"From Concorde to the iPhone, state intervention..."
Discussion
///ajd said:
Some good points Eric.
Concorde made billions for BA in profits in the end.
No way. Billions is a lot! According to the economist; "In its heyday Concorde typically flew three-quarters full, earning BA about £20m ($33m) in operating profits from 35,000 passengers a year."Concorde made billions for BA in profits in the end.
kwits 
fblm said:
///ajd said:
Some good points Eric.
Concorde made billions for BA in profits in the end.
No way. Billions is a lot! According to the economist; "In its heyday Concorde typically flew three-quarters full, earning BA about £20m ($33m) in operating profits from 35,000 passengers a year."Concorde made billions for BA in profits in the end.
As I said earlier, Concorde's true benefit to the UK (and France) was not the profits it generated as a project (it didn't generate any), but the technical knowledge gained and the industrial expertise obtained in managing international projects, which are factors that are hard to quantify, but which are definitely there.
Eric Mc said:
As I said earlier, Concorde's true benefit to the UK (and France) was not the profits it generated as a project (it didn't generate any), but the technical knowledge gained and the industrial expertise obtained in managing international projects, which are factors that are hard to quantify, but which are definitely there.
Agree completely, impossible to quantify is the effect of such a technological tour de force literally flying the flag around the world... I challenge any Brit to not have felt proud seeing one in a foreign airport! 
fblm said:
Agree completely, impossible to quantify is the effect of such a technological tour de force literally flying the flag around the world... I challenge any Brit to not have felt proud seeing one in a foreign airport!
You missed the point.My assertion is nothing to do with pride or prestige. It's to do with practical aspects of getting businesses that would normally have never worked together (i.e. what could have been competing businesses) to actually share their knowledge and work together rather than against each other.
This would only have happened when they were insured against financial failure by government support.
In 1958, when the first Concorde type aircraft were being proposed, there were a number of separate British airframe manufacturers with rival projects (e.g. Bristol and Avro). There was also a separate French project (Sud Ouest).
By 1962, the UK government had more or less forced the disparate UK companies into two major groups, the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC) and Hawker Siddeley.
BAC were chosen (by the government) as the UK part of the now Anglo-French project.
On the French side, Sud Ouest had amalgamated with other French Companies to become Sud Aviation (again, on government orders).
By the time Concorde entered service in 1976, Sud Aviation had become nationalised as Aerospatiale and the following year BAC and Hawker Siddeley were nationalised and merged to form British Aerospace - all under government plans.
maffski said:
...And 'the iPhone owes it's success to government funded GPS' suffers from the minor disadvantage that the first iPhone didn't have GPS.
I think the author is being deliberately obtuse - he's referencing the most popular Apple product and by inference trying to include Apple's overall success, IMHO.At the root of it all is a plea for more state spending, albeit for tackling 'climate change' - for which one would think no number is too large to contemplate. Oh, goodee.
Does anyone here have any thoughts on how the industrial revolution would have differed had it been a state enterprise initiative? I'm thinking the canal boats would probably be hauled by steam ponies...and maybe the locks would be nuclear powered...had a government been ladling out the grants to pick winners.
State intervention can certainly work, look at EDF the state owned company and it's research into, and roll out of nuclear power across france. And now as the UK did not invest in the technology ourselves we will are paying EDF, (the french state) to do it for us.
Or how we didn't keep up our Aerospace tech and are now buying fighter jets from the US.
The great thing about government investment is it can eventually lead to future profit as well as intervention. And as PFI PPI and the like have shown even if you are paying private firms to do public projects the budget seems to be just as fluid as if the contracts were for filled in house,(so to speak)
Or how we didn't keep up our Aerospace tech and are now buying fighter jets from the US.
The great thing about government investment is it can eventually lead to future profit as well as intervention. And as PFI PPI and the like have shown even if you are paying private firms to do public projects the budget seems to be just as fluid as if the contracts were for filled in house,(so to speak)
Innovation sometimes comes from hard nosed commercial imperatives. Sometimes it comes from answering the needs of a government (often in times of war but not always).
Even commercial operations can be lured to invest and/or investigate areas they would not normally look at from a commercial point of view because a government sees a good strategic need to to develop a certain science or technology.
Certain aspects of the Industrial Revolution happened because of pure commerce.
Certain aspects happened because of government requirements.
Even commercial operations can be lured to invest and/or investigate areas they would not normally look at from a commercial point of view because a government sees a good strategic need to to develop a certain science or technology.
Certain aspects of the Industrial Revolution happened because of pure commerce.
Certain aspects happened because of government requirements.
I think you did miss MY point - but you did make a very good and valid point of your own.
Prestige and national status are very often drivers for government backed projects. Apollo and Concorde are good examples. Also, I would suggest that the success of Germany in Grand Prix racing of the mid to late 1930s was also another example of government driven technology.
The development of TV technology in the 1930s was also funded partly by government funding - especially in the UK.
