Post #1871569

Radar is another technology which the British pioneered and shared with the US. That story is told in "The Invention That Changed the World: How a Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technical Revolution". Again, the Americans had the resources to develop and bring to production this electronic wonder. (I read that book long ago - time for a re-read in the context of these other books.) Finally, also in the 1940s, the British had a lead in the technology of stored program electronic computers. It's tragic to read about the underfunded scrabbling that the team at NPL endured to build the Pilot ACE in the aftermath of the war, constrained by a shattered economy and rationing, and contrast it with the vast state (I mean nation state) resources that the Americans could throw at their first (stored program) computing projects, EDSAC and BINAC. That story is well told in "Alan Turing: The Enigma". #sociotechnicalsystems