History and Technology, an International Open Access Journal, Volume 30, 2014, Issue 4, pages 309-333 | Published online: 24 Feb 2015. An interesting analysis of Britain’s changing role from apparent leadership in innovation and scholarship to a diminished role dominated by USA technology. The place of Lyons and LEO is outlined on page 311 amongst other notable technological achievements unmatched by American technology. See also in extract from the paper in the section.
In 1947, J. Lyons and Company, Britain’s leading catering firm, sent two senior managers to the USA to investigate American systems of office management. Their bald conclusion was that established practice could teach them nothing: ‘We did not find any firm which has developed on so broad a front as Lyons, most offices only having tackled a limited number of office problems without having surveyed the whole field’. Physical layouts – notably including that of the Pentagon – were poor, and development plans conservative, tending blindly to ignore the potential of rapid electronic processing. Far more exciting was the extensive American work on digital computing, but this was still largely uncommercialised.11 Learning that there were British efforts in the same direction, the Lyons managers fostered a partnership with researchers at the University of Cambridge to develop the Lyons Electronic Office (LEO), which automated the bulk of the firm’s payroll, stock control and valuation tasks across 1951–54, placing it at the forefront of international developments in this field. Lyons then formed a subsidiary to market LEO equipment to other businesses, stressing its business context as a unique guarantee of user-focused design.12
A similar story played out in parallel at Ferranti, the commercial electrical and defence contracting group, which in 1948 sent a representative, Dietrich Prinz, to the USA to assess the state of the art in digital computing. Prinz’s American hosts, according to company legend, wondered ‘why he had come there, since the most advanced work was being done on Ferranti’s doorstep at Manchester University’, where the cathode ray tube storage system had become the basis for a prototype computer.
