Im not convinced the USA has loads of engineers in all sectors…when I worked on the electric drives for UKs latest electric military ships (by Alstom Marine and offshore, called “Converteam” in UK)…..we had a large , dry land test facility set up by the French in Lutterworth , Leicestershire. It was needed because it was the most high power density electric drive in the world. I know that the Americans came over and exactly duplicated the whole thing, and built an exact replica in the States…..so it sounds to me like the USA is a bit short of electric drive engineers
If there's a working system, without serious flaws, and the world needs only a handful of them, you copy the working solution. The only sane reasons for not copying are that you are blocked from copying, or you have such a bizarre oversupply of engineers, that you can't lay off, that you might as well put them to use building a solution from scratch.
This is why the British auto industry, & to a large extent, their Electronics industry "went down the gurgler".
For instance, Joseph Lucas ("the Prince of Darkness") could see that Bosch made better, more reliable auto electrical systems than they did, (or maybe they didn't---the illusion of "British & best" cast a long shadow), but didn't do the most obvious thing---- get some Bosch bits, tear them down, & find out what they were doing to make them more reliable.
Another case, in the design of TV transmitters, PYE made a very ambitious 25kW UHF transmitter, of which we had two.
These delighted in killing their HT rectifiers.
The rectifiers were tiny units which must have been adequate "on paper", but in practice, on the other side of the world, they were not.
When we started using up the spares, we frantically ordered more, but PYE were extremely "laid back" in their attitude to delivery times.----- several weeks to a month!
We got out of trouble by borrowing from other stations with the same transmitters.
NEC used massive rectifiers that usually outlasted the transmitters.
Another delight was the antenna changeover switch which enabled one transmitter to maintain the service if the other died ( they normally used both).
We spent an inordinate amount of time repairing these, (& became very familiar with the smell of burnt Teflon).
Ultimately, they were replaced with much superior switches made by Andrews.
Again, a possibly good product ruined by poor design in key points.
I mentioned long delivery times for parts.
Later, when I worked at a Commercial TV Studio, I was the unlucky sod who looked after Picture Monitors, as well as being the Transmitter person
Not the Brits this time, but the same sort of story.
We had some Tektronix 650series monitors, & they were one of that companies' rare failures.
The less said the better.
We also had some oldish Bosch monitors, which were reasonable, but "too smart for their own good",
having hinges to fold out the PCBs for service, which also served as the inter board connections.
A bit prone to failure.
As well, we had Sony monitors---- reliable, easy to work on, full documentation provided, parts available from Sony Aust, usually by next airfreight, or if they didn't have it, the day after from Singapore, who also held a large stock.
Then there were the Barcos !
"So-so" reliability, poor UI, hard to work on, very poor documentation.
If you looked at the PCBs, they were a thing of beauty, everything lined up straight as a die---lovely!
Compared to a Sony, the latter looked like crap- capacitor & resistors leaning at odd angles, ribbon cables higgledy piggledy everywhere.
The thing is, the Sony would still be going 20 years down the track, when the Barco had succumbed to age & infirmity.
They did
what mattered right!
And parts!
If a Barco failed & you needed non-generic parts, you wouldn't expect to see them for 2 or3 months.
It seems to me that European firms wait until they can fill up a container before shipping it by sea.
(No airfreight for them).
PS:- I'm now expecting hate mail from ex Joseph Lucas, PYE, & Barco employees.
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