Infrastructure and the plateaus of innovation

Italy's innovators initially viewed aviation as a level field, but aircraft production quickly exposed major differences in national infrastructure. Britain could fund experiments, contract with many firms, and scale promising machines from an industrial base described as larger before the First World War than after the Second. Interwar policy later paid British yards to close, which reduced the manufacturing base available for rearmament. Italy possessed strong ideas without the same ability to manufacture them in quantity. The comparison explains why invention alone did not determine naval-air power. It also cautions against assuming continuous exponential improvement, because technologies plateau, branch into dead ends, and are displaced by different approaches. Confident predictions can look reasonable from an early growth curve while still misunderstanding which infrastructure and technical path will matter.