Well sure, the UK may not be a major player in the fields of optics, aeronautics, biotechnology, computer engineering, artificial intelligence, medicine, robotics…and a host of other silly industrial endeavors. But, they sure as hell are on the bleeding edge of technology in the cut-throat field of teapot cozies!
Oil leaks out, water leaks in.
The UK made pretty significant contributions to computing generally, I would say (if we’re talking 21st and 20th centuries). That’s pretty much only history now, but technology manufacture and development has all gone East; they’re having their Industrial Revolution now - we already had ours.
Our Industrial Revolution was coal, steam, steel, cotton and ships; their industrial revolution is silicon, glass, magnets, robots, data and networks.
And (until recently) Imagination Technologies who made the GPU in the Iphone and Ipad (and Sega Genesis back in the day). Did not go so well Apple decided to make their own GPUs however.
F1 is not “cutting edge automobile technology.” it has almost zero relevance to road cars and hasn’t for a long time.
Lytro
Light
Bridge-building. E.g. the Milau bridge. Tunnelling: the Channel Tunnel and Crossrail. Aerospace: the Typhoon, Rolls Royce engines, Airbus. Etc. Etc.
How is Airbus UK? It has some links to the country, but otherwise the great majority of them point to the hated French.
Not cameras, but optical equipment: https://www.york.ac.uk/borthwick/holdings/what-we-hold/businesses/vickers-instruments/
The stuff on display is only a tiny part of the collection. They used to let us play with some of the stuff in storage, very odd prisms used for tank periscopes are what I remember. And microscopes that were more brass than glass, very steampunk.
Well, aside from a bloody great big design and manufacturing plant in Bristol, nothing really :dubious:
The facility, for those interested, is directly opposite the HQ of Rolls Royce, another tiny contribution to aeronautical engineering.
By definition the top grades of motorsport are at the cutting edge, how can it be otherwise? Are they deliberately seeking to underperform?
As for the relevance for road cars? well the head of the Mercedes F1 team (UK-based of course)would beg to differ
Also, the post-war period saw the UK at the cutting edge of aerospace design.
Airbus UK employs 13,000 people.
rather vague and probably just a soft bit of marketing speak to justify to their stakeholders why they continue to spend money on Formula 1.
Oh, well that settles it then.
Road cars have nothing to do with F1, it doesn’t nullify the fact that British F1 engineering has been superlative. The British are capable of being excellent engineers, mechanical designers, and scientists, when they put their minds at it. The British have also created excellent military aircraft designs.
I think of GoPro as a waterproof phone camera without the phone. It has captured a niche for how-to-use but I don’t think it introduces any new imaging technology and it’s definitely not about optics.
Even though those companies existed within the last 20 years they had been on a downhill slide for years before that due to the inability to innovate or even keep pace with technology and market trends. Polaroid was basically a one-camera company and never recovered from the industry shift to digital. Kodak put all its eggs in the APS basket which wasn’t a bad technology but suffered from spectacularly bad timing, and they also failed to play a leadership role in the digital revolution. I think they both tried to branch out into other areas of imaging (e.g., photocopiers) though I’m not sure why they did not have more success there.
Kodak emerged from bankruptcy in 2013 and is still a functioning business, but since they stopped making any form of consumer camera (digital still or video - they had stopped making film cameras in 2004) and spun off their consumer film business they are no longer a camera company.
In my lifetime I do not recall Kodak cameras as anything but junk - I have never considered them to be a serious camera company.
F-stop it. You’re out of your depth of field.
But, yeah, if I had the bux I’d definitely put in a bid on this one.
Kodak had an early lead in the DSLR market.
They collaborated with Nikon (and others) and made the DCS series of DSLRs, which sold for as much as $30K, and were considered groundbreaking.