{"id":108,"date":"2015-06-15T12:00:57","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T12:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/srfb\/?p=108"},"modified":"2015-06-15T12:00:57","modified_gmt":"2015-06-15T12:00:57","slug":"waterloo-warfare-and-wind-tunnels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/2015\/06\/15\/waterloo-warfare-and-wind-tunnels\/","title":{"rendered":"Waterloo, warfare and wind tunnels"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 This Thursday of course marks the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.\u00a0 As well as mounting an exhibition in the University’s\u00a0Hartley Library,\u00a0colleagues in the Special Collections have drawn on the Wellington archive in\u00a0creating a\u00a0MOOC on the Duke\u00a0 and the Battle of Waterloo.\u00a0 This\u00a0commenced on 8 June, and across\u00a0three weeks is covering events from the French Revolution to Napoleon’s final defeat, embracing the battle’s significance and commemoration.\u00a0To enrol go to: https:\/\/www.futurelearn.com\/courses\/wellington-and-waterloo\/<\/a><\/p>\n

18 June is\u00a0full of significance for Anglo-French relations.\u00a0 This Thursday\u00a0marks another anniversary, which I suspect\u00a0we as a\u00a0nation prefer to ignore: it\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0In France\u00a018 June is an iconic date because in 1940 General de Gaulle broadcast across the Channel\u00a0his famous call to arms, urging the nation to continue the struggle despite immediate defeat by the Germans.\u00a0\u00a0At that time most people in France did not feel generous towards the British, believing them to have run away via Dunkirk.\u00a0 Thus in 1947 Bevin and the Foreign Office displayed a degree\u00a0of insensitivity in reforging the entente<\/em> courtesy of the Treaty of Dunkirk.\u00a0 Ah,\u00a0albion perfide<\/em> …<\/p>\n

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).\u00a0 I have recently drafted a lengthy reflection on ‘Fairey the man’ and look forward to advice and amendment from the family.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0Over half the book is now written,\u00a0and despite all the delays and upheavals I am still working on\u00a02017 for publication.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0My lecture\u00a0was on \u00a0\u2018Warfare and Wind Tunnel: Engineers, Physicists, and the Evolution of Combat Aircraft, 1914-1918\u2019<\/strong>, 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.\u00a0 The text of\u00a0my talk\u00a0follows:<\/p>\n

Introduction \u2013 the overall picture<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with snapshots in the sky from the first and the last Christmas Day of the Great War.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Snapshot number two: in northern France on 25 December 1917 40 Squadron\u2019s \u2018Mick\u2019 Mannock and 56 Squadron\u2019s James McCudden insisted their flights take the battle to the enemy the same as on any other day.\u00a0 Aces and<\/em> 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<\/em> quality.<\/p>\n

Consider first quantity.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s belated embrace of \u2018industrial war\u2019, with large, suitably skilled design teams facilitating a vital balance of quantity and quality.<\/p>\n

As for quality, compare a fighter aircraft, or scout, such as the SE5a \u2013 being flown that Christmas Day morning in 1917 at a maximum cruising height of 20,000 feet \u2013 with the mechanically simple machines taken to France in the late summer of 1914.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Yes, poorly performing machines still somehow survived the prototype stage and went into production, feeding a voracious appetite for combat aircraft.\u00a0 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 \u2013 this was in every sense a global conflagration, with RFC and RNAS squadrons deployed en masse far beyond the Western Front.\u00a0 Aircraft like the Sopwith Camel and SE5a were proven killing machines, especially when flown by pilots and<\/em> technicians like Mannock and McCudden.<\/p>\n

Yet this familiar story of the war in the air warrants qualification.\u00a0 Remember that first defiant demonstration of maritime air power simultaneous with the \u2018Christmas truce\u2019 of 1914?\u00a0 If aircraft were so primitive at the start of the war then how were the Admiralty\u2019s aviators capable of launching an attack on the far side of the North Sea?<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Seven of the RNAS aircraft that attempted to bomb the Cuxhaven base were built by Short Brothers.\u00a0 These seaplanes\u2019 relative sophistication was the result of a close working relationship between the north Kent company and the Admiralty\u2019s Air Department.\u00a0 Pre-war the British Army never established parallel partnerships with manufacturers, relying heavily upon the publicly-funded Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough.\u00a0 \u2018The Factory\u2019 as it was known would flourish in wartime, but it always had an unhappy relationship with pioneering manufacturers like Fairey or Handley Page.\u00a0 Farnborough\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

