Marconi and notable successors

Guglielmo Marconi, from Bolognia in Italy, at the age of 22, in 1898, set up Marconi Telegraph Company in a former mill in Chelmsford: the first wireless factory in the world. His fascination was with radio waves, and he built on earlier work, by Hertz and others, for his first patent registered in England in 1897.

He was born in Italy of an Italian father and Irish mother who had eloped ten years earlier. He was brought up largely by his doting mother who loved everything British; his father was distant and disapproving. He developed a fascination with science and electricity, frowned on by his father. He was no great scholar, but an obsessive experimentalist.

Maxwell had produced a theory supporting the existence of electromagnetic waves and eight years later Hertz had carried out experiments which demonstrated the theory. All this captured the imagination of the teenage Marconi who took over his mother’s loft to replicate Hertz’s experiments and improve upon them. A number of established scientists were exploring the theory of electromagnetic waves, Marconi’s only interest was in seeing whether the waves could transmit information. He found that whilst the transmitted wave might be weak, it could control a much stronger signal and so, for example, make a sound. Further experiments increased the range of transmission.

At the age of 21, Marconi was ready for backers to take forward his invention. His father approached the Italian Post Office, which declined. His mother took him to England where William Preece, the Chief Engineer of the British Post Office, had been experimenting with electromagnetic induction. Marconi lodged a patent application and was then introduced to Preece to whom he demonstrated his invention. A public demonstration followed in July 1896 with Morse messages sent a mile across London. Further public demonstrations followed in England and Italy. Marconi sold his patent rights to the company that bears his name receiving in exchange a controlling shareholding.

The choice of where to manufacture wireless equipment is interesting. He had experimented in London but suffered interference from the tram network. Chelmsford was far away from trams and had electrical engineers thanks to Crompton, and also factory space.

I write of the remarkable company he created in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

The company’s long term success owed a great deal to Marconi’s commitment to excellence. The company would recruit the best talent. Here are just two outstanding examples.

Dr Eric Eastwood

Dr Eric Eastwood who was recruited by Marconi after the war to lead its work on radar. He undoubtedly enhanced the technical expertise within the company which in turn led to it being the most significant part of GEC prior to that company’s breakup. Marconi Defence Systems was the perfect fit for British Aerospace with which it merged to become BAE Systems, now a respected and successful British company.

Eric Eastwood was born in Rochdale on 12 March 1910. His father was a mill worker eventually becoming an administrator. His mother kept a shop especially during periods when his father was laid off. Eric had a brother and two sisters who with Eric moved from school to school as their father sought work. It became clear that Eric was the most intellectually gifted and so the family decided to focus their resources in his schooling at Oldham. He was by all accounts a hard working and well organised student. This paid off with first scholarships to read Physics at Manchester and then to write a PhD at Cambridge.

His first career was in teaching physics which he did at Runcorn at a school founded by Brunner and Mond. He moved from there to Liverpool and in 1941 volunteered for the RAF. It didn't take long for his particular skills to be noticed and he was transferred to 60 Group which has responsibility for running the CH (chain home) network of radar stations. His first job was the calibration of one of the stations to take account of its physical position in order to report with a degree of accuracy on the position of enemy aircraft. Eric was promoted, eventually had full command of the whole of the home radar establishments.

After the war he joined English Electric in their Research Department at Stafford then, following EE's purchase of Marconi, Eric moved to Marconi Research Laboratories at Great Baddow near Chelmsford first as Deputy Director and then as Director in 1954. I write in Vehicles to Vaccines of the vital work carried out by Eric and his colleagues both to benefit the defence of these islands but also to advance the commercial success of the Marconi company.

He eventually retired from GEC in 1981 having also served on a number of governmental and professional committees. His contribution to radar was second to none. He received many awards including that of Knight Batchelor.

F.N. Sutherland

Frederick Neil Sutherland graduated from Cambridge and went to serve as a pilot in the RNAS joining English Electric in Preston in 1922. He started on the shop floor before becoming an apprentice. He was appointed Chief Engineer in South America and General Manager in Brazil before an appointment as Managing Director of English Electric South Africa. I write in Vehicles to Vaccines how he was chosen by George Nelson to run their new acquisition, Marconi. He turned out to be the perfect man for the job. Interestingly, he followed the tradition set by Marconi’s former boss, Admiral Grant, of involving his wife in the welfare of his employees, something I had only ever seen at the Central Ordnance Depot at Greenford in the early years of the Second World War.

During his tenure the turnover of Marconi grew from £2.5 million to £50 million becoming one of our largest exporters. With him at the helm the company won the Queens Award for Exports three years running.

Further reading:

• Jolly, W.P., Marconi (London: Constable, 1972)
• Jones, Francis Edgar ; Eric Eastwood, 12 March 1910 - 6 October 1981. Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 1 November 1983; (29): 177–195. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.1983.0007

Coming soon - How Manufacturing Shaped Britain

 This book sets out to discover how manufacturing shaped this island. Why manufacturing spread across the country, how it grew, why it declined and what was left.

