Why did the British airforce adopted highly similar Hurricane and Spitfire at the same time?

[Wild_Bill_Kelso]

My own definition of cottage industry is a industry that can be done in cottages/dwellings by individuals or small teams.
Like weaving or pottery or shoemaking or even cabinet making.
Granted some of these can be scaled up and be done in rather large building but once you are using water wheels and buildings of several stories and several hundred feet in lengths it is not a cottage industry (at least in that location).
It is not so much sophistication (water power vs steam) as it is scale.

A water wheel might be in a big complex or it might be in quite a small one. There are still a couple of water mill forges, sawmills etc. in some places, and they range widely in scale.

Hand looms can produce high quality cloth, they just cannot produce much of it per manhour (or manday), but they can fit in a smallish room and you can have hundreds of weavers in one village.

The proper loom is a quite sophisticated bit of kit, which required some training to use properly. But they could indeed be dispersed, in fact, that was how production was usually handled in the medieval towns. They would make large facilities for things that had to be, like say a blast furnace. Usually looms would be in individual workshops which might be a man and his wife and 2-3 apprentices and journeymen, maybe a couple of kids. But all the looms in the big town would be organized into the same craft guild organization. They would in turn be linked to other crafts such as dyers, drapers, tailors and so on.

The (mostly unprotected) villages are where the 'cottage' industry took place in the sense of precursor industries, which might be the the fulling of cloth, the spinning and production of yarn, and the processing of the madder and woad to make dye (which would then be used in the city, where the expensive alum was kept, used to fix the dye to the textiles).

Once you start using something besides human power you start evolving going beyond "cottage industry"

That depends on the nature of the non-human power. I would go more by your first statement - it's more to do with scale. A steam engine may or may not be smaller scale, by the 19th Century there were some quite small ones in boats and so on. But obviously a big one especially in the earlier period, it's going to be a bigger operation. Waterwheels and wind mills could be made with fairly inexpensive materials, if you had the know-how.

Textiles involve a lot more than just weaving there may very well have been "complexes" that used a large number of small buildings. But separating carding, washing, spinning and dying into separate areas/ building vs one craftsman doing every job before even getting to the weaving stage we are getting beyond the "cottage industry stage".

Yes all of these would be done by different crafts, organized into networks of contractors and subcontractors. It was the same in the metalworking industry. So for example a cutler (like Willie's ancestors) typically worked as a contractor. He (or she, there were female ones) would contract with a merchant to produce say, 200 swords. He would then place an order to another contractor for 200 sword blanks. That guy in turn is buying these from a smelting operation (maybe craft run or maybe run by a mercantile company). The blanks then go to the cutler's own shop and probably a few others, where the blades are heated up in the forge and shaped, then these are sent to another shop who does the heat treatments, then to another shop that sharpens, then another one that polishes, and finally to the shop that assembles the hilts and peens the cross and pommels on, and then a scabbard maker.

Textiles were similar with different workshops for each stage of the process. Sometimes small towns would do the preliminary stages and then send cloth on via boat or cart to others. For example, most of the silk was coming from Italy or directly down the silk road into somewhere like Krakow or Buda. But it could then be processed into Damask or velvet fabric say in Flanders or Swabia or Bohemia.

If the washing for example is done in large kettles heated by wood brought in by wood cutters the whole process can break down at any one of several stages leaving the weavers with nothing to do even if their loom is their great rooms in their cottages.

Yes and that brings up a whole nother issue - forests tend to go away when there is a big demand for lumber (like for ship-building) or (as there was historically in particular) charcoal. Production of iron tended to eat up a lot of forests, that's what happened to many of the forests in England. In other places though either a regional prince (duke or baron or bishop) or the town itself owned the forest, so they sent people out (Försters or Jägermeisters) to carefully manage the logging so that the forest wasn't logged out.

