Chapter 62: Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences

As the King of Spain, Yu Kaluo could not remain idle forever.

After much thought, Yu Kaluo decided to build up his own talent pool to lay a solid foundation for the Second Industrial Revolution.

The Second Industrial Revolution, to put it simply, was the Electrical Age, primarily marked by the discovery and widespread use of electricity.

Germany and the United States were both driving forces of the Second Industrial Revolution, which is also why their national strength rose rapidly after electrification, allowing them to overtake the United Kingdom, the driving force of the First Industrial Revolution.

In any case, Spain could not afford to miss the Second Industrial Revolution.

However, there was one problem: the awkward timing of the current era.

Most famous scientists had either not yet been born or were still in school, so they were naturally outside the scope of those Yu Kaluo wanted to recruit.

Most of the remaining scientists already had some achievements, and it would not be so easy to lure them from abroad to Spain.

After carefully searching his mind for a long time, Yu Kaluo could only think of two names for the moment.

One was the famous German scientist and entrepreneur Karl Benz, who founded the Mercedes-Benz automobile company; the other was the Belgian-born French physicist Zénobe Gramme, who truly realized power generation equipment that could be used for industrial production.

If one mentioned generators, the familiar names would be Faraday and Henry. But these men were more like pioneers; they were the proposers of theories and the makers of experimental devices, and they did not truly manufacture generators that were practical for industrial use.

And Gramme achieved exactly that. The electric power industry was built upon the two DC and AC generators developed by Gramme, which is why Yu Kaluo could remember his name.

With the general names and countries, investigating these two became much easier.

Yu Kaluo summoned the Director of the Royal Security Intelligence Agency, Kadier Buluonuo, and ordered him to send personnel to France and Germany to investigate the current status of Gramme and Karl Benz, and to invite them to serve in Spain if possible.

Upon receiving Yu Kaluo's order, Kadier Buluonuo did not dare to be the slightest bit careless, and worked through the night to organize personnel to head to Germany and France for the investigation.

The difficulty of the investigation was immense. Although it was known that Gramme and Benz were in France and Germany respectively, and were engaged in work related to electricity and mechanical manufacturing.

But searching for a researcher who had not yet achieved much in the vast countries of France and Germany was no different from looking for a needle in a haystack; finding them would require some luck.

Considering that it was very difficult to precisely locate one person among tens of millions of targets, Yu Kaluo also gave Kadier Buluonuo additional tasks.

If it was truly impossible to find Gramme and Benz, they could also screen for talent in the fields of electricity and mechanical manufacturing in Germany and France, and lure them to Spain as much as possible.

In order to attract such talent, Yu Kaluo was full of sincerity. The Royal Academy of Sciences was the institution Yu Kaluo had prepared for these talents.

As an institution dedicated to scientific research, Yu Kaluo would donate a portion of research funds to the Royal Academy of Sciences every year. As long as they joined the Royal Academy of Sciences, scientists could apply for research funding for their own studies.

In addition, all scientists who joined the Royal Academy of Sciences could obtain Spanish citizenship without approval and receive a free property located in the capital, Ma Deli.

Scientists at the Royal Academy of Sciences could also choose to work part-time at Spanish universities, and would also have additional part-time income.

If they achieved major scientific results at the Royal Academy of Sciences, they could also be rewarded with titles and large amounts of research and development funding, which could be described as having a bright future.

Such conditions might not attract those scientists who were already valued by their respective governments, but for those scientists who were destitute and supporting their research with their own personal wealth, it might be a good choice.

Looking across Europe, there were countless scientists devoted to research in physics and chemistry. But before they truly achieved fame through scientific results, they rarely had the opportunity to receive external funding.

Even many famous scientists of later generations were destitute in the first half of their lives, because their scientific research required a long time and a large amount of investment for trial and error, and their own personal wealth was not enough to support these studies.

Yu Kaluo did not count on the Royal Academy of Sciences to attract many top-tier talents. As long as it could attract a portion of scientists with decent levels of ability, it would already satisfy Yu Kaluo's expectations.

After all, at this time, Spain's talent in physics and chemistry lagged behind other European countries by more than just a little bit.

Even in later generations, when the number of Nobel Prize winners in the UK, Germany, and France reached dozens or even hundreds, the number of Spanish winners was a pitiful 8, of which 6 were in literature and only 2 in medicine.

Spain's land area was not inferior to the UK, France, or Germany (the mainland), but the reason for so few Nobel Prize winners was precisely because the Spanish people's minds were enlightened too late.

The discovery of the New World allowed Spain to enter a life of luxury and extravagance from then on, and the gold and treasures shipped from the Americas were all used for the ostentatious waste of the nobility and the church.

The palaces and castles of the nobility and the churches of the clergy looked magnificent, but the rise of Spain's national strength was worsening day by day.

During the Italian Renaissance, the French Enlightenment, and the British Industrial Revolution, what was Spain doing?

Spain was still strengthening the rule of the monarchy and the church, and keeping the public ignorant, attempting to consolidate a kingdom government rife with luxury.

Clearly the world's first empire on which the sun never set, clearly having earned a large amount of wealth from the Americas, and clearly still possessing colonies like Cuba that constantly generated income, the illiteracy rate of the Spanish government was actually about the same as that of the newly unified Italy.

The reason for Italy's high illiteracy rate was that the peasants of Southern Italy pulled down the average. If only the Northern Italy originally ruled by the Kingdom of Sardinia were counted, Italy's educational situation would crush Spain's.

This was also the reason why Primo and Yu Kaluo attached great importance to education, because Spain was truly lacking in talent.

Coupled with the fact that the population itself was not large, if they did not actively absorb talent from abroad, Spain would never be able to keep up with the pace of other European countries in the technological revolution.

Besides wanting to absorb excellent foreign scientists to come to Spain, another purpose for Yu Kaluo creating the Royal Academy of Sciences was to have these excellent scientists enter Spanish universities to teach, thereby cultivating more excellent talent in physics and chemistry for Spain.

Absorbing talent from abroad could only solve the surface of Spain's lack of talent; to truly cure the problem of insufficient talent, one had to start from cultivating local Spanish talent.

First update, asking for support!





(End of this chapter)