Bridging the Seas by Ferreiro Larrie D

Author:Ferreiro, Larrie D.
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: iron; steel; standardization; construction; industry; sailing; shipyards; innovation; naval warfare
Publisher: MIT Press

The rise of vertical integration was not limited to shipyards in Britain and the United States. European yards underwent a similar evolution during the same period, though in many cases there were political as well as economic factors that contributed to this development. This era was marked by a burst of nation building across the Continent. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was formed in 1867, while the unification of Italy was completed in 1871, the same year that marked the union of Germany and the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War. The governments of those nations subsequently embarked on accelerated programs of industrialization as a means of recovering from the economic and social upheavals, and shipbuilding was at the center of these efforts.28

In most of those cases, vertically integrated iron and steel shipyards were built from the ground up, either upon the site of defunct wood shipyards or in greenfield sites. In Germany, the shipyard of Meyer Werft in Papenberg had been building wooden sailing ships since 1795, but by the late 1860s it was foundering as a business. The unification of Germany spurred a sudden flurry of investment capital, and Joseph Meyer took advantage of it by building iron foundries and boiler and engine works atop the remains of the old wood boatyard. At first building small, iron-hulled coastal steamboats, he instituted a strict division of labor among workers and brought in skilled engineers from other industries. Although vertical integration was built in from the start, Meyer only slowly expanded the yard’s capabilities to large steel-hulled oceangoing vessels after the end of World War I. By contrast, in 1877 Hermann Blohm and Ernst Voss, both of whom had spent the previous three years working in Clyde shipyards, teamed up to erect a new integrated yard on a former cow pasture in Hamburg, which was dedicated right from the start to building large steel oceangoing vessels. Within 10 years, Blohm und Voss was ready to produce small steel warships, and by 1898 it was designing and building 12,000-tonne battleships.29

The creation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire also spurred the industrialization of the shipyards in its main port of Trieste, which already had a long history of technical innovation—the Panfilli shipyard built one of the first screw steamboats, Civetta, in 1829. Gaspare and Giuseppe Tonello, who came from Panfilli, tried to transition their San Marco shipyard from wood to iron, but shortly after Italian unification the yard closed. Meanwhile, the Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino led by Austrian industrialist Georg Strudthoff, began as an engine builder and quickly grew. After unification it added dry docks and foundries to its San Rocco yard and built two of the navy’s first four steel warships. By 1896 a consortium of investors led by the Rothschild family allowed Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino to buy the old San Marco yard and significantly scale up and integrate its machinery, construction, and repair facilities, becoming the sole provider of large capital ships for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Meanwhile, the unification of Italy led to the

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