There can be quite a bit of cross over.
My Grandfather for a period in WW II worked in a 4 man machine shop making gyroscope parts under subcontract to Norden. The of the machines were run by overhead pulleys form a single electric motor. It was in it's own building and not somebodies barn/woodshed but it wasn't much bigger than a 2-3 car garage.
Also note I said gyroscope parts, not complete gyroscopes.
I have no idea of how many other small contractors were supplying Norden and/or Sperry.

Yeah probably a lot. A great deal of production still is and I think always was (at least for a many centuries) distributed into such networks. Even the big car companies that used to be in the Detroit area were linked to dozens of little shops. Now with the rise of increasingly massive factories relying so heavily on automation, and the global supply chain being stretched so wide and long maybe some of this is changing. I do think the latter poses a challenge for national defense industries, for obvious reasons.

 

[Wild_Bill_Kelso]

Cutler's workshop Krakow 1505. The master is in blue, the other three at the table are journeymen, the two at the top are a Polish nobleman and his servant.

Crossbowman's workshop, very similar scene with the Polish noble and servant on the bottom left, note the wife in the top left doing the books. Back then in this part of the world (in the towns anyway) both boys and girls would typically be in school until at least age 13 and could read and write in the vernacular and could do arithmetic. Many craftsmen would then study the geometry of Euclid and probably some Vitruvius so as to have some design chops. Both of these images are from the Balthasar Behem Codex which was town government commissioned survey of the craft guilds in the town at that time.

Here is a weaver at his loom, with a hatmaker on the right, from Nuremberg around the same time. (from the housebook of the 12 Brothers of Nuremberg, a kind of retirement home for old artisans. That website shows all the images from the 'hausbooks' and has depictions of basically every type of workshop in those days)

 

[yulzari]

We do underestimate the value of water power as an enabler of the industrial revolution. River based water mills and. tidal mills were around to be used in lieu of animal power centuries before. In my own city here there were several tidal mills within just a few miles of me. What steam power did was make the power portable to the factory/mine etc. and then went on to provide continuous power and then more power and ultimately fast transport as ideal water power sites were used up. Water power remained in use all through the industrial revolution. The ability to move materials to utilise coal fired furnaces for improvements in metallurgy etc. was initially permitted in the necessary cheap bulk transport by water transport. Hence the development of the British narrow canal system that preceded the railways. The steam engine progressed the industrial revolution but it did not start it nor allow it. It kicked off before steam power and included a national mass transport system. Steam power drove it far further but it could have moved along without it. If not progressing as far and as fast.

However, are we digressing perchance?

 

[Wild_Bill_Kelso]

Water as transport too... rivers and (linked by) canals were almost literally the first railroads, both in Europe and China.

And yeah, good mention of mining there - the steam engine was invented for mining, and it meant you could do deep mines in places where water power was inconvenient.

But yeah, we digress. Cottage industries. Big factories. Both together. Airplanes.

There, we are back!

 

[WARSPITER]

However, are we digressing perchance?

Perhaps but it is an interesting digression and helps to show where aircraft etc came from.

The progress made in what we might term 'Western' countries did depend mostly on water travel as it made
it possible to transport bulk items in a relatively cheap way compared to using roads and animals.

The major civilisations through time have all been based on the use of rivers and good ports. Sub Saharan
Africa has long suffered from this as river systems are not an all year round proposition and/or are not
safely navigable over their whole length. Coastal areas tend to be shallow as well which is not a great
help either.

The other interesting factor in all this was the use of glass. Many Asian based civilisations used ceramics
but not glass. European countries made advances in chemistry for example due to being able to mix acids
etc in glass. The ability to continue to have good eyesight due to the invention of eye glasses doesn't seem like
a big deal but it was and still is, especially compared to countries where they weren't available or even known
about.

