Summary In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Prussian State supported savants who combined learned inquiry into nature with technical work. Members of the physical and mathematical classes of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences were involved in State projects such as surveying for the construction of canals, chemical analysis of Silesian iron, production of porcelain and of beet sugar. Some of these men were truly ‘hybrid’ experts living both in the worlds of State-directed manufacture and academic natural (...) inquiry. Among these savant experts there was a particular sub-group that is at the centre of this paper: mining officials who were also recognized as mineralogists, geologists and chemists. The paper describes and analyses the training and the varied technical and scientific activities of these ‘savant officials’. At the centre of attention are the travels of inspection of the mineralogist and mining official Carl Abraham Gerhard (1738–1821) in the late 1760s. I argue that Gerhard's travels of inspection were at the same time geological travels and that savant officials like Gerhard made a significant contribution to the fledgling science of geology. (shrink)

After the Seven Years War, the Prussian administration launched a campaign for useful knowledge and scientific education of state officials. This essay scrutinizes efforts undertaken around 1770 by the Central Prussian Administration for Mining and Smelting Works to establish the “mining sciences” and a mining school in the city of Berlin. As a result, from October 1770 on this Administration supported the public teaching in Berlin of mathematics, mechanics, mineralogy, metallurgy, chemistry and other areas of knowledge that constituted the “mining (...) sciences.” In so doing, it promoted the interconnection of scientific and technological knowledge. Contrary to common belief, however, a mining school or academy was not established in eighteenth-century Berlin. (shrink)