of his power, his dominance of
London's eighteen sixty two Grand Exhibition was absolute. Past fairs
had taught him that the mob doated on weapons, and
he played to the gallery. An artist from the Illustrated
London News sketched a group of objects exhibited by Mr
Krupp of Essen, Prussia, and the sketch bristles with objects
of murder. One journalist did find a pair of Royal

(57:00):
road wheels, which have been run nearly seventy four thousand
miles without having been again put into the lathe. But
he was a digger and exception. His colleagues eyes were
riveted on Alfred's artillery, and their speeches and their cheers
were strident. The Morning Post, the Daily News, the News
of the world were enthralled. The Spectator rapturously told of
ladies standing in mute delight, and men dreaming of the
battle music of the future. Even the Times saluted the

(57:23):
almost military discipline which prevails in krupt steelworks at essence,
and concluded, we congratulate Krupp on the pre eminent position
which he occupies. And just like, oh man, I can't
wait for this to kill me. They didn't you know,
it's weird that they didn't. Really a lot of them
didn't seem to be thinking about the fact that, like
their grandchildren would be murdered by the tens of thousands

(57:45):
by the descendants of these machines. And it does say
a lot about human nature that like corrupt also invents
railroad wheels which can go for tens of thousands of
miles without having to be repaired, Like a revolutionary development
that makes international trade possible, That makes it that criss
crosses continents, that like makes so many wonderful things possible. Um,

(58:07):
but nobody cares about that because Krupp brought guns and
like all these women are just like it doesn't go boom, yeah,
men dreaming of the battle music of the future, which
is actually the death sounds of their grandchildren. Like there
were babies born during this that would diet to the
descendants of these guns. It's awesome. It says so many
good things about people. Soon Krupp was selling arms all

(58:28):
around the world. Prussia started buying his guns. Finally, after
he gave some to uh, so he gave it, like
he couldn't sell a big cannon he brought to this exhibition,
so he gives it to the King of Prussia, and
that convinces the King of Prussia to buy his guns again.
It's a good tactic. Um Austria puts and orders his
guns Russia, but brings buys more steel cannons, which inspires
Turkey to start buying steel cannons. It had taken over

(58:50):
a decade, but through a mix of savvy advertising and
ingenious design, Alfred Krupp had succeeded in creating demand for
his inventions. A local Berlin newspaper reported on one particularly
large cannon deal with Russia by giving Alfred the nickname
by which you would come to be known in history,
the canon King. Wow. I mean I call him the
horseship King. He loves himself some horseship he does, he does.

(59:13):
So that's in the end of part one. How you feeling, Allison,
I mean ship, I'm not. I can't get over at
you guys. I don't know if I can be on
part two. Yeah, it's very strange. There's more good horseship
stuff in part two. Yeah, no, no, no, no, lots

(59:35):
more horseship to come. So how we how we doing?
How we feeling Allison? Fine? Good? Good? Yeah? Are you
feeling optimistic about human nature. Uh, you know no, but
I think that's the point, right, Yeah, it's so you're
supposed to feel bad. I'm gonna go feel bad about
the nature of humanity while I cradle uh my nineteen

(59:58):
tin mouser um and enjoy you know the same thing
that all of those people in eighteen sixty two. Can
I have a cannon for for for for for a present, please,
I will do my very best to find you a cannon.
So not one of those shitty brass ones. I YEA
with a good ship guys, the non worship version. Fucking

(01:00:20):
crups stall baby, Alison, Do you have any plugs to
plug by the way, I have my the daunible original
Like Mother, Like Like Mother. It is nothing like what
we've been talking about. It is a mother daughter comedy
starring Ye and Susie Sman and we just argue a

(01:00:43):
lot and it's very Jewish and fun. So yeah, if
you yeah, check that out. No horship involved, There is
no guarantee. Wait now, I'm Mike, wait is there Yeah,
no horseship, but tune in for part two of this episode,

(01:01:03):
in which there will be a tremendous amount of horseship.
So strap in, buckle up, and prepare for the manure
filled conclusion of the life of Alfred Krupp on Thursday.
Yeah h