Military-Industrial Interaction, 1884–1914 271tide that the arsenal could not supply quickly or more cheaply.
Though no one realized it at the time, this decision soon gave private
arms makers an effective monopoly on the manufacture of naval heavy
weapons. The reason was simple. Woolwich never caught up with the
grandiose scale of capital investment needed to turn out giant steel
guns, turrets, and other complicated devices with which warships
came to be armed. Armstrong, on the other hand, recognized im
mediately after Krupp’s demonstrations of 1878 and 1879 that to com
pete successfully his firm must at once install the machinery needed to
produce large steel breech-loaders. Sir William therefore reacted to
Krupp’s threatened invasion of a field in which he had hitherto held
undisputed pride of place—the building of big guns for coast artillery
and naval use—by investing in a brand new steel mill and ship yard.^14
By 1886, therefore, Armstrong was ready and eager to add the Royal
Navy to his already distinguished list of foreign customers at a time
when Woolwich had only begun to convert to the manufacture of
breech-loaders.
For the next thirty years the gap proved quite unbridgeable because
of economies of scale. It had long been true that international sales
were needed to keep gunmaking capital equipment in continual—or
nearly continual—use. Such a regime cheapened production drasti
cally, which was why Liège had played such a dominating role in the
European gun trade between the 15th and 19th centuries. Still, in the
course of the eighteenth century, Europe’s leading states all set up ar
senals where guncasting machinery stood idle most of the time. Only
so could they enjoy full sovereign power over the manufacture of
their artillery. Then in the middle years of the nineteenth century
Prussia, the poorest of the great powers, and Russia, the least industri
alized, had supplemented arsenal production with purchases from
Krupp. But in France and Britain (with the exception of William Arm
strong’s years of official recognition, 1859—63) state arsenals retained
their official monopoly until the 1880s. Woolwich had invested in new
machinery for producing larger and larger wrought iron guns for the
Royal Navy ever since the 1860s. But the shift to steel escalated costs
so suddenly and drastically that the responsible authorities balked at
installing the necessary new facilities at Woolwich.
If they had done so, a very expensive capital plant would have stood
- J. D. Scott, Vickers: A History (London, 1962), pp. 34–44. Before 1878 Krupp
had concentrated on field artillery and tacitly left the manufacture of naval artillery to
the British. His big guns of 1878–79 threatened to overturn that division of the market.
Hence the energy of Armstrong’s reaction.