Technology transfer Britain

Roy M. MacLeod is professor of history at the University of Sydney. Educated at Harvard, the LSE, and at Cambridge, where he took his Ph.D., he has written extensively in the history of science, medicine and technology. He has held senior appointments at the universities of Sussex and London and visiting appointments at many universities in Europe and the United States. He teaches military history, nuclear history, and the history of museums in Europe, Asia and Australasia. He has written or edited sixteen books, of which the most recent are Darwin s Laboratory Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific (Honolulu University of Hawaii Press, 1994), Technology and the Raj Technical Transfer and Technological Change in British India, 1780-1945 (New Delhi Sage, 1995), and Public Science and Public Policy in Victorian Britain (Aldershot Variorum, 1995). In 1996, he was Edelstein International Fellow in the History of Chemistry. 

The most significant transfer of technology from the Allies was the British process for making amatol , a mixture of TNT and ammonium nitrate. When, in 1917, the demand for TNT outstripped supply, the British extended their store of TNT by mixing it with the more plentiful ammonium nitrate—first in proportions of 50-50, and then, 20-80. Ordnance officers expected the United States would encounter similar shortages, and made inquiries of their own arsenals, of DuPont, and of Britain. In October 1917, two British military experts travelled to the United States, bearing stacks of confidential reports that encapsulated the British state of the art. In inorganic explosives as well, the Americans also borrowed British... 

Jones PL. Heat and mass transfer in a radio-frequency dryer. Ph.D. thesis, Loughborough University of Technology, Loughborough, Great Britain, 1981. 

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