TWITTER_ARTICLE

Jordan W.

2026-02-07 · 11:57 UTC ·Jordan_W_Taylor ·10 min read

Brief

Jordan W. Taylor frames Europe’s comparative advantage as depth rather than scale: while the US is strongest at entrepreneurship and China at rapid industrialization, Europe still dominates in narrow, technically forbidding sectors he calls "Impossible Industries." His central example is the gas turbine, where performance gains of only a few percentage points justify extreme engineering sophistication. He points to ceramic matrix composite blades that are about one-third the weight of conventional metal blades and tolerate temperatures beyond those of nickel superalloys, plus the elaborate lubrication, sealing, scavenging, de-aeration, and heat-exchange systems required just to keep a jet engine running. He extends the argument to scientific manufacturing, citing SCHOTT and Safran Reosc’s multi-year work on the Extremely Large Telescope’s giant convex mirrors.

But Taylor’s main warning is that "impossible" advantages rarely last. Electric vehicles reduced the importance of the internal-combustion expertise that long protected incumbent carmakers, and he expects other moats—from airliners to ASML’s lithography ecosystem—to weaken eventually. Europe’s real weakness, he argues, is failing to create enough new scalable businesses because its markets remain fragmented. He claims cross-border regulatory inconsistency functions like a 44%–110% tariff barrier, especially in services, which make up 70% of EU GDP but see only about 20% traded across borders. The result is a continent that still produces engineering marvels but struggles to turn local startups into continental or global champions.

Why it matters

Jordan W. Taylor argues Europe excels at "Impossible Industries"—highly specialized sectors with deep technical moats—citing top-end gas turbines as an example and noting that fewer countries can build leading gas turbines than can build their own nuclear reactors.

Key details

  • The piece highlights gas-turbine engineering complexity through examples such as ceramic matrix composite turbine blades that weigh about one-third as much as conventional blades and can run hotter than nickel superalloys, which melt around 1,400°C yet operate hundreds of degrees above that under active cooling.
  • Taylor uses European precision manufacturing to illustrate durable expertise: SCHOTT’s mirror blanks for the Extremely Large Telescope required 3 months of annealing and 6 months of heat treatment, while Safran Reosc then polished them over 2 years to nanometer-scale accuracy about 20,000 times finer than a human hair.
  • The article argues these moats erode over time, using electric vehicles as the clearest case: century-old automotive expertise built around internal-combustion engines did not prevent newer entrants such as BYD and Tesla from becoming credible global competitors.
  • Taylor says Europe’s bigger structural problem is not simply overregulation but fragmentation: inconsistent national rules create the equivalent of a 44% to 110% tariff barrier, and although services account for 70% of EU GDP, only about one-fifth of services are traded across borders within Europe.
  • TopGolf serves as the author’s example of Europe’s scaling failure: founded in the UK roughly 25 years ago, it expanded primarily in the United States and is now incorporated in Dallas, suggesting companies find it easier to cross the Atlantic than to navigate Europe’s multiple tax and regulatory regimes.
Source evidence

title: @JordanWTaylor: The future, as they say, is dreamed up in America and made in China. This tends ...
author: JordanWTaylor
contenttype: twitterarticle
published: 2026-02-07T11:57:42+00:00
sourceurl: https://x.com/JordanW_Taylor/status/2020104681150722359

word_count: 2161

The future, as they say, is dreamed up in America and made in China. This tends to make European ski

The future, as they say, is dreamed up in America and made in China. This tends to make European skin itch, which is fair enough. We all read history and know there was a time when Britain was Great, France actually had a Lingua Franca and Germany… well, it was a busy place. They’ve definitely gotten up to a few things. Moving on.

And in our age of ubiquitous connection and the Pocket Demon, the more sensitive of you might bristle at know-it-all Americans and studious Chinese flaunting borrowed internet pride of a country they happened to be born in. “Here’s an NVidia AI chip, and here’s a Chinese drone taxi, and what have you got to say about yourselves, Europeans? A flexy bottle-cap? Great stuff.” And it’s good to bristle at some of these things; after all, it really is good to be an entrepreneur in America, and China really does want to asphalt the world and build wonders.

Valid criticisms then, but I’m a Rolls-Royce veteran, which means I know a thing or two about the other type of clever company that flies under the radar and Europe, central Europe in particular, is very, very good at.

I call them ‘Impossible Industries’.

Did you know that there are more countries that can build their own nuclear reactors than there are that can build top-end gas turbines, the things that fly you on holiday and power most of your electrical grid? When I heard that fact I just nodded and said “Yeah. Duh. Gas turbines are hard!” and that was that.

