As the King of Spain, Carlo couldn't just sit idly.
After much thought, Carlo decided to build up his pool of talent to lay a solid foundation for the Second Industrial Revolution.
The Second Industrial Revolution, in simple terms, was the age of electricity, primarily marked by the discovery and widespread use of electricity.
Germany and the United States were the driving forces behind the Second Industrial Revolution, which is why their national strength rapidly increased after electrification, surpassing Britain, the driving force of the First Industrial Revolution.
In any case, Spain could not miss the Second Industrial Revolution.
However, there was a problem at the moment: the awkward timing.
Most famous scientists were either not yet born or still in school, and naturally not within the scope of those Carlo wanted to attract.
The remaining scientists had mostly achieved some success, and it was not easy to attract them from abroad to Spain.
After carefully pondering for a long time, Carlo could only temporarily think of two names.
One was Karl Benz, the famous German scientist and entrepreneur who founded Mercedes-Benz, and the other was Zénobe Gramme, a Belgian-born French physicist who truly created power generation equipment that could be used for industrial production.
If you mention generators, the familiar names are Faraday and Henry. However these individuals were more like pioneers; they were the proponents of theories and the creators of experimental devices, and they did not truly build generators for industrial use.
Gramme, however, achieved this. The power industry was built upon the two direct and alternating current generators developed by Gramme, which is why Carlo could remember his name.
With the approximate names and countries, it became much easier to investigate these two individuals.
Carlo summoned Carter Bruno, the Director of the Royal Security Intelligence Bureau, and instructed him to dispatch personnel to France and Germany to investigate the current situations of Gramme and Karl Benz, and to try their best to invite them to work in Spain.
Upon receiving Carlo's order, Carter Bruno dared not be negligent in the slightest and immediately organized personnel to go to Germany and France for investigation overnight.
The difficulty of the investigation was significant. Although it was known that Gramme and Benz were in France and Germany respectively, and were engaged in work related to electricity and mechanical manufacturing, respectively.
But searching for a researcher who had not yet achieved great success in the vast countries of France and Germany was like looking for a needle in a haystack; finding them would require some luck.
Considering that it was difficult to precisely find one person among tens of millions of targets, Carlo also assigned Carter Bruno additional tasks.
If it was truly impossible to find Gramme and Benz, they could also screen for talents in electricity and mechanical manufacturing in Germany and France, and try their best to attract them to Spain.
To attract these talents, Carlo was quite sincere. The Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences was the institution Carlo prepared for these talents.
As an institution specifically for scientific research, Carlo would donate a portion of research funds to the Royal Academy of Sciences every year. As long as they joined the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences, scientists could apply for research funds for their studies.
In addition, all scientists who joined the Royal Academy of Sciences could obtain Spanish nationality without approval and receive free property in the capital, Madrid.
Scientists at the Royal Academy of Sciences could also choose to join Spanish universities for part-time work and would receive additional part-time income.
If they achieved significant scientific research results at the Royal Academy of Sciences, they could also be awarded titles of nobility and large amounts of research funds, promising a bright future.
Such conditions might not attract scientists who were already valued by various governments, but for those impoverished scientists who were supporting their research with their own means, it might be a good option.
Throughout Europe, there were countless scientists engaged in research in physics and chemistry. However, before they achieved scientific results and became famous, they rarely had the opportunity to receive external funding.
Even many famous scientists in later generations were impoverished in the first half of their lives because their research required a long time and significant investment in trial and error, and their own financial means were not enough to support these studies.
Carlo did not expect to attract many top talents with the Royal Academy of Sciences. As long as they could attract some scientists with decent levels, it would already meet Carlo's expectations.
After all, Spain was significantly behind other European countries in terms of talent in physics and chemistry at this time.
Even in later generations, when the number of Nobel laureates in Britain, France, and Germany reached dozens or even hundreds, the number of Spanish laureates was only a pitiful 8, of which 6 were in literature and only 2 were in medicine.
Spain's land area was no less than that of Britain, France, and Germany (mainland), but the reason for such a small number of Nobel laureates was precisely because the Spanish people's thinking enlightened too late.
The discovery of the New World led Spain into a life of extravagance and waste from then on. The gold and silver treasures transported from the Americas were used for the extravagance of the nobility and the church.
The palaces and castles of the nobility and the churches of the church looked magnificent, but Spain's national strength declined day by day.
What was Spain doing during the Italian Renaissance, the French Enlightenment, and the British Industrial Revolution?
Spain, under a monarchy and church determined to strengthen their grip, implemented policies that arguably kept the populace uninformed, thus facilitating the consolidation of a government often characterized by its lavishness and centralized control.
Despite being the first global empire on which the sun never set, despite earning vast wealth from the Americas, and despite still possessing colonies like Cuba that continuously generated income, the illiteracy rate of the Spanish government was surprisingly similar to that of newly unified Italy.
The reason for Italy's high illiteracy rate was that the peasants in Southern Italy lowered the average. If only considering Northern Italy, which was originally ruled by the Kingdom of Sardinia, Italy's education situation was far superior to Spain's.
This is also why Prim and Carlo both attached great importance to education because Spain truly lacked talent.
Coupled with the small population, if they did not actively attract talent from abroad, Spain would never be able to keep up with the pace of other European countries in terms of technological revolution.
Besides wanting to attract excellent foreign scientists to Spain, Carlo created the Royal Academy of Sciences with another purpose: to have these excellent scientists teach at Spanish universities, thereby cultivating more excellent talents in physics and chemistry for Spain.
Attracting talent from abroad can only solve the superficial problem of Spain's lack of talent. To truly cure the problem of insufficient talent, it is necessary to start by cultivating local Spanish talent.
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