Empire Rise: Spain

Chapter 62: Spanish Royal Academy

As the King of Spain, Carlo couldn’t just sit idle forever.

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

The Second Industrial Revolution boiled down to the electrical era, with its main hallmark being the discovery and widespread use of electricity.

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

In any case, Spain could not miss out on the Second Industrial Revolution.

But there was currently one problem: the awkward timing they were in.

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

The remaining scientists had mostly already achieved certain results, and pulling them from abroad to Spain was not that easy.

After carefully pondering in his mind for a long time, Carlo could only temporarily think of two names.

One was the famous German scientist and entrepreneur who single-handedly founded Mercedes-Benz, Carl Benz, and the other was the Belgian-born French physicist who truly developed generators suitable for industrial production, Gramme. If generators were mentioned, the familiar names were Faraday and Henry. But these people were more like pioneers; they proposed theories and created experimental devices but did not truly manufacture generators practical for industrial use.

Gramme achieved this. The electric power industry was built on the two DC and AC generators that Gramme developed, which was also why Carlo remembered his name.

With rough names and nationalities in hand, investigating these two became much easier.

Carlo summoned the Director of the Royal Security Intelligence Bureau, Cadillac Bruno, and ordered him to dispatch personnel to France and Germany to investigate the current situations of Gramme and Carl Benz, and to invite them to Spain for employment if possible.

After receiving Carlo’s order, Cadillac Bruno did not dare to be the least bit negligent and immediately organized personnel overnight to go to Germany and France for the investigation.

The investigation was very difficult. Although they knew that Gramme and Benz were respectively in France and Germany, engaged in work related to electricity and mechanical manufacturing.

But finding a researcher who had not yet achieved great success in the vast France and Germany was like finding a needle in a haystack; it required some luck.

Considering that precisely finding one person among several million targets was very difficult, Carlo also assigned an additional task to Cadillac Bruno.

If they truly could not find Gramme and Benz, they could also screen talents in electricity and mechanical manufacturing from Germany and France, and recruit them to Spain as much as possible.

To attract these talents, Carlo was full of sincerity. The Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences was the institution Carlo prepared for these talents.

As an institution specifically for scientific research, Carlo would donate a portion of research and development funds to the Royal Academy of Sciences each year. As long as scientists joined the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences, they could apply for research funds for their own research.

In addition, all scientists joining the Royal Academy of Sciences could join Spanish nationality without approval and obtain a property in the capital Madrid for free.

Scientists of the Royal Academy of Sciences could also choose to take part-time positions at Spanish universities, with additional part-time income.

If they achieved major scientific research results at the Royal Academy of Sciences, they could also receive nobility title rewards and a large amount of research and development funds, with a very promising future.

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

Looking across the whole of Europe, there were countless scientists engaged in research in physics and chemistry. But before they truly gained fame from scientific research results, they rarely had opportunities for external funding.

Even many world-renowned scientists in posterity were destitute in the first half of their lives, because their research required long periods of time and massive investments in trial and error, and their personal wealth was insufficient to support these studies.

Carlo did not expect the Royal Academy of Sciences to attract many top talents. As long as it could attract some scientists of decent level, it would already meet Carlo’s expectations.

After all, at this time, Spain lagged far behind other European countries in talents in physics and chemistry.

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

Spain’s land area was no less inferior to that of the UK, France, and Germany（ Spanish Mainland）, but the reason for so few Nobel Prize winners was precisely because Spaniards enlightened too late.

Discovering the New World led Spain into a life of extravagance and squandering, with gold, silver, and wealth shipped from America all used for the nobles’ and church’s extravagance.

Nobles’ palaces and castles, and the church’s cathedrals looked resplendent, but Spain’s national strength declined day by day.

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

Spain was still strengthening monarchical and ecclesiastical rule, keeping the public in ignorance, attempting to consolidate the kingdom government rife with extravagance.

Clearly the world’s first empire on which the sun never sets, clearly earning massive wealth from America, clearly still possessing colonies like Cuba that continuously generated income, yet the Spanish Government’s illiteracy rate was almost the same as that of the newly unified Italy.

The reason Italy’s illiteracy rate remained high was still because the farmers of Southern Italy dragged down the average. If only Northern Italy originally ruled by the Kingdom of Sardinia was considered, Italy’s education situation crushed Spain’s.

This was also why both Primó and Carlo placed great emphasis on education, because Spain truly lacked talent.

Moreover, with its inherently small population, if it did not actively absorb talent from abroad, Spain would never be able to keep up with other European countries in technological revolutions.

In creating the Royal Academy of Sciences, besides wanting to attract excellent foreign scientists to Spain, Carlo had another purpose: to have these excellent scientists teach at Spanish universities, thereby cultivating more excellent talents in physics and chemistry for Spain.

Absorbing talent from abroad could only address the surface of Spain’s talent shortage; to truly cure the problem of talent shortcomings, it had to start with cultivating native Spanish talent.

First update, seeking support!