 

[Wild_Bill_Kelso]

(The other reason to plunge into this is it's right at the nexus of skilled labor, unskilled labor, automation and mechanization. One thing they did really well in say, the 15th Century, was scale up skilled labor production to make very high quality products in surprisingly large quantities. Later when increasingly sophisticated methods of harnessing unskilled labor for complex tasks became possible, the old 'putting out system' pioneered by the organized skilled labor i.e. craft guilds, was used by the emerging industrialists. So you have kind of a parallel history of both types of putting out or cottage industries, ones like the machine shop with skilled labor -probably pretty well paid, with a lot of small owners, and ones where vast numbers of people, including children, are doing pretty simple tasks as part of a much bigger machine, and being paid very little - the "industrialist" scoops it all up. Production quality is also affected by this balance, obviously. Quality for a lot of artifacts including many types of military kit actually declined considerably between the 16th and 18th Centuries. The balance between the two types of systems is still relevant in WW2 and nations with more skilled labor had certain advantages, IMO.)

 

[Wild_Bill_Kelso]

Perhaps but it is an interesting digression and helps to show where aircraft etc came from.

The progress made in what we might term 'Western' countries did depend mostly on water travel as it made
it possible to transport bulk items in a relatively cheap way compared to using roads and animals.

The major civilisations through time have all been based on the use of rivers and good ports. Sub Saharan
Africa has long suffered from this as river systems are not an all year round proposition and/or are not
safely navigable over their whole length. Coastal areas tend to be shallow as well which is not a great
help either.

The other interesting factor in all this was the use of glass. Many Asian based civilisations used ceramics
but not glass. European countries made advances in chemistry for example due to being able to mix acids
etc in glass. The ability to continue to have good eyesight due to the invention of eye glasses doesn't seem like
a big deal but it was and still is, especially compared to countries where they weren't available or even known
about.

Good points. You are somewhat alluding here (I think) to what they call the little divergence (precursor to the 'great divergence'). Alchemy was a big part of that, in mining and metals processing as well as glass and medicine and many other things.

Literacy and the emergence of public schools, scriptoria, and the spread of the paper mill are all also key factors, IMO. It was something building for a long time, it didn't just suddenly happen with the printing press.

There are a lot of very good scholarly articles about how the Venetian and Czech glassmakers guilds responded with great agility to rapidly changing market conditions, especially going from the medieval to Early Modern period. One article I read was about how in about a 5 year span in the 16th Century the Venetian glass industry had to reconfigure from selling drinking vessels, spectacles and window panes (often as little colored disks, which were easy to transport) which they were selling to middle class burghers and yeoman / rural gentlemen, to small numbers of 'bespoke' giant mirrors for the very rich, and simultaneously absolutely huge numbers of ultra cheap trade goods like beads and tiny mirrors for trade with indigenous people all over the world. They basically reorganized the networks of contractors and subcontractors and kept the same amount of people employed, and stayed competitive in the glass making world for another century or two. They also had to reconfigure the textile industry several times for example to adjust to the appearance of cochineal dye from the New World.

Making things like good properly heat treated steel goes right back to these late medieval industries. They figured out how to make relatively large pieces of tempered steel armor in Augsburg around 1400, allowing them to make armor much thinner and therefore almost 50% lighter. Very similar heat treatment techniques were revived during WW2 to make thinner but more effective armor for aircraft and tanks, in fact I had read a while ago that both the German and British industries looked at the 'old methods' when seeking ways to improve their processes.

I think it was not until the 19th Century when someone figured out how to make tempered glass, which was another very important technology for warplanes in WW2.

 

[Wild_Bill_Kelso]

(the armor industry in Europe kind of collapsed by the 17th Century due to the shift from skilled to less skilled labor in armies, and steel armor became increasingly rare and expensive again. Fabrication and then correct heat treatment of large-ish pieces of steel is quite tricky)

 

[WARSPITER]

(the armor industry in Europe kind of collapsed by the 17th Century due to the shift from skilled to less skilled labor in armies, and steel armor became increasingly rare and expensive again. Fabrication and then correct heat treatment of large-ish pieces of steel is quite tricky)

True. German tank armour had large quality variations depending on the batch even before they had started to run out of alloy
materials.

 

[Shortround6]

Somewhat touching on aircraft (ok a hand wave over the paper).

