Cambridge is of course the other of our ancient universities and the offspring of Oxford whose students fled there to escape death at the command of a vengeful king.
I am grateful to F.A. Reeve for the particular angle he took in the university’s and city’s brush with manufacturing in his book entitled Cambridge.
He takes his reader back through the history of the fenland town and the emergence of the university. Later, he says this: “until 1867, no college gave a Fellowship to a scientist.” In all my researches into British manufacturing this is a constant complaint that we were at a disadvantage compared to Germany which took scientific education seriously.
The first chemical laboratory was equipped at the expense of G.D. Liveing, the Professor of Chemistry and this was replaced at the expense of St John's; the replacements continued to be used until 1914. A new chemical laboratory was added in 1889.
The Cavendish Laboratory for experimental physics was built at the expense of the Duke of Devonshire in 1872 and James Clark Maxwell had become Professor in 1871. Later, J.J. Thomson became professor at the age of 28 and in his 34 years discovered the electron. He was succeeded in 1918 by Ernest Rutherford who opened up the field of nuclear physics.
For mechanical and applied mechanics, it fell to the Professor, James Stuart, in 1875 to equip the building at his expense although the university later bought the equipment from him.
Most of the instruments needed for medical science were imported from Germany until the Professor of Physiology Sir Michael Foster and two of his pupils, Dew-Smith and Francis Balfour. began to design and manufacture them. This led to Dew-Smith and Horace Darwin founding Cambridge Scientific Instruments with W.T. Pye as their mechanic.
Pye's son W.G. Pye had worked with Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory and in 1896 set up to make scientific instruments. Some twenty five years later, his company moved into wireless but continued with scientific instruments and by 1976 employed 7,000 people in Cambridge. I write more about Pye Wireless in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines.
In the Second World War, Pye’s then owner, C O Stanley, argued strongly against setting up a shadow factory to manufacture sets, and instead set up a whole string of small production units in Cambridgeshire villages and ended up employing 14,000 people. Pye designed and made both an infantry set and tank set.
After the war, design was becoming more important, and Pye took on designer, Robin Day, moving away from ‘high-gloss finishes, radiused corners and gilt trims' that were then general in radiogram and television cabinet design. He moved Pye to an over-all geometry and eventually to a house style recognisable of the best 1950s design evident at the Festival of Britain.
Cambridge Scientific Instruments [Founded by Horace Darwin with A. G. Dew-Smith in 1881 after earlier partnership Fulcher/Drew-Smith partnership in 1878] under the guidance of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation joined with instrument makers George Kent 1968 to form Cambridge Instruments, the largest independent British manufacturer of industrial instruments. A logical progression was into minicomputers which brought the power of computing out of the mainframe room onto the factory floor. 1974 saw the company combine with the international Brown Boveri and then in 1988 it became part of ASEA Brown Boveri (ABB). ABB UK is now a major player in CADCAM.'
Cambridge is home to Life Sciences including Astra-Zeneca R&D. The University produces and nurtures wonderfully innovative manufacturers. ARM probably comes top of the list having emerged from Acorn famous for their BBC computer. With the wartime presence of so many airfields, aircraft manufacturers abounded. Marshall Aerospace has been providing services to aviation since before the First World War. Sustainable packaging Pulpex has set up here. Bayer Crop Science is based here.
Further reading:
- Cattermole, M. J. G. & Wolfe, A. F., 'Horace Darwin's shop: a history of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, 1878–1968' (Adam Hilger, 1987)
- F.A. Reeve, Cambridge (London: B.T. Batsford 1976)
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