Discussion: Comparing British and German industries 1900-1940

Thomas1195

Banned
The problem here is the figure is essentially meaningless, for a start how much electrical power did the Entente need? How much power was provided by steam engines? What was the nearest equivalent price per kilowatt hour? After all if for example British electricity is a lot cheaper than German electricity...

I could not find data but based on how Britain carried out their electrification, I can infer that German electricity was much cheaper because British electrification, like in London, was too localized, with electricity being generated by a large number of small stations, which was very inefficient. This was a consequence of laissez faire policy
 
I could not find data but based on how Britain carried out their electrification, I can infer that German electricity was much cheaper because British electrification, like in London, was too localized, with electricity being generated by a large number of small stations, which was very inefficient. This was a consequence of laissez faire policy
It was also because Ferranti didn't have the management skills for this London Electrical Supply Company that the people behind the Newcastle Electrical Supply Company, which by 1913 had become the North Eastern Electrical Supply Company did.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
It was also because Ferranti didn't have the management skills for this London Electrical Supply Company that the people behind the Newcastle Electrical Supply Company, which by 1913 had become the North Eastern Electrical Supply Company did.

But overall britain still lagged behind germany, illustrated by total electricity output.
 
This is from a 2007 draft of my British Railway Electrification Essay
My source for this section of the essay was the book Electricity before Nationalisation: a study of the development of the electricity supply industry in Britain to 1948 by Leslie Hannah.

In 1887 Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti and Sir Coutts Lindsay formed the London Electrical Supply Company (LESCo) to take over the Grovsenor Gallery power station. In 1890 he proposed to close this down and build a new one at Deptford in order to reduce noise in Bond Street and gain access to cheap river borne coal and cooling water. Eventually he envisaged, Deptford could produce sufficient electricity to light 2 million lamps, to be transmitted economically to central London at a pressure of 10,000 volts AC in cable laid alongside the tracks of the railway companies. The building at Deptford was larger than any power-station then standing or planned, and the large generators (each powered by 10,000hp reciprocating steam engines) had to be designed by Ferranti and built on the site. Ferranti also invented the paper-insulated cable for the transmission mains to London.

Yet, in the last resort, Ferranti lacked the integrated scientific approach to system-building and the commercial sense of Edison to whom he was compared by the British press – and the project considered in its self was a disaster. Unforeseen difficulties and delays in construction meant that the capacity at Deptford was not ready to meet the expanding demand of the company’s customers. Fires repeatedly interrupted supply, on one occasion for as much as 3 months, and consumers were understandably dissatisfied. Many of them transferred their custom to the smaller companies providing electricity from rival DC systems and the company did not obtain the franchises for as large an area of London as it hoped. The directors of the company, not surprisingly, were nervous of the technological leap in the dark on which their engineer had embarked, and in May 1891 gave orders that the large machines at Deptford should be suspended; they were in fact never completed supply being given from smaller machines. Three months later Ferranti left the company to return to his business as a manufacturer. Even on the reduced scale of operation, however, the system led LESCo into great financial difficulty, and in 1894 Lord Wantage appointed a receiver to take over the management of the business. Not until 1905 was the company able to pay a dividend on the ordinary shares.

Deptford had been rightly seen as a futuristic vision of engineering genius, encapsulated the principles of economies of scale in generation and long-distance high-voltage transmission which formed the basis of future development. In a commercial and technical sense, however, it was well in advance of its time and LESCo paid the price of baking an unsuccessful project on the frontiers of technology. In the longer run engineering developments were to confirm the validity of Ferranti’s intuitions. As the technical problems of the large-scale plant were gradually overcome, Deptford’s size was to become the norm rather than the exception: the average size of generators being installed in British power stations, which had been just over 0.1 MW in 1895, rose to 5 times that level by 1905 and had more than doubled again by 1913. The efficiency of large scale plants was greatly advanced by the development of high-speed steam turbines to replace the reciprocating steam engines used by Ferranti and then in common use as the prime movers in power-stations. The speed of existing engines was limited to perhaps 500 rpm by their reciprocating action, and for some years engineers had experimented with methods of redesigning them to produce circular motion at a faster speed appropriate for coupling directly to electric generators.

