Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean on board an American frigate

by Nathaniel Parker Willis

It was the hungry hour of two, and I was still musing on the emperor’s dinner, and admiring the anxious interest his servants took in their disposition of the baskets, when a blast of military music came to my ear. It was from the barracks of the imperial guard, and I stepped under the arch, and listened to them an hour. How gloriously they played! It was probably the finest band in Austria. I have heard much good music, but of its kind, this was like a new sensation to me. They stand, in playing, just under the window at which the emperor appears daily when in the city.

I have been indebted to Mr. Schwartz, the American consul at Vienna, for a very unusual degree of kindness. Among other polite attentions, he procured for me to-day an admission to the Polytechnic School—a favour granted with difficulty, except on the appointed days for public visits.

The Polytechnic School was established in 1816, by the present emperor. The building stands outside the rampart of the city, of elegant proportions, and about as large as all the buildings of Yale or Harvard College thrown into one. Its object is to promote instruction in the practical sciences, or, in other words, to give a practical education for the trades, commerce, or manufactures. It is divided into three departments. The first is preparatory, and the course occupies two years. The studies are religion and morals, elementary mathematics, natural history, geography, universal history, grammar, and “the German style,” declamation, drawing, writing, and the French, Italian, and Bohemian languages. To enter this class, the boy must be thirteen years of age, and pays fifty cents per month.

The second course is commercial, and occupies one year. The studies are mercantile correspondence, commercial law, mercantile arithmetic, the keeping of books, geography and history, as they relate to commerce, acquaintance with merchandise, &c. &c.

The third course lasts one year. The studies are chemistry as applicable to arts, and trades, the fermentation of woods, tannery, soap-making, dying, blanching, &c. &c.; also mechanism, practical geometry, civil architecture, hydraulics, and technology. The two last courses are given gratis.

The whole is under the direction of a principal, who has under him thirty professors and two or three guardians of apparatus.

We were taken first into a noble hall, lined with glass cases containing specimens of every article manufactured in the German dominions. From the finest silks, down to shoes, wigs, nails, and mechanics’ tools, here were all the products of human labour. The variety was astonishing. Within the limits of a single room, the pupil is here made acquainted with every mechanic art known in his country.

The next hall was devoted to models. Here was every kind of bridge, fortification, lighthouse, dry dock, breakwater, canal-lock, &c. &c.; models of steamboats, of ships, and of churches, in every style of architecture. It was a little world.

We went thence to the chemical apartment. The servitor here, a man without education, has constructed all the apparatus. He is an old grey-headed man, of a keen German countenance, and great simplicity of manners. He takes great pride in having constructed the largest and most complete chemical apparatus—now in London. The one which he exhibited to us occupies the whole of an immense hall, and produces an electric discharge like the report of a pistol. The ordinary batteries in our universities are scarce a twentieth part as powerful.

After showing us a variety of experiments, the old man turned suddenly and asked us if we knew the geometrical figures described by the vibrations of musical notes. We confessed our ignorance, and he produced a pane of glass covered with black sand. He then took a fiddle bow, and holding the glass horizontally, drew it downward against the edge at a peculiar angle. The sand flew as if it had been bewitched, and took the shape of a perfect square. He asked us to name a figure. We named a circle. Another careful draw of the bow, and the sand flew into a circle, with scarce a particle out of its perfect curve. Twenty times he repeated the experiment, and with the most complicated figures drawn on paper. He had reduced it to an art. It would have hung him for a magician a century ago.