Let’s start with a shameless plug for the University’s Special Collections, the staff of which, ably led by Karen Robson, and before her Chris Woolgar, have been incredibly helpful in the writing of both my Mountbatten and Fairey biographies. This Thursday of course marks the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. As well as mounting an exhibition in the University’s Hartley Library, colleagues in the Special Collections have drawn on the Wellington archive in creating a MOOC on the Duke and the Battle of Waterloo. This commenced on 8 June, and across three weeks is covering events from the French Revolution to Napoleon’s final defeat, embracing the battle’s significance and commemoration. To enrol go to: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/wellington-and-waterloo/
18 June is full of significance for Anglo-French relations. This Thursday marks another anniversary, which I suspect we as a nation prefer to ignore: it’s the eightieth anniversary of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, the signing of which infuriated the French as they had no advance warning of the Anglo-Saxons coming together again exactly 120 years after Blucher joined the Duke. In France 18 June is an iconic date because in 1940 General de Gaulle broadcast across the Channel his famous call to arms, urging the nation to continue the struggle despite immediate defeat by the Germans. At that time most people in France did not feel generous towards the British, believing them to have run away via Dunkirk. Thus in 1947 Bevin and the Foreign Office displayed a degree of insensitivity in reforging the entente courtesy of the Treaty of Dunkirk. Ah, albion perfide …
Richard Fairey was never a great admirer of the French, in contrast to his enthusiastic view of the Belgians (as refugees they worked in his factory during the First World War, and in the early 1930s welcomed the establishment of Fairey Aviation’s spin-off company in Belgium). I have recently drafted a lengthy reflection on ‘Fairey the man’ and look forward to advice and amendment from the family. Having spent a day last week at the RAF Museum I now await the transfer of numerous boxes of papers from the Fleet Air Arm Museum to the Special Collections, so I can immerse myself fully in research on the 1930s. Over half the book is now written, and despite all the delays and upheavals I am still working on 2017 for publication.
There are various spin-offs of course, and last Saturday I attended a conference in Oxford on ‘Physicists and the Great War’, organised by the St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics. My lecture was on ‘Warfare and Wind Tunnel: Engineers, Physicists, and the Evolution of Combat Aircraft, 1914-1918’, and I was please with the way my remarks complemented and reinforced points made by David Edgerton in his plenary address on myths and histories regarding scientists and the First World War. The text of my talk follows:
Introduction – the overall picture
Let’s start with snapshots in the sky from the first and the last Christmas Day of the Great War. Snapshot number one: on 25 December 1914, as elements of the British Expeditionary Force enjoyed a brief respite from the fighting, the Royal Naval Air Service mounted a truly audacious raid on the Zeppelin sheds at Cuxhaven. Snapshot number two: in northern France on 25 December 1917 40 Squadron’s ‘Mick’ Mannock and 56 Squadron’s James McCudden insisted their flights take the battle to the enemy the same as on any other day. Aces and engineers, both men needed every opportunity to fine tune the power unit and armament of the SE5a, the key to the Royal Flying Corps [from 1 April 1918 the RAF] securing a definitive aeronautical advantage over the enemy: ultimately the British triumphed in the great air war of 1917-18 because of quantity and quality.
Consider first quantity. The growth of the British aircraft industry in the course of the First World War is truly remarkable, not least the dramatic acceleration in production across the final two years of the conflict: monthly output at the start of 1917 was still only 122 machines, and yet by the time of the Armistice a workforce of around 300,000 had boosted that figure to a remarkable 2,688. The RAF lost no less than 7,000 aircraft in the last ten months of the war, and yet operational squadrons enjoyed a steady stream of replacements. Long-serving ground crews found the supply of spares equally reliable, enabling frontline serviceability above 85 per cent. Production on this scale powerfully demonstrated Britain’s belated embrace of ‘industrial war’, with large, suitably skilled design teams facilitating a vital balance of quantity and quality.
