Seite - 103 - in Nikola Tesla and the Graz Tech

103 Johann recognised how much technology and education depended on each other. He saw that the upheaval of the technological foundations and the ex- pansion of trade placed completely new demands on the people involved in the production and circulation process, both entrepreneurs and workers. As long as technical inventions could not be put into practice due to a lack of knowledge or because trade connections were not used or the entrepreneur concerned could not conduct the necessary ‘correspondence’, successful ac- tion was not possible. The development of a corresponding educational infrastructure was there- fore a basic condition for the capitalist mode of production. In order to remedy the shortcomings in this area, the trade association organised easy-to-under- stand lectures on science and set up so-called drawing institutes in Graz, Kla- genfurt and Ljubljana for further training, where the most important technical books and journals were published in its own libraries. In 1832 a trade exhibition took place in Graz and the industrial exhibition of 1841 had a stimulating effect on the economic development of the city. The decisive growth spurt, however, was only to begin in the aftermath of the revolution of 1848. Although Graz was not a ‘factory town in the Biedermeier period, like Brno, the city of Steyr and others’, according to Gustav Schreiner, the city never- theless possessed ‘some major trades which belong to the more excellent of the monarchy’. There was the ‘optical, geometric and physical’ machine factory of the Ros- pini brothers in Bürgergasse. Here, physical and meteorological observations were carried out from a tower. There was the Jäckle large clock factory which would export to America and other companies. The first factory in the modern sense of the word was the sugar refinery in Geidorf, which was founded in 1825 with capital from the Jewish Viennese bank Arnstein & Eskeles. With 110 workers, it was the biggest factory of its kind in Austria. It contained the first ever steam engines in Styria, which still had to be imported.