Alfred Herbert Ltd. and the British Machine Tool Industry, 1887-1983 (review)

The twentieth-century machine tool industry remains little explored by historians of technology, despite being central to modern production. David Noble's thoughtful analysis of automatic machine tools remains one of the few exceptions, and there has been some research and publication by economic and business historians. Now we have a valuable addition to the literature with Roger Lloyd-Jones and M. J. Lewis's detailed, chronological history of Alfred Herbert Ltd. and the British machine tool industry. Their careful economic analysis raises many tantalizing historical questions about the complex relationships between technological capability, innovation, and economic success.

The authors' documentation of the industry's oscillation between optimism and pessimism, growth and contraction, is a concrete contribution to the debate about British industrial decline. They demonstrate that the machine tool industry did not undergo a gradual, linear decline but rather a precipitous drop signaled in the late 1970s and early 1980s by increasing import penetration and the industry's rapidly decreasing global market share.

The British industry was characterized by a deliberate concentration on the production of general-purpose machines, while special-purpose machines—which would have allegedly necessitated an investment of resources hardly justified by the small British demand—were imported. Underlining this policy was the industry's dedication to free trade. Herbert's became one of the largest machine tool firms in the world through a (sometimes uneasy) combination of importation and production and was dependent on factoring for a large proportion of its sales.

One of the outstanding features of this study is the importance that the authors accord to understanding firms within the "market-cum-technological environment" (p. 1). Thus they make use of Richard Nelson's evolutionary metaphor of the "player" and the "game" throughout their analysis. In this framework, they critically examine the industry's success in meeting the challenge of American manufacture at the end of the nineteenth century; its success in raising production and productivity during both world wars; its struggles with skilled labor, volatile demand, and user industries' modernization policies; and its failure to compete internationally both in the interwar and postwar periods. In response to the challenges of the "game," the deeply individualistic British machine tool firms established international and domestic factoring relationships, pursued subcontracting, and developed a faith in the duty of British machine tool firms to cater to the needs of a uniquely British engineering distinguished by flexibility. Although the authors draw a perhaps unnaturally sharp distinction between internal and external influences on the firm, their study demonstrates once again that it is critically important for historians of technology to be aware of the constraints of the commercial "game" in which technological development occurs.

For a historian of technology, however, the details of the industry's fluctuating fortunes are ultimately less interesting than the role of technological innovation in them. The authors conclude that the British machine tool industry was a technological follower, an industry that responded to users' needs through incremental design improvements rather than pushing user industries toward "the technological frontier" (p. 6). Behind this judgment (and its negative connotation) lies a traditional concept of innovation that downplays the significant and indeed revolutionary technical advances—especially in terms of productivity gain—that incremental improvements to existing machine designs often represented. Improvements such as those necessary in redesigning machines for the full and effective use of new cutting-tool materials were rarely the result of one-sided initiative.

The authors' discussion of the industry's technical capability also falls prey to a common confusion about the importance of the distinction between general-purpose and special-purpose, and high-efficiency and automatic, machine tools. These labels are used by contemporaries and historians alike despite the difficulty of determining the extent to and manner in which particular tools were actually used in machine shops. The facile use of such categories is misleading because it is generally accompanied by a...