Innovation and Technology Transfer during the Cold War: The Case of the Open-End Spinning Machine from Communist Czechoslovakia

Innovation and Technology Transfer during the Cold War

The Case of the Open-End Spinning Machine from Communist Czechoslovakia

In 1980 spinners in the Hanes Knitwear plant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, cheered the dismantling of the labor-intensive ring spinning machines whose configuration had led to back strain for generations of workers (fig. 1). No longer would they have to bend down to doff yarn bobbins from low spindles, nor reach up high to change roving bobbins. The new machines would spin yarn upwards from large cans onto huge spools that had to be changed only a few times per shift, and they could be serviced from a standing position. They would also produce less dust.¹ Plant managers were equally enthusiastic—the replacement equipment would triple productivity.

The machine that promised to change the lives of Hanes textile workers, as it had for thousands of others throughout the textile world, was the open-end (OE) spinning machine² developed in post-Stalinist Czechoslovakia³

to meet the needs of textile-starved postwar Europe. Called the BD 200—from bezvřetenové dopřádání (spindleless spinning) and the machine's 200 "heads" or rotor-spinning units—it had the market to itself for nearly four years after its debut in 1967 (fig. 2). The BD 200 brought not only recognition to the Czechoslovak state, but also hundreds of millions of dollars in hard currency through sales of machines and licenses. Even after 1976, when it lost its leading position in Europe, the BD 200 continued to dominate the industry, either directly or through licensees. A decade later, the machines constituted over three-quarters of all OE installations worldwide. By 1987 they were represented in fifty-five countries, and they have continued to be sold and resold throughout the developing world.⁴

The BD 200 is a significant example of how a radical innovation can permeate and change an entire technological system. It pushed out a reverse salient (slow spinning technology that could not keep up with faster weaving and knitting machines); simplified manufacturing processes and lowered costs; roused competitors; forced improvements to old (ring-spinning) technology; and stimulated research and development that led to breakthroughs in both product and process. Along the way, it changed the workplace for good and for ill: improving conditions and increasing profits, but contributing to technological unemployment.

This study of the revolutionary BD 200, which emerged from an entirely different context than market capitalism, not only sheds light on technological development in the Soviet-dominated command economies of Eastern Europe. By examining the successful "reverse technology transfer" this machine represents, it also brings those economies into the discourse on innovation and diffusion.⁵

The success of the BD 200 does not conform to typical expectations of industry in Soviet Bloc countries. Glimpses of their ubiquitous shortages, poor-quality consumer goods, fumbling bureaucracies, and primitive factories contributed to a picture of inept research and development and inadequate manufacturing capacity. These assumptions were strengthened by the isolation of those countries behind the Iron Curtain; it was easy to forget that some had presented a very different picture before the war. Czechoslovakia, for example, had been the sixth most industrialized country in the world, equal to any in Continental Europe. Moreover, the crumbling infrastructures and environmental degradation revealed after 1989 made it difficult to believe that the...