As for quality, compare a fighter aircraft, or scout, such as the SE5a – being flown that Christmas Day morning in 1917 at a maximum cruising height of 20,000 feet – with the mechanically simple machines taken to France in the late summer of 1914. The rate of change in aviation across the course of the First World War was determined by a technological imperative, with one side gaining a huge and deeply destructive advantage until the other caught up and then secured its own advantage as a consequence of fresh innovation, and so on.
Yes, poorly performing machines still somehow survived the prototype stage and went into production, feeding a voracious appetite for combat aircraft. Yet despite these death traps reaching the front line, a Darwinian process of procurement prioritised the production of planes tested in the air war taking place day after day in the skies above Picardy, Pavia, and Palestine – this was in every sense a global conflagration, with RFC and RNAS squadrons deployed en masse far beyond the Western Front. Aircraft like the Sopwith Camel and SE5a were proven killing machines, especially when flown by pilots and technicians like Mannock and McCudden.
Yet this familiar story of the war in the air warrants qualification. Remember that first defiant demonstration of maritime air power simultaneous with the ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914? If aircraft were so primitive at the start of the war then how were the Admiralty’s aviators capable of launching an attack on the far side of the North Sea?
The reality was that not all aircraft were as unsophisticated as those with which the RFC crossed the Channel at the onset of the war. Seven of the RNAS aircraft that attempted to bomb the Cuxhaven base were built by Short Brothers. These seaplanes’ relative sophistication was the result of a close working relationship between the north Kent company and the Admiralty’s Air Department. Pre-war the British Army never established parallel partnerships with manufacturers, relying heavily upon the publicly-funded Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough. ‘The Factory’ as it was known would flourish in wartime, but it always had an unhappy relationship with pioneering manufacturers like Fairey or Handley Page. Farnborough’s critics pointed to the type of aircraft flown by Royal Navy pilots as evidence that entrepreneurial aviation pioneers like the Short brothers and Tommy Sopwith were more innovative designers than their state-sponsored counterparts.
So what does this important rejoinder to the grand narrative concerning British combat aircraft in the Great War have to do with physicists?
Well, another familiar element when telling the story of British aviation across the First World War is the portrayal of applied and theoretical scientists making a significant contribution to research and development between 1914 and 1918 before they return to the laboratory and the lecture theatre. Thus physicists of various varieties and their colleagues in pure and applied maths are mobilised in order to aid the war effort, and collectively they act as a catalyst. In other words, their individual or joint experimentation makes a crucial contribution to wartime aeronautics and a revolution in aircraft design, but it’s unique to the four years of conflict. Furthermore, the same phenomenon will occur again, on an even vaster scale, only a quarter of a century later.
I want to suggest that, while clearly plentiful examples exist of physicists who made a significant impact for the duration of the conflict, there was also a strong thread of continuity – that the pioneering generation of designers were from the outset keen to utilise university-educated scientists and mathematicians, not least because their own training as engineers had left them heavily indebted to physics and physicists. Tyro industrialists like Geoffrey de Havilland, Fred Handley-Page, and Richard Fairey were as comfortable on the shop floor as in the boardroom, and as adept at reading a spreadsheet as a blueprint. This was a unique generation of technicians driven by enterprise, who by dint of youth and education had a distinctly modern attitude concerning the contribution of science to making machines and making money. This respect was reciprocated by graduates of Cambridge, Imperial, Manchester, etc. who were encouraged by practical-minded tutors to embrace and enter what later would be labelled the ‘sunrise industries’. Readers of David Edgerton will be familiar with an industrial-academy inter-relationship very different from the negative view of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain advanced by the ‘declinists’ like Corelli Barnett. Barnett downgraded the calibre of science and technology tuition in Britain, while applauding comparable centres of excellence in the Wilhelmine Empire. As we shall see, British universities’ curricula of both pure and applied science contrasted favourably with the narrow focus upon engineering maintained in most of Germany’s technical high schools.