Ferranti’s ideas were realised by Charles Merz and the North Eastern Electricity Supply Company (NESCo) in the 1900s. Their large-scale power stations produced cheap electricity which was delivered to the North East Coast Area by equally large-scale interconnected transmission system. The NESCo area grew from 16 square miles in 1900 to 1,400 square miles in 1914. There was a 32-fold increase in sales in the 10 years to 1913 compared to perhaps 4-fold in the rest of Britain. The NESCo network was the biggest integrated power system in Europe at the time due to the standardisation on the three-phase 40Hz AC supply. NESCo made more intensive use of its capital. There was a 45% average load after 1908 compared to barely more than 20% in other industrial areas.

In this version of history Ferranti had the skills needed to make the Deptford power station and its associated high voltage distribution system a success. Hannah does not tell which phase or frequency his supply system used, for convenience 3-phase and 50Hz were used in this version of history with 11,000v rather than 10,000v cables. The Board of Trade brought the Electricity Supply Act, 1919 forward to 1894. This forced the supply companies to transmit their electricity as 3-phase AC at 50Hz along cables pressurised in multiples of 11,000v and build large-scale power stations. Thus what happened to the North East of England in the real world in the 1900s was applied to the whole country in this version of history in the 1890s. The success of the 1894 Act led to the Electricity (Supply) Act, 1926 being brought forward to 1901. It created the Central Electricity Board to build the National Grid, which was operational in 1908. In turn the Electricity Act, 1947 was advanced to 1920 resulting in the British Electricity Authority and 14 Area Boards being created on 1st April 1921 rather than 1st April 1948.
IIRC the North East of England had the largest electricity supply grid in Europe and the cheapest electricity in the UK if not the whole of Europe.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
This is from a 2007 draft of my British Railway Electrification EssayIIRC the North East of England had the largest electricity supply grid in Europe and the cheapest electricity in the UK if not the whole of Europe.
Agreed.


However:
https://books.google.com.vn/books?i...ication in Western Society, 1880-1930&f=false
London lagged behind Berlin in electrification.

The worse thing is that British electrical equipment firms was too weak to support the electrification. None of them could produce heavy electrical machinery, and they were totally supplied by American and German subsidiaries.

That's why I said British electrical industry lagged behind Germany.
Overall, they lagged in electricity as well as related machine tool derived from these industries.
https://books.google.com.vn/books?i...TAB#v=onepage&q=The Victorian Economy&f=false
 
OTOH I have to agree with Thomas1195 and say that the Germans were usually better. The proof surrounds me. E.g. before I wrote the last few posts I was cleaning the Bosch hob in my kitchen, which sits above and AEG oven. After I finish this post I'm going to take the bedding out of my Bosch tumble drier and iron it with my Bosch iron.

Britain's railways were beginning to electrify in the 1900s. E.g. the North Eastern Railway electrified its Tyneside suburban lines in the early 1900s using electricity purchased from NESCo and ambitious plans for further electrification were thwarted by the First World War. However, the electrification of the London Underground's Circle Line which was done at about the same time was done with a large percentage of imported equipment.

An important reason why the railways in the south of England are electrified on third rail DC instead of AC overhead is because the London Brighton & South Coast Railway bought the equipment from German firms, which could not be delivered because the First World War broke out. This allowed its rival the London & South Western Railway to catch up in spite of the other firm having a 10 year head start. Thus the Southern Railway inherited about 24 route miles of AC overhead railway from the LBSCR, but 58 route miles of DC third rail from the LSWR. Have a guess on which system the Southern decided to standardise on...
 

Thomas1195

Banned
Define inferior though. Peacetime it seems to have provided a higher per capita income as of 1914; $244 for Britain compared to $184 for Germany going by Table 21 of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy. In war time...well it won Two Worlds Wars and only one World Cup going by the song.

