So much mystery has been made of the achievements of German chemists--as
though the Teutonic brain had a special lobe for that faculty, lacking
in other craniums--that I want to quote what Dr. Hesse says about his
first impressions of a German laboratory of industrial research:

Directly after graduating from the University of Chicago in
1896, I entered the employ of the largest coal-tar dye works in
the world at its plant in Germany and indeed in one of its
research laboratories. This was my first trip outside the
United States and it was, of course, an event of the first
magnitude for me to be in Europe, and, as a chemist, to be in
Germany, in a German coal-tar dye plant, and to cap it all in
its research laboratory--a real _sanctum sanctorum_ for
chemists. In a short time the daily routine wore the novelty
off my experience and I then settled down to calm analysis and
dispassionate appraisal of my surroundings and to compare what
was actually before and around me with my expectations. I
found that the general laboratory equipment was no better than
what I had been accustomed to; that my colleagues had no better
fundamental training than I had enjoyed nor any better fact--or
manipulative--equipment than I; that those in charge of the
work had no better general intellectual equipment nor any more
native ability than had my instructors; in short, there was
nothing new about it all, nothing that we did not have back
home, nothing--except the specific problems that were engaging
their attention, and the special opportunities of attacking
them. Those problems were of no higher order of complexity than
those I had been accustomed to for years, in fact, most of them
were not very complex from a purely intellectual viewpoint.