Brown-Curtis turbines and John Brown's refinements

The British shipbuilder John Brown built the American Curtis company's impulse turbines under a local arrangement and became particularly effective at improving their performance. John Brown's occasional attempts to design its own turbines were less consistently successful. Its strength lay in extracting more from a design that already worked well. Brown-Curtis machinery gained a reputation alongside Parsons turbines, to the point that foreign buyers could prefer Brown-built versions to Curtis's own production. The appeal of those refinements also helps explain British choices of machinery for capital ships and battlecruisers. Identical official ratings may not have captured the full performance differences.