Page - 49 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

49The Making of a Jesuit Astronomer in the Habsburg Provinces of Trenčín returned Banská Štiavnica to Habsburg hands, and in 1710 the Impe- rial Court Chamber ordered the closure of the mines once again. But Höll ob- tained an audience with Joseph i (1678–1711, r.1705–11), and pleaded with the emperor so successfully that he secured funds for the development of another lake and the construction of a new water pump.34 Within a generation—quite literally, as Höll senior’s position was later filled by his son Joseph Karl35—Höll’s perseverance was crowned with significant success. While elsewhere in the region engineers had already experimented with primitive and high wood consumption steam engines (called “fire en- gines”), the Hölls insisted on further improving the technology based on water. Several new lakes were constructed for power supply, and Joseph Karl replaced traditional water mills with real hydraulic machines. Inundations were at least temporarily contained, and as a result, from the late 1730s the mines of Banská Štiavnica witnessed a new golden age that lasted until the end of the eigh- teenth century. In 1740 alone, 2,429 marks of gold and 92,267 marks of silver were produced, and the income from the mines over the following two de- cades was a staggering forty-two million florins; the population of the town around 1750 is estimated at about twenty thousand (six thousand of them working in the mining industry), making it the second largest in northern Hun- gary, surpassed in the area only by Bratislava.36 Prosperity and success also stimulated an innovative and “curious” spirit: after long-standing traditions of training qualified staff in the region by guild-like methods, it is no coincidence that in 1735 Banská Štiavnica became the seat of a proper mining school (Mon- tanistiche Schule),37 established by order of the Imperial Court Chamber. 34 Kachelmann, Das Alter und die Schicksal, 191–92. 35 Many of the cunning devices in place in Banská Štiavnica around 1770 are attributed to Joseph Karl, not his father, in Nikolaus Poda, Kurzgefaßte Beschreibung der, bey dem Berg- bau zu Schemnitz in Nieder-Hungarn, errichteten Maschinen (Prague: Walther, 1771), 51, 54, 57, 61, 66, 70, 74. 36 Figures are taken from Jozef Vlachovič, “Banská Štiavnica—prostredie, v ktorom vyrastal Maximilián Hell/Banská Štiavnica—das Milieu, in dem Maximilián Hell herangewachsen war,” in Novák, Maximilián Hell, 31–42. 37 The sketch on the development of the school below is based chiefly on Tar and Zsámbék, Selmectől Miskolcig, especially 13–17, 31–36, 45–52, 65–66, 90–100. The same volume also includes several sources (in Hungarian translation). On the school in the overall context of academic life in eighteenth-century northern Hungary, see Ján Tibenský, “Pokusy o or- ganizovanie vedeckého života v Habsburskej Ríši a na Slovensku v 18. storoči/Versuche zur Organisierung des wissenschaftlichen Lebens im Habsburgerreich und in der Slowakei in 18. Jahrhundert,” in Novák, Maximilián Hell, 3–25. See also Peter Konečný, “Die montanistische Ausbildung in der Habsburgermonarchie, 1763–1848,” in Staat, Bergbau und Bergakademie: Montanexperten im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Hartmut Schleiff and Peter Konečný (Stuttgart: Felix Steiner Verlag, 2013), 95–124; Peter Konečný, 250.