I seem to remember that the glass industry was forced to use coal by Royal Edict to preserve the Forests of England (Britain) for shipbuilding.
One of the first instances of the strategic materials concept?
By the 1700s Britain was dependent on the "Baltic" and the Colonies (include Canada) for masts and spars.
Fast forward to WW II.
Not all trees are suitable for building aircraft out of, or for building fast motor launches.
Certain types of trees are strategic materials and some of them have to be imported.

 

[tomo pauk]

Some of forum members asked about the wind tunnels in the UK. Here is what I have, state in 1940 per Soviets, translated by yours truly:

 

[Wild_Bill_Kelso]

Somewhat touching on aircraft (ok a hand wave over the paper).

I seem to remember that the glass industry was forced to use coal by Royal Edict to preserve the Forests of England (Britain) for shipbuilding.
One of the first instances of the strategic materials concept?
By the 1700s Britain was dependent on the "Baltic" and the Colonies (include Canada) for masts and spars.
Fast forward to WW II.
Not all trees are suitable for building aircraft out of, or for building fast motor launches.
Certain types of trees are strategic materials and some of them have to be imported.

Definitely an issue going way, way back. Forest management was quite complex even back to Carolingian times and no doubt long before that. One of the reasons there are still large forests in densely populated countries like Germany, Belgium and France is due to successful management according to several different models. Many forests were of course also planted also going way, way back. Certain types of trees were considered useful for different purposes - like linden for shields and ash for spear hafts, yew for bows and so on. Shipbuilding had a wide variety of wood types, and in some places entire forests were cut down.

You also get weird stuff like this

 

[WARSPITER]

German forests also benefitted from the non take over by the Romans. Cedar and other trees in Spain were walloped over
the centuries by the requirements of the Roman machine - probably helped along by Carthage when they were there too.

Older relatives who went to Egypt in WWI told my mum about the tree bases they saw uncovered by wind - these were further
up the Nile and had been cut off flat originally. They were preserved somehow, maybe petrified ? These were in large numbers
and were 12 foot and more in diameter. Cut down a long time ago to move stone and build ships perhaps ?

 

[Wild_Bill_Kelso]

Probably true, though a lot of Germany actually was taken over by the Romans, basically everything close to the Rhine and a fair bit of the south. We were in Trier a couple of years ago and the massive scale of the old roman gate left over from the Imperium era town fortification says a lot about how dangerous the area was for them, but they damn sure occupied it. It's all heavily forested around there.

 

[yulzari]

Definitely an issue going way, way back. Forest management was quite complex even back to Carolingian times and no doubt long before that. One of the reasons there are still large forests in densely populated countries like Germany, Belgium and France is due to successful management according to several different models. Many forests were of course also planted also going way, way back. Certain types of trees were considered useful for different purposes - like linden for shields and ash for spear hafts, yew for bows and so on. Shipbuilding had a wide variety of wood types, and in some places entire forests were cut down.

You also get weird stuff like this
View attachment 699835

And the management is reflected in the tools. The pre Roman iron industry of the Weald on Kent forest required huge amounts of charcoal cutting down the large first growth forest but management replaced it with coppiced production on the original stools of the trees to allow continuous (cutting @ every eight years) production of many thick saplings. So large tree felling axes were replaced by the small thin bladed single hand Kentish Axe, which remains in production. Suited to the small timber. Many apparent natural forests in Europe are actually neglected coppicing reverting to major timber.

Around my home in France it appears green with large timber copses and field side trees but in fact it is all neglected coppicing and unmanaged hedgerows from the flight from rural poverty depopulating the countryside. Beginning with the 1870 War when conscripted troops began to see that their future could be more than staring at the back end of an ox and began the move to towns where they could get warm work indoors with a regular wage and access to somewhere they could spend their money on something. My own village now has only the same population in it's entire surrounding area than just my little hamlet of several had in 1900. Hence my UK house cost £300,000 for a mid terrace and my old French one €35,000 including a small field, a large barn and assorted small buildings all in it's own grounds. There used to be cottage coarse ceramics and glass making industries using local charcoal too, with water mills and a managed river.

