The Project is off to Munich, Germany. We have a fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and we’re pretty excited about it. The RCC is a great place, littered with interesting environmental historians, geographers, anthropologists. It’s hard to get to the coffee machine and back without stumbling over somebody that you want to talk to.
And while you might think that we’ve left our interest in rosefish at home in the Pacific Northwest, nothing could be further from the truth. And that’s because one of the very first fishery on rosefish was by German fishermen in the 1930s.
Central to the development of the fishery was the development of fish processing machines. The undisputed leader in the field was the company founded by Rudolph Baader in 1919. He founded the Research Institute for Fishing in Lubeck in 1920, the forerunner of the current Federal Research Institute for Fisheries.
In 1922, he caused a stir with the introduction of the first herring decapitation and boning machine. It revolutionized fish processing. The company followed with the first fish skinning machine in 1928, and a machine in 1933 that was the basis for modern fish filleting machinery.
The picture is of the Baader 99, introduced in 1951. I’ll be chasing more information about German fish processing technology this summer, as part of the story of the industrialization of fishing after World War II.
