In the border country between the nationalised industries and private industry lay industries which although privately owned were subject to quasi-public efforts to improve their productivity. Perhaps the leading examples of the occupants of this hybrid territory were the cotton and iron and steel industries, the latter not being nationalised until 1951. These ‘first industrial revolution’ industries had long attracted the attentions of a mix of bankers, politicians, and industrialists concerned to improve each industry's productivity and competitiveness. The pessimistic inter-war diagnoses of the iron and steel industry by the American engineering consultants, Brassert and Co., and of cotton by the Clynes Committee in 1930, simply seemed to be confirmed by the wartime examination of each industry. There was little disposition to challenge the crude comparisons published by Laslo Rostas in 1943, which estimated the relative productivities of steelmaking in the USA, Germany, and the UK as 168:114:100. The transatlantic gap was assumed by many commentators to have widened across the war and visits by steelmen such as John Craig of Colvilles confirmed the progress being made by US managers in the use of the larger furnaces with hearths 27 feet in diameter, operating pressures of 18–20 psi (pounds per square inch) and with daily production capabilities of 1,000 tons. Long before the end of the war, discussions on improving the productivity and competitiveness of each industry were well under way.