Vincent Ziani de Ferranti

Sir (Gerard) Vincent Ziani de Ferranti (16 February 1893 – 20 May 1980) was the second son of Dr Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti. As chairman of Ferranti from 1930 to 1963, he was responsible for evolving the company into a diverse multimillion-pound organisation recognized as an industry leader in electrical engineering, electronics and avionics.

Ferranti was educated at Repton School, and had two years of training at Yarrow shipyards in Scotstoun. He fought in World War I in the service of the Royal Engineers. During his service, he rose to the rank of Captain, and was awarded the Military Cross. His elder brother, Major Basil Francis Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti, also a Military Cross recipient in World War I, was killed in action.

After the death of his elder brother, Vincent became heir apparent. When he returned from military service in 1921, Vincent joined Ferranti as a manager in the transformer department. Vincent jointly developed and patented surge absorbers to protect transformers from lightning strikes, which aided Ferranti's ability to produce high voltage transformers for export. In 1904 Dr Ferranti lost control of his company when it went into voluntary receivership, and after restructuring in 1905 he only held 10% of the shares. This resulted in him being effectively excluded from company business by the receiver managers until 1922, when a share restructuring meant that he and Vincent held 29% of the total equity allowing them to regain control of the company. However, it wasn't until 1928 that Dr Ferranti became chairman again.

In 1923, Vincent and R. Schofield visited A.B. Cooper, the general manager of Ferranti Canada. Vincent realised that there was greater potential to expand transformer operations in the emerging Canadian market than in the UK market. After returning to the UK, Vincent gave Cooper the green light to go ahead with plans to double the Canadian factory output. Ball & Vardalas consider that this visit forged a special relationship between Cooper and Vincent that would last for the next thirty years and help Canadian small transformer technology transfer back to the parent company.

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