Research and Development in British Industry from the End of the Nineteenth Century to the 1960s

There is little doubt that at the end of the nineteenth century Britain was falling behind in the science-based industries developing new products and new technologies. In the traditional steam sector she had her final triumph with Parsons’s steam turbine, though the high-speed generator he devised to go with it was in many ways as remarkable as the turbine itself. Ferranti had persuaded the London Electric Supply Corporation to build at Deptford a power station using generators of over ten times the capacity of anything successfully tried before that time and transmitting at the unheard of pressure of 10,000 volts. Nearly everything had to be designed from scratch, including the cables. It was a marvellous technological feat, but it failed because its costs were too high and demand for electricity grew more slowly than had been estimated. In that sense it was a very British piece of advanced technology, not unlike the nuclear-power stations of our own day. But the land of Faraday made only a minimal contribution to the further development of electricity before 1914.