It is looking at manufacturing through the lens of geography.

Manufacturing transformed the places where it took place. Villages became towns because millennia earlier great forests had been buried and became rich seams of coal. Tiny seaside communities surviving on fishing witnessed the building of ever larger ships carrying cargoes of coal or wool and returning with exotic goods from the east. Waring barons found their swords replaced by guns cast from ore left in the earth’s crust. Disparate communities were linked first by sea then by Roman Road, turnpike, canal, railway, road and air. New communities formed on these links.

Manufacturing places emerged close to raw materials and sources of energy. Climate and topography gathered manufacturing which thrived in local conditions. In time, as centres of population emerged, manufacturing followed to meet their every need. Inventions were pursued where skills had been nurtured.

None of this was planned, least of all two world wars which energised manufacturers across the land to war effort, leaving vast factories in their wake crying out for new uses.

Books have explored why Britain moved ahead of its great trading rivals: the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. And it did, only to be overtaken by America, Germany, and France, and replaced by developing countries. This left manufacturers stranded with factories and workforces no longer needed, leaving populations without work, steelworks replaced by supermarkets, factories by warehouses.

This book is for people who wish to understand what has happened.

The Ferranti Spirit

Sebastian de Ferranti was born in Liverpool in 1864, the son of a photographer whose family had come from Bologna. Cesar had married Juliana the daughter of artist William Scott. Juliana, born in 1825, was a musician and had been teaching music. Their ambition for their son was in the arts, but Sebastian was fascinated by all things mechanical. He told them very early on that he would become a Manufacturing Engineer. He made models and carried out experiments. When he went to school at St Augustine's in Ramsgate he was given space in the school's kitchen to continue his experiments. He was no academic, but his father managed to secure a place for him at University College London. This was not a success, and his father's illness and consequent financial problems meant that Sebastian had to leave after only a few months in order to earn his living and keep his mother.

Ferranti’s fascination, from a very early age, was with power generation and transmission. He was convinced that power generation did not need to be located near to the user, but rather close to the source of energy used. At school in Ramsgate, he had made both an electric light and a dynamo.

He found work with Siemens Brothers as a research assistant where he worked with dynamos and lighting. He had in particular devised an improvement to the Siemens machine. One of Ferranti's father's professional acquaintances was Alfred Thompson, an electrical enthusiast. He saw huge merit in what Ferranti was doing and introduced him to a solicitor, Francis Ince. Together they formed Ferranti, Thompson Ince & Co, and Ferranti filed a patent application. By chance he met Sir William Thomson the future Lord Kelvin who was filing a patent for a similar invention. The invention was in effect shared and marketed at the Ferranti-Thomson alternator. The company received further investment from the Robert Hammond's Electric Light and Power Supply Company and some ninety-two other investors. I write of the scramble for electrical dominance in my blog piece on American manufacturers. It was a tough time for the British.

Ferranti parted company with both Hammond and Thompson and his first major project was the Grosvenor power station and then he moved on to build the first power station at Deptford in East London. I quoted in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how the power company's chairman described Ferranti's plant to the press. It was an astonishing project for anyone, let alone a young man.

Sebastian Ferranti's other passion was engineering excellence which he would achieve at the workbench with experimentation rather that at the drawing board. This was an expensive passion and caused much anxiety to Francis Ince whose focus was rather more on business. In an electrical world that was intensely competitive and in an economy that was struggling, this passion drove the company into receivership. However, the joint receivers believed in Sebastian and introduced much needed financial discipline. After two years the company was free once more.

Vincent, Sebastian's son, had seen at first hand the fall of the business and the introduction of financial discipline and when he took over he was unmoving in his commitment to financial prudence. However, the Ferranti Spirit was in his DNA and he encouraged innovation by his departmental managers. He saw the merit in diversification, but it was defence which proved the most attractive and challenging. I write of the growth of the company in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

The third generation's leader was another Sebastian, Vincent's son, who took the chair when Sir Vincent retired in 1963 after thirty-three years with the company. It was by then large, and dispersed with a wide product range and still that Ferranti spirit. I write of the work on the company in three related sectors (Heavy Electrical Manufacturing; Radio, Television and Telecommunications; and Computers and Semiconductors) in Vehicles to Vaccines in which I also tell of the end of this great company.

When the NEB took a stake in the Ferranti company to save it, there were voices who condemned what had become known as the ‘Ferranti spirit’. This spirit was the beating heart of this family company and was a determination to push back the boundaries of technology. In this the Ferranti company was hugely successful. Ferranti’s problem was money. The family was determined not to seek external investors for fear of the constraints they would impose. In the end it was a disastrous investment under the chairmanship of a non family member which led to its final demise.

Further reading:

Wilson, John F., Ferranti - A History - Building a Family Business, 1882-1975 (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 1999)