Aircraft design rooted in a firm theoretical understanding
The fascination with heavier-than-air manned flight dates back to Icarus, with the Wright brothers’ success at Kitty Hawk on 17 December 1903 having a long and complex back story. On both sides of the Atlantic and of the Channel the science of aeronautics was formalised and institutionalised in the second half of the nineteenth century, with global telecommunications facilitating a fertile exchange of ideas. Not surprisingly, engineers rooted their experimental designs in hard science – a solid grounding in physics and mechanics was a prerequisite.
Furthermore, they were adamant that their successors inherited the same intellectual equipment. Thus the autodidact Horace Short, a mathematical genius and co-founder of Short Brothers, insisted that the first cohort of Royal Navy pilots trained by his company should fly by day and at night study the science of flight to a level testing of the brightest physics graduate. Nor were the founding fathers of the Fleet Air Arm unique in their impressive scientific credentials given that several wartime recruits to the RNAS had studied engineering at Cambridge under the supervision of Bertram Hopkinson. Professor Hopkinson made sure his students in Mechanical Sciences secured a solid grounding in technical design and assembly. He encouraged undergraduates to spend their summer vacation at focal points for Edwardian aviation like the Isle of Sheppey.
A similar insistence on practical experimentation rooted in rigorous calculation and computation was the norm at Manchester University, where mathematicians and physicists mounted ambitious programmes of experimental aerodynamics. Their preoccupation with wing design later extended to hydrodynamics, with Manchester and Farnborough jointly modelling optimum seaplane performance at take-off and landing – and sharing their calculations with the cerebral seaplane manufacturer Horace Short. Manchester’s most distinguished physicist, Ernest Petavel, combined a chair in engineering with a pilot’s certificate, suitable credentials for later in his career rebuilding the National Physical Laboratory’s first wind tunnels.
Clearly the aviation industry in Britain on the eve of the Great War was handicapped by mutual suspicion between the public and private sectors. Yet there was also a surprising degree of communication between the academics, the engineer entrepreneurs, the service ministries, and the fledgling state-funded institutions, notably the Royal Aircraft Factory and the National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex. This was not an easy relationship, and Churchill’s Admiralty was crucial to fostering cooperation; but it ensured that, contrary to popular assumption, the British aircraft industry could boast a modest infrastructure at the onset of war. This needs immediate qualification, as a credible aero-engine industry scarcely existed, and the lack of reliable high performance power units remained a major brake on the British war effort until the early months of 1918.
These engineer entrepreneurs were young men reaching their creative peak at the very moment aeronautics accelerated away from the rudimentary technology that had lifted the Wright brothers off the ground in December 1903. Inspired by Horace Short and his siblings, the most talented of this first generation of aircraft manufacturers – men like T.O.M. Sopwith and A.V. Roe – first of all met the unprecedented demands of ‘industrial war’, and then survived the rude shock of peacetime retrenchment. They were products of a late Victorian middle-class that placed a premium on manufacturing and on commerce. These were mechanical polymaths, stripping down and rebuilding cars and motorcycles before moving on to balloons and aeroplanes. Resisting the narrow specialism of the varsity graduate, the likes of Geoffrey de Havilland or Dick Fairey looked to municipal technical colleges and polytechnics for a thorough grounding in all aspects of applied science and mathematics, not least mechanics. They were comfortable with physics and unfazed by scientific theory, but by dint of training and direct experience were highly practical. Whether at the drawing board or on the shop floor they were quintessential problem-solvers, as adept with a torque wrench as a slide-rule. They understood the dynamics of flight but saw ab initio research as an inductive and applied process requiring hard graft on the runway and in the engine shed. The quality of their education – several key figures studied under the eminent physicist Silvanus Thompson at Finsbury Technical College – ensured an equal partnership when working with graduate scientists and mathematicians.
For example, Richard Fairey was an intuitive ‘stress man’: he shed excess weight from a machine by a systematic identification of key stress points, which in turn ensured the precise deployment of struts and wire, to optimal effect. Most ‘stress men’ boasted maths degrees, like Farnborough’s Edward Busk whose cutting-edge experimentation in inherent stability was cut short by a fatal air crash. Fairey’s adeptness in the complex process of countering and minimising stress depended heavily on the published calculations of Harris Booth, another ‘hands on’ graduate of the Mechanical Sciences Tripos at Cambridge. Booth was at that time engaged in theoretical work on stress at the National Physical Laboratory.
