Laivanrakennusinsinöörit ja telakkateollisuuden suuri murros

Laivasto, sotakorvaukset ja idänkauppa suomalaisen laivanrakennusteollisuuden insinöörikoulutuksen kehityksessä 1920-1955

Authors

• Aaro Sahari

Abstract

Shipbuilding engineers and the great transformation: the navy, war reparations, and Soviet trade in Finnish shipbuilding engineer training, 1920-1955 Finnish shipbuilding expanded rapidlyafter the Second World War due to a massive war reparations program to USSR, which in turn was followed by a decades long bilateral trade relationship. The industry had been of limited scope before and the first permanent professorship at the Helsinki University of Technology had been filled only in 1941 by Jaakko Rahola. He had to boost education efforts as the director of the reparations’ shipbuilding and the sole professor in the subject, while also providing new insight into ship and marine engine design as diesel replaced steam and marine traffic expanded. This article delves the employment of shipbuilding engineers and maritime architects in Finland through a combination of digital history quantitative methods and qualitative historical research. The key source materials consist of Aalto University engineering master’s thesis database INSSI and engineering association matriculation data. It is argued that close ties between government officials and the university preceded the 1940s and that Rahola belonged to a select group interwar military-industrial engineers, who managed to get employed by the state during a naval new-build program, 1918–1939. Rich details on the development of the profession is included with statistical data and reflections on the usability of such data in the study of development of the engineering profession.