Britain's Tech lead in the 1950s

Derek Jackson

Could the Comet's problems have been detected and fixed before the disasters?

Might Lyon's Electronic office have become a major player in information tech (perhaps the people in catering are more tolerant of difference nad employ Turing?

Anythign else
 

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British Might have beens

The Blue Water tactical Missile. Way ahead of the competion, dumped in favor of an american overweight, overexpensive alternative.

The TSR2. Dumped for a export F111 version that was never bought

The EM2 rifle, with it's .280 round. Dumped for a US overpowered round.

The list goes on. They call it the Special Relationship. Orwell called it Airstrip one...
 

Wanderlust

British space programme, that's another one. Dumped in favour of... nothing and forcing all our rocket scientists to go to the US instead.
 

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AH Comics

This warren Ellis book is a AH masterpiece for Brit tech fans.

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Wanderlust

Every time I read it, I cry a bit :eek:. Not only does it show what might* have been for the British space programme, it shows what might have been for a human space programme. Chris Weston is an amazing artist.

*Within reason.
 

The Oncoming Storm

Derek Jackson said:
Could the Comet's problems have been detected and fixed before the disasters?
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Preventing the Comet disasters is easy, De Havilland designed the plane to have round windows but BOAC wanted it to have rectangular "picture windows" so that passengers could have a better view. It was the rounded corners of these windows that magnified the stress on the fuselage causing it to fail. There's another theory that I saw in a documentary several years ago. De Havilland wanted to be a rival to Rolls-Royce for jet engines and wanted the Comet to use it's own Ghost engines, these weren't powerful enough to lift the Comet as originally designed so De Havilland cut weight from the plane including making the skin thinner. Sadly this also made it more susceptible to metal fatigue, had De Havilland not been so greedy, swallowed it's pride, used RR and not reduced the skin thickness then the accidents could have been avoided. Apparently this is the reason why Boeing and Airbus don't make jet engines, so they don't compromise safety for commercial considerations.

It is important to remember that even if the Comet hadn't suffered the metal fatigue it was too small to be a 707 rival. It would have had the market to itself for a few years and would have sold much better but eventually it would have been outclassed. But a successful Comet would almost certainly meant that the Vickers VC-7 wuld have been built and that could have been a real 707 killer.
 
Simon

Simon

Sior said:
1953 The University of Manchester team complete the first transistorised computer.
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Yeah, up until I think it was the 60s or 70s the British computer industry was a pioneer and equal to any other country until they eventually lost the lead to the US and Silicon Valley. You had the Manchester Mark 1 being the first transistorised computer which became the Ferranti 1 - the first commercial computer, the Lyons Electronic Office which was the first real business computer, the Ferranti Atlas the first with virtual memory etc. Don't really know why that happened, think it was mainly to do with not being able to translate all those firsts into actual sales and probably boneheaded decision by the government and companies.
 

Devolved

The British problem was lack of cash and lack of a market. In most fields Britain in the early 50's were either in the lead or close to it.

There were many projects that got cancelled or weren't marketed well enough.

It is diificult to see how a small country can keep its lead for long even with decent leadership.

The best plan I can think of is that Britain joins the Coal and Steel Community at the beginning and uses its stronger influence within Europe to get some joint projects that are British lead from the outset.

You can get a whole range of science and development programmes with the British tapping into European talent and European cash and then securing European markets.
 
Simon

Simon

Reading through Project Cancelled by Derek Wood aside from civil aviation the UK also threw away the lead in military jets as well. The main reason being that the government apparently in the 50s I think it was decided to put a 10 year moratorium on putting out contracts for or buying new aircraft, so a number of very promising designs that would of exported well were killed off ceding the markets to the French and Americans without a fight and British design and production was set back a generation.
 

robcraufurd

An important psychological step, though possibly not particularly technologically valuable, would be for Britain to break the sound barrier. In 1946 they cancelled the Miles M.52 before it could fly because they didn't want to spend the £250,000 it would have cost to take it to that stage. A scale model later reached Mach 1.38.
 

Devolved

robcraufurd said:
An important psychological step, though possibly not particularly technologically valuable, would be for Britain to break the sound barrier. In 1946 they cancelled the Miles M.52 before it could fly because they didn't want to spend the £250,000 it would have cost to take it to that stage. A scale model later reached Mach 1.38.
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They did break the sound barrier. They even made a movie about it called 'The Sound Barrier' made in 1952.
 
Simon

Simon

As far as I know there's speculation that some aircraft may have broken the sound barrier earlier but there hadn't been any planes with official measuring sensors that broke it before the Bell X-1 so the Americans got the record. Ironically one of the most important components of the X-1 the all-moving tailpane had been designed for the Miles M.52 that we gave away to the US. If the Miles M.52 is able to fly first, and under its own power as opposed to the X-1 which was rocket powered and had to be carried up by a bomber for launch, then that would certainly be a major coup and give them a major boost.
 
Simon

Simon

We really need to drag PMN1 into this thread. Unless there's someone else posting on other forums under the same handle they seem to have given a fair amount of thought to how things might of worked out better and possible alternate histories of the British aerospace industry.
 

Devolved

Simon said:
As far as I know there's speculation that some aircraft may have broken the sound barrier earlier but there hadn't been any planes with official measuring sensors that broke it before the Bell X-1 so the Americans got the record. Ironically one of the most important components of the X-1 the all-moving tailpane had been designed for the Miles M.52 that we gave away to the US. If the Miles M.52 is able to fly first, and under its own power as opposed to the X-1 which was rocket powered and had to be carried up by a bomber for launch, then that would certainly be a major coup and give them a major boost.
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I think the Americans kept it secret and the British announced first. Is that right?
 

cwf1701

another thought, Had John Logie Baird lived past 1946, Britain could had devolved the Telechrome color system for the BBC by 1951-52, 2 years before the NTSC system.
 

Delta Force

Banned
I made an alternate timeline once (for a nation sim) where the Commonwealth still dominated most technology. They were ahead of the rest of the world greatly in jet engines, nuclear technology (in the timeline WW II never happened and the UK and Canada had a joint nuclear program), and computing. Turing lived and Conrad Zuse lived in the UK, and they were funded by the government to make early computing move more smoothly (Turing also did not die). In the timeline communism and fascism both took hold in Europe (Western Europe mostly facist, Trotskyist USSR spreading as far as Eastern Germany) and the Commonwealth was left as an island of stability and relative tolerance, so it was in the position of the USA once it entered WW II, with a large defense budget due to the three way Cold War.

Assuming a world where the UK is left financially better off and without the US as its tried and true ally, the UK could certainly dominate technology in the 1950s. One of the things that I found amusing while building my timeline was how much the Commonwealth gave the US in technology and how quickly Canada and the UK lost their military industrial complex. While I knew that many Canadians left to work in the US after the Avro Arrow was canceled, it surprised me that the Gemini capsule was designed by a Canadian, and that the UK had many advanced programs it scrapped in the name of economy to go with US designs that never entered service. In fact, you might not even need an alternate World War II period, you could just have a UK less obsessed with cost cutting and that works with the Canadians to make the Commonwealth a dominant aerospace power. Even without large government support Canada is one of the largest civil aircraft producers and BAE and other UK companies are major aerospace defense contractors. With it during the formative years of commercial aviation the Commonwealth's aerospace industry might be on par with the US even today.
 
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