Busk and Booth signalled the future – a largely graduate industry where the complexity of the technology demanded specialist expertise available only within select institutions (symbolised by Imperial College’s expansion in the 1920s, partly at the expense of Finsbury Technical College). What’s striking is how long this took to come about, with the first generation of aircraft manufacturers still key players at the dawn of the jet age, and beyond. Nevertheless graduate scientists – a number of them physicists – were contributing to aircraft design and manufacture before August 1914; and most of them would continue to do so after the war, assuming their company survived a collapse in Air Ministry orders.
Clearly there is continuity; and yet it’s worth noting that the wartime contribution of highly qualified applied scientists – in 1914-18 and again in 1939-45 – signalled a belated reconstitution of the British aerospace industry in the final third of the twentieth century.
Physicists go to war, 1915-18
Before focusing upon Farnborough it’s important to acknowledge the contribution of the National Physical Laboratory. This hothouse of research in Teddington was a natural home for physicists throughout the war. Its standing as a centre of scholarship rested to a considerable degree on the outstanding leadership displayed by its first two directors, both of whom were passionate about the science of flight.
The NPL’s founding father, Sir Richard Glazebrook, had established his reputation at the Cavendish Laboratory, and was a pillar of the scientific establishment even before he took up his new post. Before and after launching the Laboratory in 1899 he secured just about every honour and appointment open to him. He stepped down in 1919, and after a brief return to Cambridge, established aeronautics as a flagship department at Imperial.
Sir Ernest Petavel’s experimental work on wings at Manchester has already been noted. An interest in the NPL began with his appointment as a board member in 1911. Four years later he was appointed chairman of the Aerodynamics Advisory Committee, with sceptical manufacturers like Fairey noting his credentials as an experienced pilot. Petavel now had a presence inside Whitehall, and in September 1919 he was the Air Ministry’s natural candidate to succeed Glazebrook. Across the interwar period Petavel modernised the National Physical Laboratory’s site in south London, while at the same time consolidating its reputation for fostering both blue skies and applied research, e.g. Watson Watt’s work on radar. The NPL had attracted bright young men – sadly no women – because it quickly attracted credibility within the scientific community. Temporary recruits’ wartime acquaintance with the establishment consolidated the NPL’s reputation; and yet in terms of the popular consciousness it has never enjoyed the same high profile as the Royal Aircraft Establishment, the new name of ‘The Factory’ from 1918.
Not that the NPL and Farnborough worked in isolation. For example, the Cambridge mathematician David Pinsent, travelling companion of Wittgenstein and dedicatee of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, spent the second half of the war based at the National Physical Laboratory; but his programme of research was conducted at Farnborough. Pinsent’s test flights in the skies above north Hampshire became ever more hazardous, and finally on 8 May 1918 he was killed. Pinsent was a late recruit, as the majority of mathematicians and scientists based at the NPL and the Royal Aircraft Factory were recruited in the spring of 1915. Richard Glazebrook’s standing within the Royal Society, the Physics Institute, etc. gave him an encyclopaedic knowledge of both established and up and coming talent.
In the course of the war future policy-makers Henry Tizard and Frederick Lindemann consolidated their reputations as physicists adept at addressing the aforementioned technological imperative of meeting every challenge the enemy threw down. This was evident from the speed with which Lindemann and his colleagues gained their pilot’s certificates once civilians at ‘The Factory’ were granted permission to fly in August 1916. Lindemann and Tizard survived their tenure as test pilots, both men becoming rival power-brokers in the course of the Second World War. Until August 1914 Lindemann – the future Lord Cherwell – had been researching ultra-low temperatures at the University of Berlin, when not playing tennis with the Kaiser at Potsdam. After the war he secured a chair at Oxford, and headed the Clarendon Laboratory, largely on the recommendation of Tizard, who in contemporary parlance ‘bigged up’ Lindemann’s theoretical solution to the problem of aircraft spin. Lindemann’s postwar career confirmed that he was not in the first rank of nuclear physicists, whereas someone who certainly was had died at the Dardanelles. This was H.G.J. Moseley, whose work on the atomic numbers of elements in its own quiet way revolutionised chemistry. The fact that no authority intervened to stop Henry Moseley joining the Army demonstrates how early in the conflict the urgent need to expand munitions production saw chemists and not physicists prioritised as vital to the war effort.