Concorde led to Airbus in a fairly circuitous route.
It was the first collaboration from scratch on a civil airliner project between two companies based in different countries - in this case BAC and Sud Aviation. It was a government led project (France and Britain) who were keen for two high level industries to work together. It was all part of a plan to show the French that the Brits were good Europeans - after all.
By the mid 1960s, with Concorde moving along quite well and the French and British engineering teams working well together (most of the time), other collaborative projects were proposed - mostly military. These resulted in the SEPECAT Jaguar (France and Britain - again) and then the Panavia MRCA (later renamed "Tornado) which involved Britain, West Germany and Italy. There were also helicopter collaborations, such as the Gazelle and Puma (Britain and France).
With all these projects running (thanks to Concorde), the French in particular saw an opportunity to wrest a decent share of the subsonic airliner market away from the two American giants, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas.
Aerospatiale proposed a collaborative project which would include France, West Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland and the UK.
In all but one of these countries their respective governments agreed to provide some financial support. The country that chose not to was, you've guessed it, the UK. However, Hawker Siddeley were keen not to miss out on this opportunity and decided to invest on their own accord. It made them a bit of a junior partner and it ensured that final assembly would never be undertaken in the UK.
The first airliner envisaged was a 300 seater, medium range, twin engined wide body which would operate short to medium haul "bus-stop" type routes.
The consortium that was formed to build this new aircraft was therefore called "Airbus Industrie" with its HQ at Toulouse in France. The new aeroplane was to be called the Airbus A300 (because it was to seat around 300 passengers).
Work started in 1968 with the prototype flying in 1972.
Prestige and national status are very often drivers for government backed projects. Apollo and Concorde are good examples. Also, I would suggest that the success of Germany in Grand Prix racing of the mid to late 1930s was also another example of government driven technology.
The development of TV technology in the 1930s was also funded partly by government funding - especially in the UK.
Concorde led to Airbus in a fairly circuitous route.
It was the first collaboration from scratch on a civil airliner project between two companies based in different countries - in this case BAC and Sud Aviation. It was a government led project (France and Britain) who were keen for two high level industries to work together. It was all part of a plan to show the French that the Brits were good Europeans - after all.
By the mid 1960s, with Concorde moving along quite well and the French and British engineering teams working well together (most of the time), other collaborative projects were proposed - mostly military. These resulted in the SEPECAT Jaguar (France and Britain - again) and then the Panavia MRCA (later renamed "Tornado) which involved Britain, West Germany and Italy. There were also helicopter collaborations, such as the Gazelle and Puma (Britain and France).
With all these projects running (thanks to Concorde), the French in particular saw an opportunity to wrest a decent share of the subsonic airliner market away from the two American giants, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas.
Aerospatiale proposed a collaborative project which would include France, West Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland and the UK.
In all but one of these countries their respective governments agreed to provide some financial support. The country that chose not to was, you've guessed it, the UK. However, Hawker Siddeley were keen not to miss out on this opportunity and decided to invest on their own accord. It made them a bit of a junior partner and it ensured that final assembly would never be undertaken in the UK.
The first airliner envisaged was a 300 seater, medium range, twin engined wide body which would operate short to medium haul "bus-stop" type routes.
The consortium that was formed to build this new aircraft was therefore called "Airbus Industrie" with its HQ at Toulouse in France. The new aeroplane was to be called the Airbus A300 (because it was to seat around 300 passengers).
Work started in 1968 with the prototype flying in 1972.
Whatever occasional successes were achieved by state intervention, they were all funded by taxing businesses that would otherwise have been more profitable and citizens who would otherwise have been more wealthy. If that money had been invested according to true consumer demand there might have been many more commercially funded innovations such as Sony Walkmans and Dyson vacuum cleaners that would have delivered real benefits to the population rather than national prestige and defences for theoretical wars.
Fantic SuperT said:
...If that money had been invested according to true consumer demand there might have been many more commercially funded innovations such as Sony Walkmans and Dyson vacuum cleaners...
But no nuclear power, or radar, or particle physics, or gps, or satellites, or space telescopes, or human genome project... just to name ones off he top of my head. Projects that took tens of billions in investment, some over multi-decade periods, to yield unknown results. I'll take those over a few new consumer gadgets. Fantic SuperT said:
Whatever occasional successes were achieved by state intervention, they were all funded by taxing businesses that would otherwise have been more profitable and citizens who would otherwise have been more wealthy. If that money had been invested according to true consumer demand there might have been many more commercially funded innovations such as Sony Walkmans and Dyson vacuum cleaners that would have delivered real benefits to the population rather than national prestige and defences for theoretical wars.
If you look at the aviation industry (and the space industry), most of the businesses involved would not even have survived their first 30 years of existence without massive state intervention - either through direct state purchase of their projects, state specification of their projects, or state subsidies to encourage them to build certain types of products.And don't forget that even Sony Walkmen and Dyson vacuum cleaners will have gained from technological gains made in other industries which were heavily state supported.
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