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Ecological Niches 237

another firm, Bendix, has made every single set of automotive brakes
used by the American automobile industry.
By now these are all old and well-established firms, of course, but
only because the automobile is itself an old industry. These compa-
nies established their controlling position when the industry was in its
infancy, well before World War I. Robert Bosch, for instance, was a
contemporary and friend of the two German auto pioneers, Carl Benz
and Gottfried Daimler, and started his firm in the 1880s.
But once these companies had attained their controlling position
in their specialty skill niche, they retained it. Unlike the toll-gate
companies, theirs is a fairly large niche, yet it is still unique. It was
obtained by developing high skill at a very early time. A. O. Smith
developed what today would be called “automation” in making auto-
mobile frames during and shortly after World War I. The electrical
system which Bosch in Germany designed for Mercedes staff cars
around 1911 was so far advanced that it was put into general use even
in luxury automobiles only after World War II. Delco in Dayton,
Ohio, developed the self-starter before becoming a part of General
Motors, that is, before 1914. Such specialized skills put these com-
panies so far ahead in their field that it was hardly worth anybody’s
while to try to challenge them. They had become the “standard.”
Specialty skill niches are by no means confined to manufacturing.
Within the last ten years a few private trading firms, most of them in
Vienna, Austria, have built a similar niche in what used to be called
“barter” and is now called “counter-trade”: taking goods from a devel-
oping importing country, Bulgarian tobacco or Brazilian-made irriga-
tion pumps, in payment for locomotives, machinery, or pharmaceuticals
exported by a company in a developed country. And much earlier, an
enterprising German attained such a hold on one specialty skill niche
that guidebooks for tourists are still called by his name, “Baedeker.”
As these cases show, timing is of the essence in establishing a spe-
cialty skill niche. It has to be done at the very beginning of a new indus-
try, a new custom, a new market, a new trend. Karl Baedeker published
his first guidebook in 1828, as soon as the first steamships on the Rhine
opened tourist travel to the middle classes. He then had the field virtu-
ally to himself until World War I made German books unacceptable in
Western countries. The counter-traders of Vienna started around 1960,
when such trade was still the rare exception, largely confined to the
smaller countries of the Soviet Bloc (which explains why they are con-
centrated in Austria). Ten years later, when hard curren