The countryside can be read like a history book if you have learned the language of historical geography. The land title plans will show you where the old village was that the English burned down in the 14th century before it was moved downhill out of sight of the principal road. Which same road was so difficult until the late 19th century that it had no church and no large waggon or coach could reach it from the main road 10 km away. When the Protestants started evangelising the barely Christian peasantry in the mid 19th century the Roman Catholic Church had to send in missionaries and build a new church. Geography is history made, sometimes literally, concrete. It is a wonderful way of seeing history without the personalities and shorn of biased reporting.

 

[yulzari]

Perhaps but it is an interesting digression and helps to show where aircraft etc came from.

The progress made in what we might term 'Western' countries did depend mostly on water travel as it made
it possible to transport bulk items in a relatively cheap way compared to using roads and animals.

The major civilisations through time have all been based on the use of rivers and good ports. Sub Saharan
Africa has long suffered from this as river systems are not an all year round proposition and/or are not
safely navigable over their whole length. Coastal areas tend to be shallow as well which is not a great
help either.

The other interesting factor in all this was the use of glass. Many Asian based civilisations used ceramics
but not glass. European countries made advances in chemistry for example due to being able to mix acids
etc in glass. The ability to continue to have good eyesight due to the invention of eye glasses doesn't seem like
a big deal but it was and still is, especially compared to countries where they weren't available or even known
about.

Additionally to glass per se, the spread from China of glass in the form of ceramic glazing also permitted assorted chemicals to be mixed in the same way, if not as reliably. Many chemical/alchemical/industrial recipes refer to something such as a 'glazed pipkin' in which to mix the ingredients.

 

[Wild_Bill_Kelso]

And the management is reflected in the tools. The pre Roman iron industry of the Weald on Kent forest required huge amounts of charcoal cutting down the large first growth forest but management replaced it with coppiced production on the original stools of the trees to allow continuous (cutting @ every eight years) production of many thick saplings. So large tree felling axes were replaced by the small thin bladed single hand Kentish Axe, which remains in production. Suited to the small timber. Many apparent natural forests in Europe are actually neglected coppicing reverting to major timber.

Around my home in France it appears green with large timber copses and field side trees but in fact it is all neglected coppicing and unmanaged hedgerows from the flight from rural poverty depopulating the countryside. Beginning with the 1870 War when conscripted troops began to see that their future could be more than staring at the back end of an ox and began the move to towns where they could get warm work indoors with a regular wage and access to somewhere they could spend their money on something. My own village now has only the same population in it's entire surrounding area than just my little hamlet of several had in 1900. Hence my UK house cost £300,000 for a mid terrace and my old French one €35,000 including a small field, a large barn and assorted small buildings all in it's own grounds. There used to be cottage coarse ceramics and glass making industries using local charcoal too, with water mills and a managed river.

The countryside can be read like a history book if you have learned the language of historical geography. The land title plans will show you where the old village was that the English burned down in the 14th century before it was moved downhill out of sight of the principal road. Which same road was so difficult until the late 19th century that it had no church and no large waggon or coach could reach it from the main road 10 km away. When the Protestants started evangelising the barely Christian peasantry in the mid 19th century the Roman Catholic Church had to send in missionaries and build a new church. Geography is history made, sometimes literally, concrete. It is a wonderful way of seeing history without the personalities and shorn of biased reporting.

Agreed all around ... some of the specialized planting of forests (not just coppicing but also basically orchards for harvesting -of trees themselves or what they bear) and deer parks where the trees are arranged in rows to make the prey animals easier to spot and so on. Apparently the planting of forests in Europe goes back to at least the Bronze Age. And nowhere I've been is the shaping of the land more obviously successful than France.

In some other regions you can see where poor forest management actually created deserts.

