Georg Schlesinger (1874-1949)

Georg Schlesinger was born to a Jewish family in Berlin on 17 January 1874. After finishing school, he did a one-year apprenticeship in a mechanics workshop before enrolling in the TH Berlin in 1892. He qualified in mechanical engineering in 1897 with a prize-winning dissertation on control gears for steam engines.

Schlesinger had already started working as a design engineer at the Ludwig Loewe & Co AG machine tool factory in March 1897. In 1902 he became head of the Design Engineering Department at Loewe. Schlesinger paid particular attention to the measuring technology in the workshop, and he created the first functioning limit gauge and fit classification system. He took his doctorate at the TH Berlin in 1904 for his work on a fit classification system for machine tool engineering. In the same year, he was promoted to the new professorial chair of machine tools, manufacturing systems and plant operation at the TH Berlin. From 1906 he established experimental practices in the field of machine tools that became a standard for similar institutes across Germany. Schlesinger's research interests were wide, ranging from design engineering to machine tools and to the integration of human labour into the production process and to factory organisation. He advised many companies on the organisation of new facilities and on restructuring existing production systems.

During World War I Schlesinger was director of the Royal Gun Factory in Spandau and he was central to the foundation of a test centre for artificial body parts. The centre developed new prostheses suited to the occupational rehabilitation of wounded soldiers. After World War I, Schlesinger's department was behind pioneering work in the areas of scientific plant management and rationalised production techniques. In 1924 he travelled in the USA to study developments in machine tool engineering and in the car industry. He highlighted in numerous lectures and publications the possibilities that American production processes offered. These ideas found expression in his work as an advisor to industry. In 1918 Schlesinger founded a working group on industrial psychology, out of which grew an independent institute in 1922. The goal of the discipline was to harness the knowledge gained through experimental psychology in order to optimize the industrial process.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Schlesinger had to give up his professorship because of his Jewish background. In April of that year, unsubstantiated accusations of spying were levelled against him and he was arrested and detained for seven months. In March 1934 he emigrated to Switzerland, where he worked as a visiting lecturer at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich. In November 1934 he moved to Brussels, where he worked as an industrial consultant and as a teacher at the Université Libre. In 1939 Schlesinger emigrated to Great Britain. There he set up a research laboratory devoted to manufacturing engineering in Loughborough, where he remained director until 1944. On the morning of the day he died, 6 October 1949, he completed the manuscript for his final work, "The Measurement of Surface Quality".

Source: Günter Spur, Wolfram Fischer (ed.): Georg Schlesinger und die Wissenschaft vom Fabrikbetrieb. Munich; Vienna: Carl Hanser 2000

[J. Z.]