When did Europe miss the technology train?

Europe suffers from a technological lag. This seems indisputable. But when did it miss the boat? In reality, not so long ago. In the mid-20th century, it was still at the forefront, and in certain sectors, it maintained advantageous positions almost until the dawn of the 21st century. Then it collapsed.

When the IG Farben conglomerate was formed, in 1925, the German chemical and pharmaceutical industry had no rival in the world. Neither did the arms industry: rockets like the V-1 and V-2, which the Third Reich used against the United Kingdom during World War II, caused astonishment. Nazism even projected intercontinental-range bombers and missiles to launch attacks against the United States.

That cycle ended with the Nazi defeat. IG Farben, which had distinguished itself as a pillar of Hitler's regime (it developed Zyklon B gas for the extermination camps, used slave labor, and had its own concentration camp), was dismembered by the Allies, and the various units that had formed the conglomerate (Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Agfa, etc.) became independent again.

As for the rockets, the main German engineers (like Wernher von Braun) were recruited by the United States, which, thanks to them, initiated its space program.

But it wasn't just Germany. In the 1950s, the United Kingdom embarked on a revolutionary project: a commercial supersonic aircraft. The necessary investment was excessive for a country burdened by war debts, and France joined the venture. Between the British Bristol Aeroplane Company and the French Sud Aviation, they developed the Concorde, an aircraft capable of flying at 2,000 kilometers per hour (almost twice the speed of sound). The first prototype took off successfully in 1969.

As proof of the Concorde's technological prowess, the parallel project of the Soviet Union (which in the early 60s had an advantage over the United States in the space race) turned out to be a fiasco: the Tupolev Tu-144 required so much fuel that it was not viable.

Nor was the Concorde itself very much so. It consumed a lot, was extremely noisy (several countries banned it because of the thunder it made) and the 90 passengers traveled quite uncomfortably. But the flight from London to New York lasted just over three hours. And, ultimately, European industry demonstrated its ability to keep pace with the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The legacy of all that was the European consortium Airbus.

The Concordes stopped flying in 2003, three years after one of the aircraft crashed near Paris. 113 people died. It was the first Concorde accident, and the last.

In 1966, France embarked on a revolutionary initiative for European railways on its own. Japan had created the bullet train, the Shinkansen, two years earlier. In 1974, the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer (SNCF) and Alstom had the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse, or high-speed train) ready, powered by gas turbines. By then, however, the first major oil crisis had broken out. French engineers rounded off the feat by converting the locomotives to electric power.

Another small French marvel was the Minitel, commercially launched in 1982: we are talking about what most resembled the internet when the internet did not yet exist. It was a small terminal that gathered all the information from users of the then-monopolistic PTT: you could chat, shop, make reservations...

Also in 1982, the Finnish company Nokia manufactured the world's first mobile telephony model. Its technological advantage allowed Nokia to be the leading company in the sector for many years. Between 1998 and 2011, no one sold as many phones as Nokia.

However, just as the advent of the internet in the 90s doomed the Minitel, the appearance of the iPhone (2007) ended Nokia's supremacy.

Europe barely participated in the personal computer business and was left out of a fundamental invention: the microprocessor, which from the 70s onwards ended vacuum tubes and transistors and in the 90s became the key to contemporary technology. While the European Union remained absorbed in the Maastricht agreements (monetary union, single market) and its eastward expansion, the world took a turn.

And Europe definitively fell off the train.