So what does this important rejoinder to the grand narrative concerning British combat aircraft in the Great War have to do with physicists?<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In other words, their individual or joint experimentation makes a crucial contribution to wartime aeronautics and a revolution in aircraft design, but it\u2019s unique to the four years of conflict.\u00a0 Furthermore, the same phenomenon will occur again, on an even vaster scale, only a quarter of a century later.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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 \u2018sunrise industries\u2019.\u00a0 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 \u2018declinists\u2019 like Corelli Barnett.\u00a0 Barnett downgraded the calibre of science and technology tuition in Britain, while applauding comparable centres of excellence in the Wilhelmine Empire. \u00a0As we shall see, British universities\u2019 curricula of both pure and applied science contrasted favourably with the narrow focus upon engineering maintained in most of Germany\u2019s technical high schools.<\/p>\n

Aircraft design rooted in a firm theoretical understanding<\/strong><\/p>\n

The fascination with heavier-than-air manned flight dates back to Icarus, with the Wright brothers\u2019 success at Kitty Hawk on 17 December 1903 having a long and complex back story.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, engineers rooted their experimental designs in hard science \u2013 a solid grounding in physics and mechanics was a prerequisite.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, they were adamant that their successors inherited the same intellectual equipment.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Professor Hopkinson made sure his students in Mechanical Sciences secured a solid grounding in technical design and assembly.\u00a0 He encouraged undergraduates to spend their summer vacation at focal points for Edwardian aviation like the Isle of Sheppey.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Their preoccupation with wing design later extended to hydrodynamics, with Manchester and Farnborough jointly modelling optimum seaplane performance at take-off and landing \u2013 and sharing their calculations with the cerebral seaplane manufacturer Horace Short.\u00a0 Manchester\u2019s most distinguished physicist, Ernest Petavel, combined a chair in engineering with a pilot\u2019s certificate, suitable credentials for later in his career rebuilding the National Physical Laboratory\u2019s first wind tunnels.<\/p>\n

Clearly the aviation industry in Britain on the eve of the Great War was handicapped by mutual suspicion between the public and private sectors.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This was not an easy relationship, and Churchill\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Inspired by Horace Short and his siblings, the most talented of this first generation of aircraft manufacturers \u2013 men like T.O.M. Sopwith and A.V. Roe \u2013 first of all met the unprecedented demands of \u2018industrial war\u2019, and then survived the rude shock of peacetime retrenchment.\u00a0 They were products of a late Victorian middle-class that placed a premium on manufacturing and on commerce.\u00a0 These were mechanical polymaths, stripping down and rebuilding cars and motorcycles before moving on to balloons and aeroplanes.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They were comfortable with physics and unfazed by scientific theory, but by dint of training and direct experience were highly practical.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They understood the dynamics of flight but saw ab initio<\/em> research as an inductive and applied process requiring hard graft on the runway and in the engine shed.\u00a0 The quality of their education \u2013 several key figures studied under the eminent physicist Silvanus Thompson at Finsbury Technical College \u2013 ensured an equal partnership when working with graduate scientists and mathematicians.<\/p>\n

For example, Richard Fairey was an intuitive \u2018stress man\u2019: 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 \u2018stress men\u2019 boasted maths degrees, like Farnborough\u2019s Edward Busk whose cutting-edge experimentation in inherent stability was cut short by a fatal air crash.\u00a0 Fairey\u2019s adeptness in the complex process of countering and minimising stress depended heavily on the published calculations of Harris Booth, another \u2018hands on\u2019 graduate of the Mechanical Sciences Tripos at Cambridge.\u00a0 Booth was at that time engaged in theoretical work on stress at the National Physical Laboratory.<\/p>\n

Busk and Booth signalled the future \u2013 a largely graduate industry where the complexity of the technology demanded specialist expertise available only within select institutions (symbolised by Imperial College\u2019s expansion in the 1920s, partly at the expense of Finsbury Technical College).\u00a0 What\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Nevertheless graduate scientists \u2013 a number of them physicists \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Clearly there is continuity; and yet it\u2019s worth noting that the wartime contribution of highly qualified applied scientists \u2013 in 1914-18 and again in 1939-45 \u2013 signalled a belated reconstitution of the British aerospace industry in the final third of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

Physicists go to war, 1915-18<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before focusing upon Farnborough it\u2019s important to acknowledge the contribution of the National Physical Laboratory.\u00a0 This hothouse of research in Teddington was a natural home for physicists throughout the war.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The NPL\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Before and after launching the Laboratory in 1899 he secured just about every honour and appointment open to him.\u00a0 He stepped down in 1919, and after a brief return to Cambridge, established aeronautics as a flagship department at Imperial.<\/p>\n