When you want to go global and make a billion, the US-of-A is the place to play. And if you want to build things fast, order aluminium or churn out ships, you call on China. What Europe seems to do is slowly & carefully dig to great depths of expertise in things you never knew about. And make chocolate. We’re top-notch at that.

A gas turbine is a miracle of engineering that’s well past the point of chaotic innovation and well, well down the path of serious expertise and optimized perfection. In many industries like, say, paracetamol pills or razors or biros, that might be a recipe for stagnation, generic imitation and your entire production system sliding into the unappetizing sinkhole marked ‘fungible goods’. One block of washing machine, please, I don’t care what brand.

But that never happened to the gas turbine. For one thing, the value of what it does is hundreds of times greater than the value of the thing itself, and it lives in industries where fuel burn is waste, efficiency is king and margins are tight. This means that it’s always worth piercing the veil of the impossible and building things that God did not intend to power a plane, if it only means a few extra percent of efficiency. And for this reason, hyper-specialists dominate the field. China has been trying to enter the gas turbine game for decades, but -especially with aerospace engines- it hasn’t gotten anywhere near parity with the big boys. Their moat of expertise is just too large. No Apple or Amazon could just rock up and trade infini-cash to create a top end gas turbine business from scratch without taking decades doing it the hard way: It’s too damned difficult.

And of course it is! Recently I wrote about things such as the ceramic matrix composite turbine blade; a creation of materials science bordering the divine (or demonic), which bypasses metals entirely and creates composite blades made out of ceramic fibre matrices. They weigh a third of normal gas turbine blades. They can also run even hotter than conventional nickel superalloys, which themselves already have melting points in the region of 1,400 Celsius and operate a couple of hundred degrees above their melting point, supercooled and pulling thousands of g in a hurricane furnace.

Basically, this is the point at which technology becomes magic and we all need to enroll at the Hogwarts school of engineering wizardry. No wonder the Chinese haven’t caught up.

And that’s just the beginning. There's no depth of banality that extraordinary expertise hasn't given the sorcerer's touch. For example, to run a multi-shaft jet engine you need high performance bearings, and these need oil to keep them lubricated and cool. Check out this (simplified) oil feed diagram from a Trent1000 engine to get an idea of what this means.

Of course the oil works in high pressure zones and low, so you need to separate them somehow or all the oil (and air) will flow straight to the low-pressure bit, so you use labyrinth seals, which allow to rotating masses to create a slip seal whose confusing zig-zag shape makes it difficult for air to leak across.

But some does leak across, so to deal with this you need to create a pressure gradient that keeps oil where it needs to be at every lubricated bearing, so air comes in but oil doesn't leak out.

And now you need to get the air out of the oil too, and debris and muck, and cool it down as well. So now you need scavengers, de-aerators and heat exchangers. Here's a diagram of what that looks like in a common CFM-56 engine.

And that, ladies & gentlemen, is what you need just to pump oil around.

A few years ago, German company SCHOTT produced massive blanks for the secondary mirrors in the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope in Chile. Made out of a proprietary glass ceramic with a near zero coefficient of thermal expansion, they are the biggest convex mirrors ever produced and had to be annealed for 3 months and heat treated for 6 to eliminate all internal stresses. The mirror is then passed to French company Safran Reosc for polishing to the nanometer scale over two years, reaching accuracies 20,000 times finer than the width of a human hair.

Impossible Industries.

But impossible isn't forever…

The End Of Impossible.

Just because something is hard, that doesn't mean it can't be bypassed.

Computers were hard to build once, until they weren't and it was farmed out to low cost countries. Silicon chips, at the highest end, still are , put together by a combination of hyper precision and actual sorcery, but even there the hurdles will eventually fall.

The automotive industry is the clearest example. For decades, deepening experience and challenging customer demands built a moat of engineering perfectionism around the best players in the game. The internal combustion engine is the heart of the beast, and the best, racehorse-standard hearts are grown in the old world, on a coalescence of motorsport, deep engineering tradition and intense competition for the world's most discerning customers. It was held as common wisdom that to enter into this ring, with competitors bred on a century of automotive perfectionism, meant defeat to any newcomer.

And then electric cars happened.

I'll be getting a new car soon, and if not for the fact that BYD aren't good for carrying lots of children, and Tesla is owned by Elon Musk, who my wife isn't keen on, I'd be getting either one. I probably shouldn't be surprised that China, of all places, doesn't do cars for big families, but oh well.

Making good cars is still very, very hard but it's not an impossible industry. The walls are breached, the moat is drained and the siege is over. Time to plunder.

