Vickers Using Krupp Fuzes

[bob lembke]

I am currently reading Manchester's The Arms of Krupp ( an interesting but somewhat uneven book, IMHO), and he mentioned two interesting things, but I have learned to be cautious of some of the things that he states. From my notes: "1897 - About 1897 Krupp took a leading role in establishing an armor plate trust between Krupp, Vickers, Armstrong, Schneider, Carnegie, and Bethlehem Steel, and Krupp got a $45/ton royalty on each ton of hull armor. There were only two basic processes for case-hardening armor; Krupp’s, and the Harvey process (H. A. Harvey was an American; the Harvey United Steel Company was a shell corporation headed by Albert Vickers, but manufactured nothing itself.) So as the Great Powers were ramping up their navies leading up to the Great War, the other powers were paying Krupp a considerable amount of royalties. Manchester, William, The Arms of Krupp 1587 - 1968, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1964, 942 pages, page 213."

Even more interestingly, in 1902 Vickers wanted to sell shells with the Krupp time fuzes, which seemed to be the best, so they cut a deal with Krupp, and the latter sent Vickers the blueprints, and promised to advise them whenever they developed improvements to the fuzes. A license fee of one shilling threepence was set up for "each one fired" (not manufactured, or sold?). After the war, in 1924 Krupp approached Vickers for payment of the royalties for the shells fired against the Germans and others (in 1919 the war might have been a bit fresh), and in 1926 Vickers supposedly actually paid Krupp 40,000 pounds in fees, seemingly having been quite modest in their accounting of how many shells they actually made.

Under the agreement Vickers shells with Krupp fuzes were supposed to be stamped "KPz" ("Krupp Patent Zunder"?; "Zunder" in German is "fuze") How long was this done? Till 1918? The book deserves to be taken with a grain of salt sometimes, to my mind, but those major arms companies certainly were a piece of work.

Bob Lembke

[centurion]

I believe that such arrangements existed in both directions (Whitehead torpedos for example used by navies on all sides and manufactured in Britain and Trieste) but that any payment was made to an escrow account in Switzerland for settlement sometime after hostilities had ceased. I think something similar happened in WW2 in respect of Dunlop tyres made in Birmingham and Hanau.

[Cnock]

Hi Bob,

this was the British fuze nr.80

Cnock