This book has its somewhat unlikely origins in my longstanding, but for some time dormant, interest in the seemingly disparate technologies of weapons and optical instruments. That interest was reawakened by chance several years ago when a friend gave me a copy of Anthony Pollen's The Great Gunnery Scandal which he thought might make for a good book at bedtime. Telling the story of one inventor's efforts before the First World War to sell the British Admiralty a new system for controlling long-range naval gunnery, it did indeed turn out to be what used to be called a ‘jolly good read’. I owe Michael Grey a good deal of thanks for the gift of the book because it led me to the realization that the two technologies not only converged in the control and deployment of weapons but also had distinct commonalities in the way they were conceptualized, understood, selected and acquired by their military clients. As I began to explore both areas it quickly became apparent that although there was an abundance of literature, both scholarly and popular, on the design and manufacture of weapons, there was virtually nothing on the production of optics for warfare.

Optical munitions have indeed been very much been overlooked by historians of all persuasions, something which was pressed home to me by my then undergraduate supervisor Alan Simmonds. It was he who first encouraged me to investigate the subject and to develop my findings.

War is the ultimate test of munitions supply. If a country's armed forces have inadequate quantities of munitions, or if they are significantly inferior to the enemy's, then the possibility of defeat increasingly becomes a threat. Even the greatest of command skills, determination and courage can be negated by the lack of the necessary equipment for the effective prosecution of war. In evaluating the success of munitions supply it might reasonably be supposed that the principal, perhaps the only, criterion of success is whether sufficient quantities of what was needed to ensure victory were indeed provided. But success in tests comes at different levels and assessing the degree attained by the optical munitions industry after mid-1915 is not one which can be measured by the simple yardstick of whether the armed forces received an adequate number of whatever instruments they needed. Equally important is to understand how it went about meeting the tasks imposed on it by the exigencies of war and, in particular, its relationship with the state in the form of the Ministry of Munitions’ Optical Munitions and Glassware Department (OMGD). Because that body was inextricably linked to the industry from mid-1915, both must be considered together.

A convenient route towards understanding the evolution of the industry between then and the end of the war is to look at the processes by which the OMGD went about securing adequate output from the industry in what have been called ‘individual optical technologies’, and examining how each progressed in the context of wartime conditions.

Having passed through the upheaval of industrial demobilization, the optical munitions makers had to face the longer-term problems of the reversion to peace. The post-war period brought new political attitudes to armaments and the resulting shift to arms limitation and reduction contrasted sharply with the pre-war years, which had been characterized by the willingness of governments to spend heavily on military technologies. Budgets shrank and with demobilization the victorious armies found themselves with a surplus of optical munitions, many of which would not need replacing for a considerable time. This virtually eliminated short- and medium-term demand for land service instruments and for most pre-war producers military optics ceased to be viable business. Matters were different with sophisticated naval instruments such as large rangefinders and submarine periscopes, where demand survived because continuing evolution in related weapons technologies sustained the need for improvements, even though the quantities required were relatively small. These diminished requirements meant that by 1923 only one British company was still substantially involved in complex optical munitions production, and of the other makers mentioned previously, only three continued occasionally to manufacture less complex military optics. Frederick Cheshire's gloomy assessment of the capacity for optical munitions manufacture in 1915 perhaps came closer to the truth in 1923 than when he originally made it; even fewer firms were now involved and the capacity for mass production was far less than before the war.

The optical munitions makers, like almost all of British industry, were unprepared for the demands of a major war and encountered a variety of problems in responding to the growing demands made upon them between August 1914 and the early summer of 1915. Some of these difficulties were outside the industry's own control, but others resulted from the overall structure of optical instrument making within which most of the established munitions contractors lived. The principal difficulty was the unanticipated, exponentially increasing demand from the British Army that was expanding on an unprecedented scale and which had not yet been fully equipped with optical apparatus before the war. In the first ten months of the conflict, the War Office failed not only to quantify its own optical requirements accurately, but also neglected to concentrate the orders it did place on the makers who were best suited to deal with them. There was an inability to recognize, let alone come to terms with, the strengths and limitations of both the general and specialized optical sectors of the industry. Its strengths were either ignored or disregarded during 1914 and early 1915, and the ensuing shortcomings in deliveries have been read as signifying a chronic systemic weakness in the industry, particularly in that it had failed to keep up with both its French and German counterparts.