Henry Tizard had similarly volunteered at the start of the war. However, in June 1915 he was transferred to the RFC as an experimental equipment officer, with a remit to improve the quality of the standard bombsight. Once qualified to fly Tizard became a test pilot. In 1917 Bertram Hopkinson – seconded from Cambridge to Whitehall to mastermind aeronautic research – made his protégé chief scientific officer at the newly established experimental station at Martlesham, Suffolk. Tizard led by example, not least when monitoring aircraft performance in hazardous conditions. His success in forging a harmonious team of civilian scientists and military personnel saw him join Hopkinson at the Air Ministry in 1918. Later that year Tizard took over as controller of the R and D programme when Hopkinson died in an air crash.
Frederick Lindemann’s exploits at Farnborough, most famously his systematic spinning of notoriously unstable aeroplanes, may have been exaggerated. Nevertheless, the German Germanophobe’s reports on auto-rotation were invaluable, and speedily transmitted to manufacturers such as the Short brothers, Sopwith, and Richard Fairey. The contrast with relaxed attitudes pre-war to the sharing of information was stark. In peacetime the transmission of knowledge was a fairly haphazard affair; but long before the establishment of the Air Ministry both the Admiralty and the War Office ensured a systematic passage of technical data from the research establishments to the manufacturers. Similarly, the plane makers and the front line squadrons on the Western Front were encouraged to provide reciprocal feedback. For example, the SE5a became a formidable piece of kit because collective dissatisfaction with the original marque, both at home and in the front line, prompted urgent remedial action. Well before the war senior service personnel such as the RFC’s David Henderson and Frederick Sykes, or the RNAS’s Murray Sueter, had a healthy respect for the boffins – if Sir Hugh Trenchard, inaugural Chief of the Air Staff, received trenchant criticism when inspecting squadrons in France and Belgium then he prioritised the briefing of relevant bodies back home.
Conclusion
Aeronautics was a uniquely twentieth century science, and the exciting new technology bore witness to this. The RAF’s very public respect for its engineers was a key element in projecting the fledgling service as an excitingly modern phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, most of these engineers had a firm grounding in physics and mechanics, or were by dint of academic qualification physicists. Physicists per se were mobilised from 1915 to consolidate and expand an already vibrant programme of testing and experimentation, primarily at Farnborough and the National Physical Laboratory. Yet within the embryonic aircraft industry there were already experts in aerodynamics and hydrodynamics for whom physics had constituted a major component of their degree. Designers without degrees in natural or mechanical sciences had invariably studied physics and mechanics at an advanced level, courtesy of well qualified staff at technical colleges such as Finsbury and Crystal Palace – their engineering skills were firmly rooted in scientific principle, and they more than held their own with colleagues boasting a more traditional academic background. Unique among these pioneers of British aviation were the proto-industrialists, the engineer entrepreneurs who founded those companies which across the last century became household names. Other than a keen sense of enterprise, common to all of them was a talent for mathematics. As their personal and company papers confirm, men like Richard Fairey and Geoffrey de Havilland were brilliant at translating theory into practice; and having been educated by Fellows of the Royal Society such as Silvanus Thompson they maintained a healthy respect for hard science. What the design and development of combat aircraft in the First World War demonstrates is that the contribution of physicists per se was important but not critical, but the contribution of physics as a multi-faceted discipline was absolutely crucial – and, to the credit of all involved, from the boardroom to the shop floor, was seen to be so.
