Inventions Have Their Day

How should we understand Rudolf Steiner’s statements about technology? In search of the power of invention.

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Rudolf Steiner was very interested in the inventions of his time. When he noticed a zipper on Willem Zeylmans van Emmichoven’s tobacco pouch, he said: “What a pity that one of us didn’t invent that.”¹ In his Mystery Dramas, he sometimes mentions contemporary developments in inconspicuous places. For example, the engineer Dr. Strader oversees a factory where screws are “thread rolled.” Although this process had already been patented in Glasgow in 1851,² it was not used in Europe until around 1920 because the steel required for industrial screw rolling wasn’t available yet. Did Rudolf Steiner ingeniously incorporate his own invention here, or did he hear about this process through his connections in industrial circles?³

Regardless, the mechanism that Dr. Strader develops in The Guardian of the Threshold is highly ingenious. How does Strader come up with his mechanism?

But then, amazingly, as if by ‘chance,’
Engaged in work completely unrelated.
The thoughts poured out of me that showed the way
At last to solve this question.⁴

The search for something and instead finding something else entirely (sometimes called “serendipity”⁵) has been the starting point for many inventions and discoveries.⁶ It’s one way spiritual guidance intervenes in human affairs.

Although Strader doesn’t explain how his mechanism works, he does describe its purpose:

The forces of technology will so
Be shared with everyone that all
A person needs to carry out their work
May comfortably be theirs to use, in their
Own homes, and fashioned just as they determine.⁷

Is this merely an anticipation of today’s home office, or is Rudolf Steiner inaugurating a technology that stands in contrast to our current digital-electronic developments? The fact that this is not just a prop for a performance was demonstrated by Oskar Schmiedel,⁸ who reported that Rudolf Steiner expected this invention to actually be created one day.

Ultimately, Strader fails in the translation from prototype to product. This shows that Rudolf Steiner understood the challenges facing the world of industry. The translation from design to product is not simply a matter of replication but usually requires working out several unexpected details. In the Mystery Dramas, the spiritual teacher Benedictus gives another interesting reason:

I saw you closely joined to types of beings,
Which, if they were creatively involved,
Already now, in human life,
Would bring about evil.
They live, though, in some souls, a seed-like life,
Which will, in future, ripen for the Earth.⁹

Inventions have their day. If they come too early, they may cut off certain necessary developments. This probably explains why inventions often occur simultaneously in different parts of the world.

The idea of “the Strader machine” became the germinal point for a number of initiatives that wanted to actually build this technology. All these initiatives faced the same question: How does it work? This is almost always the fundamental problem with Rudolf Steiner’s inventions or “indications”. We have the answer, but we don’t know the question.

Searching through Implementation

In my professional work at the Association for Cancer Research [Verein für Krebsforschung] in Arlesheim, I’ve been working on this challenge for over three decades. Rudolf Steiner gave indications for a special mixing machine to be used in the production of mistletoe preparations for cancer treatment. From out of the few passages where he discusses the effect of this mixing machine,¹⁰ I’ve selected those for which a reliable transcript exists:

“If we take what is now at work in the activity of mistletoe and introduce it directly into the human being, it changes again . . . too much. And so, an attempt is now being made to process what lives in the activity of mistletoe with a highly complicated machine that uses a centrifugal force, creating a centrifugal and a radial force at an enormously high speed. The construction was not easy. So that what is effective in the activity of mistletoe is transformed through a completely different process of aggregation, allowing us to use the mistletoe-forming force in an even more concentrated way than occurs naturally, since the activity within the mistletoe has become decadent today.”¹¹

In discussions with doctors in the Glashaus next to the Goetheanum, he returns to this mixing machine when responding to a question:

“The essential thing to understand is that the use of mistletoe sap depends on the enhancement that we must apply to it, that we don’t just use a simple form of [unprocessed] Viscum, but that we need a device to enhance it. First, we bring the mistletoe sap into a vertical movement and then we let this movement pass through a horizontally rotating movement. The aim is to make it so that the mistletoe sap drips and then that this dripping is crossed through in such a way that it again joins with the mistletoe sap that is going in the horizontal rotation; then a special structure is created down to the smallest [dilution] cycles. Here is where the actual healing power of the Viscum arises. Certainly, it is already an effective remedy in itself, but it only becomes the absolutely specialized medicament through this complicated process.”¹²

There are further accounts, including one from an engineers’ meeting where the diameter (1 m) and speed (10,000 rpm) of the plate were specified. Rudolf Steiner speaks of an “enormous speed.” With these specifications, the edge moves at one and a half times the speed of sound (approx. 500 m/s). Normal metal plates explode under these forces. It was not until the mid-1960s that it was possible to manufacture titanium plates capable of withstanding these forces. To circumvent the problems caused by breaking the sound barrier (at speeds above 300 m/s, there is a sonic boom in the air, which additionally heats the air), the plate runs in a helium atmosphere (where the speed of sound is much higher, 1000 m/s). In Arlesheim in the early 1970s, we achieved the speeds indicated with a titanium plate. Unfortunately, the leap in the effectiveness of the medicaments was quite small compared with our expectations (to completely replace the need for surgery.) Some patients recovered, some learned to live with their cancer, but many still died. Like the Strader machine, we also have only the answer to a question we don’t specifically know yet: “Herr Doctor, how did you come up with that?”

