For the record
Britain's industrial revolution was powered by coal and forged in iron. It was the Darby's of Coalbrookdale, a family of ironmasters, who pioneered the technique of first coking the coal which in turn enabled the use of English ores; in less than half a century, coal and iron between them had transformed the face of England. Since then coal has lost ground to oil, but iron and steel continue to dominate the economy of world capitalism.
It was iron that provided a material strong enough to stand up to steam and so paved the way for Watt’s engines. Industry was able to get away from the rivers and streams and its dependence on waterwheels. Hundreds of miles of canals were built in no time to cope with the increased demands of the blast furnaces for coal. Roads were built to carry away the manufactures.
In the I850's, iron gave way to steel with the developments introduced by Bessemer and Siemens of using “blowers” to raise the furnace temperature and get rid of the impurities in the iron. Since then there have been further improvements, using electric furnaces for special steels and, very recently, the use of oxygen instead of air for the blast. At the same time, as the industry has grown bigger and bigger, more use has been made of the integrated plant principle whereby all the processes of steelmaking are concentrated on the same site- hence the growth of the huge complexes which are the dominant feature today.
These installations need vast capital resources. United States Steel, the biggest producer in the world, has a share capital of over £1,000 million and its nearest rival. Bethlehem Steel, more than £500 million. The world is now scoured for iron-ore; mountains of it are literally taken away and transported thousands of miles to the furnaces. Marvels of engineering construction are built to load and unload it and bulk carriers of up to 100,000 tons ply a ferry service across the oceans. More and more, the furnaces are migrating to the coast to eliminate transport costs—the result is the huge new plants at Newport and Dunkirk, and the proposed giant complex at Rotterdam.
In the Darby’s time, a firm was big if it produced a thousand tons of iron a year; nowadays it is in economic danger if it produces less than a million, or even two million, tons. Steel is still one of the pillars of capitalism’s economy—it is still the barometer that can forecast whether the economy is set fair, or there are storms ahead, or just a period of doldrums.
As usual under capitalism, the tendency is towards bigger and bigger units. There are still absorptions and amalgamations going on, and more and more does an annual output of 2 million tons seem the minimum unit for present day efficiency and competitiveness. In the following table, showing the “top twenty” producers in the world excluding Russia and China, the minimum is actually about 2$ million tons a year.
The most striking impression from the figures is, of course, the overwhelming preponderance of the American firms, particularly U.S. steel, which on its own has a greater output of steel than the whole of the U.K. It is also interesting to note the apparently greater fragmentation of the British industry. United Steel is the only British firm to appear, in the table and there is only one other, the Steel Company of Wales, in the next ten, whereas there are three further German companies, three French, and one Japanese.
We hope to take a further look into the international steel industry in a later issue.
Rivalry v. Safety
We do not need to labour the point about the intense competition existing at present in the aviation industry. What with the excitement over Australia’s decision to buy American TFX's instead of British TSR-2's, the race between the Anglo/French Concord and the U.S. Mach 2 airliner; and the current struggle of B.A.C. to get their V.C.-10 into the air commercially before the Douglas D.C.-9; the aeroplane manufacturers must really be having a worrying time of it.
It was thus a major setback for B.A.C. when their prototype V.C.-I0 crashed recently, apparently as a result of trouble with the tail assembly.
As is well known, the V.C.-10 carries on a technique, engines set well back in the rear, that was developed originally by the French company, Sud-Aviation, with their Caravelle. And it is with Sud- Aviation that B.A.C. are developing the new supersonic Concord.
It has also been known for some time that the V.C.-10 has been running into snags with this particular tail assembly—only a few months ago B.A.C. announced publicly that they had had to modify it. Strong rumour also has it that the Caravelle went through similar troubles in its early development stages. What more natural, then, that B.A.C. should ask Sud-Aviation—after all, their collaborators in the Concord—for details of their earlier experiences of putting engines under the tail?
And what sort of an answer do you think they got? A very dusty one, according to an Insight report in the Sunday Times of October 27 -“Sud-Aviation would disclose nothing.”
A few months later, the V.C.-10 crashed, killing all its crew. There may conceivably be other crashes before the makers discover what is happening to the tail assembly.
In the meantime, the Caravelle flies on, with hardly a competitor. And the longer the V.C.-10 takes to get commercially off the ground the longer will Sud-Aviation enjoy this happy state of affairs. Co-operation may be all very well but under capitalism one must be very careful not to carry it too far.
Stan Hampson
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