Ralf Banken

Constructing an ‘industry’: the case of industrial gases, 1886–2006

Historically minded social scientists who analyse business and industrial development over time – including business historians – often deploy the term ‘industry’ as if its meaning were both self-evident and unchanging through time. This article uses the case of the international industrial gases industry over the course of 12 decades to demonstrate some ways in which a more critical and dynamic view of ‘industry’ – in combination with recognition of the imperfect overlap between firms on the one hand and industries on the other – enables better understanding and analysis of both.

'The trauma of competition': The entry of Air Products Inc. into the industrial gases business in Britain and continental Europe, 1947-70

The British Oxygen Company (BOC) had a virtual monopoly on the supply of industrial gases (e.g. oxygen and acetylene) on the British market through the 1950s, when it was finally challenged by an American-based company, Air Products. Air Products Limited (APL) was able to undercut BOCs position, overcoming high barriers to entry to gain significant market share in this sector, which shares some features of network industries. Factors in this success included conditions imposed by the Board of Trade, APLs innovations, BOCs slow response, and favourable market conditions. APLs success had implications for the internationalisation of the industrial gases industry.

Building on Air: The International Industrial Gases Industry, 1886–2006

The industrial gases industry originated in 1886, when a London-based company began producing high-purity oxygen. Initially purified oxygen was a solution in search of a problem, but demand for it soared early in the twentieth century with the emergence of welding technology. By then, dramatic technological improvements in air separation and purification emerged, as did most key firms dominating the industry today. Building on air in the decades that followed, the firms expanded their product range and geographical reach to create applications essential to every manufacturing process in the modern world, from semiconductor production to oil refining, waste water treatment, and steel-making. This is the first scholarly history of this vital but invisible industry from its origins to the present. Based on unparalleled access to company and public archives, the book explores business and technological development, industrial evolution, and the industrys local roots even while becoming international and global.

Pipelinenetze als Unternehmensstrategie. Die Entstehung des Sauerstoffleitungsnetzes im Ruhrgebiet 1956 bis 1975

Although pipelines form a vital part of the transport and distribution infrastructure for a variety of industries, they are rarely examined by economic and business historians. Those analyses that do exist concentrate on oil and gas pipelines, and often on geopolitical dimensions and general interactions between economics and politics, including pipelines as a focus for political protest. In contrast, the interests of the firms involved in building and operating them, the interplay between suppliers and customers and the economic logic of pipeline construction are seldom addressed in any detail. This article explores these issues using the case of the construction of an oxygen pipeline network in the Ruhr district between 1956 and 1975.

Swiss aluminium for Hitler's war? The history of the 'Alusuisse' 1918-1950

considered as a dynamic factor that impacted upon business as the economic environment in Western Europe was moulded by the institutions of the EC. In each case, as British industrialists increasingly realised, developments within the EC impacted upon their business practices regardless of Britain’s failure to sign the Treaty of Rome; the rub was, however, the lack of purchase that Britain’s companies had, as outsiders, on the processes of change within the EC. Taken overall, and in the context of the historiography that addresses the process of ‘Europeanisation’, Neil Rollings argues here for an analogous recognition on the part of business historians.