Thomas1195
Banned
Well at the rate he's going, I can see what he's saying being decisively disproven by say an industrialist who studied the period or something to that effect. He is getting there.
And machine tools can't do much if you don't have the raw materials to make whatever that tool helps you make. Remember that whole refined wolfram obsession you had earlier OP, that desperate attempt to rubbish the British because they didn't do the job themselves and bought elsewhere? That same substance the germans had heavily restricted access to, which thus made sure their industry was crippled when they decided to commit to war (that you like avoiding because it stuffs you)? Because having the base components to use those fancy die presses is kind of important to actually have it be worth a hill of beans.
Not that it matters since British tools were mainly generalized ones for skilled labor and for their domestic market, while Germany made specced ones to account for unskilled labor and could export. Due to that worldwide soft power called money you seem to not get, the UK didn't need to cook their economy to death by overbuilding their own war machine and rely on pure looting to keep things going; they could just buy what they needed when they were given a bad hand.
The problem was that they did not do themselves in high-tech new industries (especially did not carry out R&D themselves), which distorted their technological progress, causing them to decline during 1910-1940 and declined even faster postwar, when others (even Soviet) grew rapidly. Developments in chemical, electrical, electronic, metallurgy and machine tool sectors had a big spillover impact on other industries as they provide better production techniques and better means of production, the evidence for this was even bigger postwar, outside this time frame. For example, installing new, semi-automatic and electric-powered machine tools in a car assembly line would increase production speed; or adopting welding equipment in ship and tank building; or factory electrification (sorry you cannot import electricity back then, and Britain also lagged behind in this department); or new metallurgy process like electric arc furnace; mechanization of craft-based industries. German profit gains from exporting these new products before ww1 was terribly high, far from cooking their economy to death like Nazi. Falling to develop these sectors and to modernize their whole industries using new inventions from the new industries I mentioned was a major cause of the rapid British decline postwar.
Failure to change the practice you mentioned (building machines requiring operatives) also contributed to the rapid decline of the British machine tool industry postwar, when others gradually moved to semi-automatic and eventually automatic machines. This is called lagged effect.
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