This book describes and analyses the creation and growth of a successful technological and strategically vital manufacturing community in Britain whose story runs counter to perceptions of the general relative decline in British scientific and technological industries during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The optical munitions industry has remained largely unnoticed by historians, not least because of assumptions that its products were essentially little different from those of the general optical manufacturing sector. In fact, the optical munitions industry produced a highly specialized, increasingly sophisticated and complex group of products in response to other advancing technologies that not only influenced military and naval weapons design, but also the strategy and tactics of their use. These devices were specially designed or deliberately adapted for use in warfare and were used for a multiplicity of tasks, from observation and sighting individual weapons to controlling gunnery on land and at sea. They ranged from derivatives of the simple terrestrial telescope to highly complex and sophisticated apparatus such as the naval rangefinder and the submarine periscope, creations without which the principal strategic weapons of the First World War could not have functioned at all. This relatively small but highly specialized manufacturing sector attained a crucial degree of importance within the armaments industries so that its story adds substantially to the understanding of the performance of specialized technological manufacturing in Britain between the late nineteenth century and the mid-1920s.

Before the start of the Second Boer War in 1899, the optical instruments employed by the British armed forces had yet to be used on active service in a major war. Although the British Army had been involved in fighting in colonial campaigns throughout the second half of the century, there had been no sustained experience of action to demonstrate the effectiveness of the equipment combined with the tactics into which they fitted or, equally importantly, the ability of the domestic industry to manufacture when faced with the increases in demand typified by large-scale and sustained warfare. By the end of 1906 the British Army had been able to digest how efficiently its optical munitions performed in the Boer War and the War Office had had the opportunity to consider how well its procurement processes had worked. The emergent optical munitions industry had also been given a taste of government contracting under the urgency and pressures of wartime conditions. The Royal Navy had seen no fighting at sea and thus had experienced none of the first-hand experiences of the Army, but it continued to be the industry's more important British service client, its demands increasingly driven by a combination of factors including evolving attitudes to gunnery, improvements in ordnance and the emergence of what amounted to entirely new weapon systems in the form of the submarine and the Dreadnought battleship.

For the optical munitions industry, the signing of the armistice on 11 November 1918 came unexpectedly and, in one sense, prematurely. The effect of the cessation of fighting on Sunday, 11 November had almost immediate repercussions for its business in the form of order cancellations on what amounted to a heroic scale. This had in no way been anticipated by the industry. Irrespective of the political desire to end hostilities and the sentiments being voiced in the press, it had been very much ‘business as usual’ right up to 10 November 1918. There had been no scaling down of contracts and no warnings from the Ministry of Munitions of any imminent likelihood of cancellations. Indeed, firms were still being exhorted to step up production and new contracts were still being issued.

All the country's optical instrument manufacturers were wholly employed in the war effort and none had even begun to consider in practical terms any policies for industrial demobilization and a return to peacetime trading. Furthermore, the efforts of the Ministry's Optical Munitions and Glass Department (OMGD) to set the optical industry on a better footing had not yet reached a stage where substantial improvements in organization or infrastructure had been achieved. The pre-war optical instruments industry had been conscripted and undergone a metamorphosis into the wartime optical munitions industry with some considerable success, but nothing had been done to cater for the inevitable end of large-scale government orders.