 

[Deleted member 68059]

Good points. You are somewhat alluding here (I think) to what they call the little divergence (precursor to the 'great divergence'). Alchemy was a big part of that, in mining and metals processing as well as glass and medicine and many other things.

View attachment 699825
Literacy and the emergence of public schools, scriptoria, and the spread of the paper mill are all also key factors, IMO. It was something building for a long time, it didn't just suddenly happen with the printing press.

There are a lot of very good scholarly articles about how the Venetian and Czech glassmakers guilds responded with great agility to rapidly changing market conditions, especially going from the medieval to Early Modern period. One article I read was about how in about a 5 year span in the 16th Century the Venetian glass industry had to reconfigure from selling drinking vessels, spectacles and window panes (often as little colored disks, which were easy to transport) which they were selling to middle class burghers and yeoman / rural gentlemen, to small numbers of 'bespoke' giant mirrors for the very rich, and simultaneously absolutely huge numbers of ultra cheap trade goods like beads and tiny mirrors for trade with indigenous people all over the world. They basically reorganized the networks of contractors and subcontractors and kept the same amount of people employed, and stayed competitive in the glass making world for another century or two. They also had to reconfigure the textile industry several times for example to adjust to the appearance of cochineal dye from the New World.

Making things like good properly heat treated steel goes right back to these late medieval industries. They figured out how to make relatively large pieces of tempered steel armor in Augsburg around 1400, allowing them to make armor much thinner and therefore almost 50% lighter. Very similar heat treatment techniques were revived during WW2 to make thinner but more effective armor for aircraft and tanks, in fact I had read a while ago that both the German and British industries looked at the 'old methods' when seeking ways to improve their processes.

I think it was not until the 19th Century when someone figured out how to make tempered glass, which was another very important technology for warplanes in WW2.

Totally off-topic, but I approve as very interesting indeed. Proceed >

 

[Wild_Bill_Kelso]

One of the reasons we know much more about craft guilds in the Anglophone world today than we did say, 30 years ago, is that the British government has been trying to figure out how to improve what in the US we call 'vocational training', i.e. the raising of skilled labor. When they look at their economic rivals in Germany and a few other continental regimes across the channel (Austria, Switzerland, Czechia, Slovakia... and a little bit in France, Sweden, Denmark, the Low Countries and Italy), where they still utilize some elements of the old medieval craft system - in particular apprenticeships and in some industries still some full-fledged journeymen (who spend a year or two on the road traveling to learn their craft).

So back in the 90s the London School of Economics started funding some in depth studies which have changed the perception of 'guilds' in academia to some extent (also started a huge argument, with factions appearing on both sides throughout Europe and North America). Their goal was to learn better methods for training skilled labor for industry. This issue of the availability of skilled labor is at least tangentally relevant to aircraft production. A shortage of skilled labor was a problem gradually overcome in the Soviet Union. I think there was an issue with this in Japan as well, in both cases it was due to the rapid transformation of feudal, agrarian societies into technological, industrial ones. China was still on the other side of that during Ww2 and had a big problem finding enough skilled labor and learning how to train them.

England I think benefited from a fairly high ratio of skilled labor, Germany definitely did. France, Italy and the United States had their share as well though with varying degrees of unique local conditions. The US for example had a lot of semi-skilled people who may have had some experience with factory work, and also had become used to tinkering with cars, trucks and farm tractors due to their increased production and use of such machines in the economy. But certainly there was little remnant of any guild culture (though there were some). Somewhat similar for Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc.

So as war is increasingly imminent, each nation has a reservoir of skilled vs unskilled labor, and there is also some variation on what kinds of skill sets are available - do you have a lot of people with design chops (like cutlers or masons from 15th Century Strasbourg who studied Euclid and Vitruvius) or are your skilled workers simply trained to operate a lathe or to work on a factory floor and follow instructions? All of this ties into the history of industrialization in each region.

 

[Wild_Bill_Kelso]

By the way Merry Christmas and happy Hanukkah and Winter Solstice etc. Very much enjoy chatting with you folks and hope you are all doing well today.