Economics is about learning to play to your strengths, the British appear to have done just that.
I am only talking about industry, not service and agriculture. Britain had stronger service sector, which offset its wesknesses in industries and made its per capita higher.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
What was the problem of the electrification of London I have googled it but nothing much comes up.
It was too localized.

And you do know that british electrical industry was retarded, especially before 1914, lagged far behind germany. It was no more than an offshoot of american and german firms.
I mentioned it in post 57
 

Thomas1195

Banned
Another weakness of the British economy was that most of its finance flew to other parts of the world instead of being used for domestic investments to modernize its backward (compared to US and Germany) industry and infrastructure.
 
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Another weakness of the British economy was that most of its finance flew to other parts of the world instead of being used for domestic investments to modernize its backward industry and infrastructure.
I only half agree with that because that money came back as invisible earnings and there was the crippling public debt created by World War One. Furthermore the money invested in things like Latin American railways generated work for British manufacturing firms.
 
Another weakness of the British economy was that most of its finance flew to other parts of the world instead of being used for domestic investments to modernize its backward industry and infrastructure.

Or the amazing strength of the British economy was that it raised the finance that allowed the rest of the world to catch up as modern industrialised nations with all of the benefits this allowed the common people at home and abroad, not merely did it boost the size of foreign markets but further some of those same foreign markets were able to provide new consumer goods at low prices never before seen in the history of the world. The savings in domestic labour resulted not merely in a better quality of life due to superior health but enabled the people's of Europe and North America to access greater leisure opportunities by travelling on new and more modern transport systems (often funded at least in part by the British).

See the whole point of the dismal science is that it preaches there can be more than one winner in a relationship, as I gain so can you.
 
modernize its backward industry and infrastructure.

Infrastructure? are we talking about the same country. I am not going to claim Britain was in the lead of everything but backward oh come on you didnt have a lot of credibility left but what next, everyone in Britain wore bearskins and chased Woolly Mammoth with a Flint axe.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
Infrastructure? are we talking about the same country. I am not going to claim Britain was in the lead of everything but backward oh come on you didnt have a lot of credibility left but what next, everyone in Britain wore bearskins and chased Woolly Mammoth with a Flint axe.
Sorry, it should have been''increasingly backward compared to Germany and US''
 

Thomas1195

Banned
I only half agree with that because that money came back as invisible earnings and there was the crippling public debt created by World War One. Furthermore the money invested in things like Latin American railways generated work for British manufacturing firms.
Well, new firms in new industries could not obtained sufficient long-term finance as the supply of loans had gone abroad, so they could not increase investment in new sectors. The markets for new industries in 1900-1914 were US and Europe, not others.
.
 
Well, new firms in new industries could not obtained sufficient long-term finance as the supply of loans had gone abroad, so they could not increase investment in new sectors. The markets for new industries in 1900-1914 were US and Europe, not others.
While it is true that the opportunity cost of spending money on A is that it can't be spent on B, what you wrote doesn't invalidate what I wrote in Post 91.
 
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Thomas1195

Banned
Britain also lacked excellent industrialist (I mean manufacturing business entrepreneurs) that make big difference like Edison, Westinghouse, Carnegie, Ford in the US or Werner von Siemens, Emil Rathenau, Robert Bosch in Germany.
 
If Germany is so far superior to Britain, would you care to explain why the GDP/head (a reasonable idea of how efficient the economy of the country is) was considerably higher in Britain than in Germany?
In the 30's, the GDP of Germany and the UK was about the same, yet the population of Germany was nearly 70% higher.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
While it is true that the opportunity cost of spending money on A is that it can't be spent on B, what you wrote doesn't invalidate what I wrote in Post 94.
Works in Latin America basically only generate revenue for firms in old industries, so new industries and new tech could not be developed.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
If Germany is so far superior to Britain, would you care to explain why the GDP/head (a reasonable idea of how efficient the economy of the country is) was considerably higher in Britain than in Germany?
In the 30's, the GDP of Germany and the UK was about the same, yet the population of Germany was nearly 70% higher.
Well, I am comparing industry (about output, organisation and technological level). Britain had bigger service sector
 
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