The second stage of the optical munitions industry's war was one of large-scale industrial mobilization, a process inextricably interwoven with the policies and attitudes of the Ministry of Munitions. Its creation in the late spring of 1915 and, in particular, the setting up of a department dedicated to optical output was responsible for increasing both the volume and diversity of production between then and the end of the war in 1918. To do so, the Ministry brought into being what can be best described as a ‘conscript’ optical munitions industry which largely submerged the identity of what had existed before the war and during its first ten months. The story of this mobilization is complicated by the existence within the Ministry's Optical Munitions and Glassware Department (OMGD) of parallel aims for short-term and long-term change within the whole of Britain's optical industries. The OMGD essentially looked to replace what it presented as an outmoded, inward looking, pre-war optical instruments industry with a reconstructed one that would not only meet wartime needs but be able to secure a dominant position in the foreign markets which were optimistically expected to emerge after the defeat of Germany removed its large and diverse optical industry from the international stage. These aims were sometimes in conflict with each other, and struggled to find adequate expression within a framework of problems that were grounded in shortages of materiel and an unsatisfactory technological infrastructure.

The story of optical munitions manufacture in Britain between 1888 and 1923 has shown the evolution of a peculiar, even idiosyncratic industry whose progress was often as much governed by the state's defence policies as by its technical and commercial abilities. Although sharing many of the characteristics of the optical instruments industry, such as the computation of lens systems and the finest standards of mechanical engineering, its evolution is best understood by seeing it in the perspective of the armaments industry which provided the stimulus for the creation of almost all of its products. The crucial division between civil instrument and munitions manufacture lay not just in the nature of the products but in the nature of their clients. Armies and navies, and their exchequers, were very different to surveyors, scientists and the man in the street requiring disparate marketing methods. But despite its differences, the optical munitions sector still drew on the private sector for many of its optical techniques, raw materials and skilled workers.

The British optical munitions makers functioned in a demand-led market which was driven by evolving weapons technologies and often heavily influenced by social factors exerted by those who formulated and influenced thinking within the armed forces. The War Office's protracted indecision in choosing an artillery rangefinder between the end of the Boer War and 1914 was caused at first by the service's adherence to the concept that the greatest potential accuracy in an instrument should take precedence over the need for speed and convenience of operation.

By 1914 armies and navies had become dependent on optical devices for much, and sometimes all, of their ability to use their weaponry effectively. That was particularly true for the major naval powers whose battleships and submarines were practically impotent without their rangefinders, telescopic gun sights and periscopes. Land forces were not so totally reliant but, even so, all deployed optics on an increasing scale and would have been hard pressed to counter an enemy in their absence. The seven years running up to the start of the First World War saw optical munitions production grow at an increasing rate and by 1914 a clearly identifiable sector of industry was engaged permanently in the production of such instruments which, with few exceptions, had no civil applications.

Only a small part of the optical instruments trade was engaged in this work, reflecting not just the specialized nature of what was being made but also the contemporary scale of demand for military and naval optics. That demand grew after 1907 partly because advances in optical technology permitted the creation of new instruments but even more because developments in weapons technologies and increasing political instability created a climate that encouraged European states in particular to increase their expenditure on armaments and take up equipment which increasingly depended on optical instrumentation for its effectiveness. For the first time, the British War Office became a systematic buyer of optical munitions, greatly increasing its spending in the last two years of peace.

The story of the emergence of the optical munitions industry from 1888 to 1899 is largely about the growing importance of one instrument – the rangefinder – and the influence which the state had on the emergence of an industry for the manufacture of such specialized optical devices for use in war. The state's influence was transmitted through the activities of the War Office and the Admiralty, both of whom showed a common commitment to the idea of using optical aids but differed significantly in how they organized their acquisition and deployment. These differences changed over time and were based on a number of sometimes complex issues which included technological and tactical considerations, along with other, social, factors – reflecting particular aspects of what were really two very different military societies. That assortment of disparities meant that they proceeded along very different lines in taking up optical munitions and in the way they related to the industry on which they would increasingly come to rely. The War Office, although the first mover in taking steps that might stimulate the growth of a new industry, proved to be less inclined to seek innovation and often reluctant to move forward in the adoption of new types of optical devices.

Even if the term optical munitions would have been unfamiliar to the armed forces in the 1880s, optical instruments intended to give soldiers and sailors some form of tactical advantage in warfare had been used regularly on a small scale since the seventeenth century.