Ferranti-Packard: Pioneers in Canadian Electrical Manufacturing

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University and the
author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

In 1923, the sales manager of the English electrical company Ferranti
visited his Canadian subsidiary. “Electrical thought,” he noted
enviously of Canada, “has become a national habit.” This superb
corporate history provides a lively tale of Canada’s abiding appetite
for electricity and the role of two manufacturers of the apparatus that
carried, measured, and applied power from source to consumer.
Ferranti-Packard was the product of a 1958 merger of two foreign-born
electrical equipment makers. American technology and capital sparked the
Packard Electrical Company’s 1895 beginnings as the producer of
delicately crafted vacuum light bulbs. The company was soon
manufacturing watt-hour meters and briefly even automobiles. The sale of
meters also drew the English firm Ferranti to Canada in 1912; it was
soon producing transformers that allowed broader transmission of power
by “stepping-down” high voltage for local distribution.

This book succeeds in many ways. On a narrative level, it vividly
traces the distinctive corporate cultures of Packard and Ferranti. The
rhythm is set by the notoriously cyclical nature of the electrical
industry and the yeasty growth of technology. Transformers grew
exponentially in size. The applications for electricity defied the
expectations of the wildest turn-of-the-century dreamer. Ferranti still
makes transformers, but it has also, for instance, recently masterminded
the production of the magnetic “flip-disk” display technology
employed at airports and on buses. Ball and Vardalas convey this
involved evolution in lively fashion, one that puts often intricate
technical detail in language comprehensive to the layreader. Excellent
illustrations enhance this effect.

The book also provides two valuable case studies of the fickle process
of developing new technologies and bringing them to market. Much has
been written about foreign subsidiary companies operating in Canada;
they are often uniformly categorized as “miniature replicas” of
their foreign parents, stripped of any technological independence and
barred from exporting. The Packard and Ferranti of these pages defy this
stereotype. Packard, for instance, developed a corporate culture of
“leanness, efficiency and self-reliance,” perfecting new transformer
technology and eventually exporting it to the United States. Ferranti
moved into electronics, applying electronic data processing to mail and
cheque sorting, military tracking, and airline scheduling. Not all these
ventures brought profits; Ferranti was too small to compete against the
likes of IBM in computer development. Ferranti-Packard’s history
demonstrates that some of the “infant industries” set up under the
tariffs of John A. Macdonald’s National Policy did come of age,
thereby stimulating technological innovation and diversified industrial
production in the Canadian economy. Now controlled by Rolls-Royce,
Ferranti-Packard has shown similar maturity in allowing a couple of
professional historians to tell its story.