You can't hide behind castle walls forever.

Building large civil airliners is still an impossible industry, despite the best attempts of Russia and China to break the Boeing-Airbus duopoly, but it too will eventually fall. The single aisle market has already seen capable competition from Brazil in the shape of Embraer, and the lure is strong. There will be others.

ASML's wonder-machines for building silicon chips are still unparalleled, based on decades of Dutch development (say that ten times fast!) and can create features as small as 8 nanometers, or 8 billionths of a metre in a single pass, which is Hogwarts engineering again. Even this de-facto tech monopoly, upon which every US ‘tech giant depends, won't last forever. The sorcery will someday be cracked by another. The spellbook will be found, even one reliant on a supply chain of thousands.

And then you need a new one.

Europe builds deep, not wide. Our corporate champions have gotten supremely good at one thing or another but usually don't conquer worlds in the process, and that leaves us vulnerable. Not only can you not support an entire continent on, say, spectacular German industrial optics, but ultimately you can't defend the same castle forever either.

And it's not like Europe doesn't have entrepreneurs: Business creation runs at a similar level to that in the United States, but consumer and capital markets are fragmented, so those that germinate are slow to grow, or else decamp to grow somewhere else.

Weirdly this is not just about ‘excessive EU regulations’, and more about inconsistency of regulation between countries, particularly in services where the manufacturing-orientated single market has been slow to break down barriers. The net effect of this is equivalent to a tariff barrier of between 44% and 110%, though this is achieved without actual tariffs, which almost makes Donald Trump's shenanigans look benign. In services, for example, which make up 70% of EU GDP, only a fifth are traded across borders, which is hysterically low for a continent that’s basically a patchwork of small nearby nations.

The result? Businesses may start in the old country, but they grow in the new world, and that means that we're not building enough castles. And this is especially galling when many of the new industries (being built elsewhere) turn out not to be ‘impossible industries’ after all, which casts doubt on the ones we still have.

AI? The faster the sector grows and the more low-cost competitors enter, the more it's starting to look like a fungible good rather than an impossible industry. And the company that AI may eat, Google, was once an ‘impossible industry’ too, by dint of its market-leading network effects, until it isn't. Genetic engineering, biopharma and tailored crops at one point looked set to become impossible industries, until they weren't, and grid-scale electrical transformers, a famously long lead bespoke product with few alternatives, might become a lot easier too. The jury is out on domestic robots and self-driving cars. Big pharma and medical technology remain redoubts in a strictly regulated ecosystem of their own.

And this doesn't matter if you're constantly germinating new sectors, laying the ground for the next impossible. The risk is that, by making things too hard on entrepreneurs over here, we aren't.

Mind you, we gave fusion a go, although that's turning out to be a little too impossible at the moment. And there are unexpected holdouts like ARM, a specialist British chip designer whose licensed designs are in most smartphones. But they are a bit player in a much larger industry, and while there's dignity in being a cog in someone else's machine, that doesn't mean that it pays.

No, Europe's problem is the lack of a TopGolf.

On one of my last visits to the US in Minneapolis-St. Paul (don't judge me; I work in medical devices and it wasn't a holiday) I found myself with a day to kill. The lads & I went to TopGolf, a driving range. “That'll kill half an hour” I thought.

It killed most of a day.

I expected a disappointing driving range and dodgy coffee, not a three-level climate controlled cornucopia with RFID tracked golf balls, themed scored games, a roof bar, a kitchen, air hockey, sports on TV and great chicken wings.

It was, I thought, very American. Except it wasn't, having been founded in the UK twenty five years ago. Despite this, almost all the expansion has been in the United States and the company is now incorporated in Dallas. This tells a story.

Granted, not every country in Europe is keen on golf but even so, the fact that European expansion is only considered twenty years later after having conquered the US says it all: It says that a score of countries and a dozen regulatory and tax regimes is enough of a pain to grow into that they decided to cross an ocean first.

TopGolf isn't an impossible industry, but it's a good business and good fun. If Europe can just make itself easier to grow within, so that a newly-incorporated TopGolf-style company feels happy expanding to Vienna rather than Virginia, then a lot of our agues would be cured in one high-arcing drive.

We can make wonders and we don't lack for talent. We can do particle accelerators, giant telescopes, jet engines and silicon chip building kit, but maybe that's not what we need right now.

Maybe what we need is some golf, a beer and some decent chicken wings.

Food for thought.

https://jordanwtaylor2.substack.com/

Posted: 2026-02-07T11:57:42.000Z

Engagement: 237 likes, 47 retweets, 7 replies