Daniel Immerwahr

But of course they're debating about screw thread standards because if you don't work this out, the whole thing comes grinding to a halt.

Like Herbert Hoover's point that incompatibility of standards is a massive inefficiency.

I mean, that just sounds like a dorky thing to say, but it turns out if you're in the middle of a war, inefficiencies are lethal.

And so you really do want to resolve the screw thread issue.

Now,

Britain operates on a 55 degree screw thread, so they don't speak to each other.

And it's not just Britain, it's the entire British Empire.

So there's already a global scale political unit that works on the 55 degree screw thread angle, but also has become...

newly dependent on the industrial might of the United States.

And so there are a series of Anglo-US meetings between 1943 and 1945.

And I just sort of went through them all.

And what you can see is the formerly proud, world-dominating British just being humbled and chastened and eventually completely given up.

So the first meeting they have, like meeting one, they say, we would be willing to talk

about screw thread standardization.

Okay, interesting.

Okay, let's have that conversation.

Second meeting, they say, we would agree to consider retooling.

So the screw thread standardization would happen by us adopting your screw thread is something that we would consider.

In the third meeting, they say, okay, we are retooling, but it is just temporary.

It is just for the purposes of the war.