Searching in Spirit

Simply replicating the specifications and adding needed dimensions left unspecified by Rudolf Steiner did not lead to the desired result. We had to try to clarify the question: What effect did Rudolf Steiner want to achieve with the mistletoe? Did he want to invent an optimized emulsification process? During these years, the Ultra-Turrax was invented [in the 1950s], a knife with a diameter of only 1 cm that ran at similarly high speeds and was used for high-shear emulsification (it’s still in use today for homogenization processes). This inspired further ideas in Arlesheim and other initiatives that had their own solutions for mixing based on the same information from Rudolf Steiner. However, the greatest obstacle to the research was proving the effectiveness of any of the changes we were making in the processing—partly because the effects varied dramatically from patient to patient, but especially because the ever-increasing regulation by the authorities made changes in processing impossible. Other initiatives discontinued their research.

In Arlesheim, we decided to ponder the spiritual question: Can we develop ourselves in such a way that we would be able to trace the effects of the mixing process (“other aggregation processes”) spiritually? We discovered that some procedures commonly used in conventional research did not work here (for instance, the replication of experiments for specific questions) and that we had to engage more in a dialogue with the beings accompanying the healing process. We still wanted to meet scientific standards, though, since we didn’t want to just project our own preferences and aspirations onto the processes, to perform a soliloquy, so to speak, but rather to really enter into a conversation.

The Strader apparatus has undergone a similar development. Here, too, researchers initially just started building; then all kinds of ideas were brought up, determining why it had to be exactly one way and couldn’t be another way. But today, similar to our research, spiritual approaches are now being pursued that require inner training of the researchers themselves.¹³

I’ve described here two examples that show how Rudolf Steiner’s statements, his “inventions,” pose challenges to those who take them up and try to work them out. This equally applies to his statements in the fields of agriculture, medicine, and education, to name just a few of the many areas where he inspired innovation.

There’s also, for example, the collection of a variety of scientific data, compiled during Rudolf Steiner’s lifetime in the Stuttgart laboratories, that didn’t yield any significant results at the time, but is certainly still worthy of investigation today.¹⁴

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Translation Joshua Kelberman

1. Emanuel Zeylmans, Willem Zeylmans Van Emmichoven, an inspiration for Anthroposophy. A biography (Forest Row, East Sussex: Temple Lodge, 2002).
2. Science Museum Group. “Thread Rolling Machine, Glasgow, 1855–1860,” in Science Museum Group Collection Online. 1860–54. Accessed May 18, 2025.
3. Oral communication from Angelika Wiehl, granddaughter of Rudolf Steiner’s friend, the industrialist van Lehr from Vienna.
4. Rudolf Steiner, The Guardian of the Threshold in Four Modern Mystery Dramas, translated by Richard Ramsbotham (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2023), scene 1, p. 284.
5. “Serendipity” refers to the accidental observation of something not originally sought after, but which turns out to be a new and surprising discovery. (Wikipedia, s.v. “Serendipity,” last modified May 17, 2025). In other words, you look for a needle in a haystack and find the farmer’s daughter.
6. Inventions differ from discoveries in that they are patentable, because inventions are the first practical realization of an idea, whereas discoveries are the realization of something previously unknown (but already existing).
7. See footnote 4, The Souls Awakens, pp. 443.
8. See Oskar Schmiedel, “Kurzbericht und Skizzen” [Short Report and Sketch] in Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe [Contributions to Rudolf Steiner’s Collected Works], no. 187 (Michaelmas 1991), pp. 5–8.
9. See footnote 4, scene 4.
10. Hartmut Ramm and Andreas Heertsch, “Entwicklung des Mischprozesses im Institut Hiscia” [Development of the mixing process at the Hiscia Institute] in Mistel und Krebs: 70 Jahre Forschungsinstitut Hiscia [Mistletoe and cancer: 70 years of the Hiscia Research Institute], edited by the Verein für Krebsforschung [Association for Cancer Research] (Arlesheim, Switzerland: Verein für Krebsforschung, 2019): 104–117.
11. Rudolf Steiner, The Healing Process: Spirit, Nature & Our Bodies CW 319 (Hudson, NY: SteinerBooks, 2010), lecture in London on September 3, 1923.
12. Rudolf Steiner, Physiology and Healing: Treatment, Therapy, and Hygiene, CW 314 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2013), lectures in Dornach on April 22, 1924.
13. See strader.tech.
14. The so-called “Schiller File.” See Paul-Eugen Schiller, ed., The Schiller File: Supplements to the Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2010).