Sir Ernest Petavel\u2019s experimental work on wings at Manchester has already been noted.\u00a0 An interest in the NPL began with his appointment as a board member in 1911.\u00a0 Four years later he was appointed chairman of the Aerodynamics Advisory Committee, with sceptical manufacturers like Fairey noting his credentials as an experienced pilot.\u00a0 Petavel now had a presence inside Whitehall, and in September 1919 he was the Air Ministry\u2019s natural candidate to succeed Glazebrook.\u00a0 Across the interwar period Petavel modernised the National Physical Laboratory\u2019s site in south London, while at the same time consolidating its reputation for fostering both blue skies and applied research, e.g. Watson Watt\u2019s work on radar.\u00a0 The NPL had attracted bright young men \u2013 sadly no women \u2013 because it quickly attracted credibility within the scientific community.\u00a0 Temporary recruits\u2019 wartime acquaintance with the establishment consolidated the NPL\u2019s 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 \u2018The Factory\u2019 from 1918.<\/p>\n

Not that the NPL and Farnborough worked in isolation.\u00a0 For example, the Cambridge mathematician David Pinsent, travelling companion of Wittgenstein and dedicatee of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus<\/em>, spent the second half of the war based at the National Physical Laboratory; but his programme of research was conducted at Farnborough.\u00a0 Pinsent\u2019s test flights in the skies above north Hampshire became ever more hazardous, and finally on 8 May 1918 he was killed.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Richard Glazebrook\u2019s standing within the Royal Society, the Physics Institute, etc. gave him an encyclopaedic knowledge of both established and up and coming talent.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 This was evident from the speed with which Lindemann and his colleagues gained their pilot\u2019s certificates once civilians at \u2018The Factory\u2019 were granted permission to fly in August 1916.\u00a0 Lindemann and Tizard survived their tenure as test pilots, both men becoming rival power-brokers in the course of the Second World War.\u00a0 Until August 1914 Lindemann \u2013 the future Lord Cherwell \u2013 had been researching ultra-low temperatures at the University of Berlin, when not playing tennis with the Kaiser at Potsdam.\u00a0 After the war he secured a chair at Oxford, and headed the Clarendon Laboratory, largely on the recommendation of Tizard, who in contemporary parlance \u2018bigged up\u2019 Lindemann\u2019s theoretical solution to the problem of aircraft spin.\u00a0 Lindemann\u2019s postwar career confirmed that he was not in the first rank of nuclear physicists, whereas someone who certainly was had died at the Dardanelles.\u00a0 This was H.G.J. Moseley, whose work on the atomic numbers of elements in its own quiet way revolutionised chemistry.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Henry Tizard had similarly volunteered at the start of the war.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Once qualified to fly Tizard became a test pilot.\u00a0 In 1917 Bertram Hopkinson \u2013 seconded from Cambridge to Whitehall to mastermind aeronautic research \u2013 made his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 chief scientific officer at the newly established experimental station at Martlesham, Suffolk.\u00a0 Tizard led by example, not least when monitoring aircraft performance in hazardous conditions.\u00a0 His success in forging a harmonious team of civilian scientists and military personnel saw him join Hopkinson at the Air Ministry in 1918.\u00a0 Later that year Tizard took over as controller of the R and D programme when Hopkinson died in an air crash.<\/p>\n

Frederick Lindemann\u2019s exploits at Farnborough, most famously his systematic spinning of notoriously unstable aeroplanes, may have been exaggerated.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the German Germanophobe\u2019s reports on auto-rotation were invaluable, and speedily transmitted to manufacturers such as the Short brothers, Sopwith, and Richard Fairey.\u00a0 The contrast with relaxed attitudes pre-war to the sharing of information was stark.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Similarly, the plane makers and the front line squadrons on the Western Front were encouraged to provide reciprocal feedback.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Well before the war senior service personnel such as the RFC\u2019s David Henderson and Frederick Sykes, or the RNAS\u2019s Murray Sueter, had a healthy respect for the boffins \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

Aeronautics was a uniquely twentieth century science, and the exciting new technology bore witness to this.\u00a0 The RAF\u2019s very public respect for its engineers was a key element in projecting the fledgling service as an excitingly modern<\/em> phenomenon.\u00a0 Unsurprisingly, most of these engineers had a firm grounding in physics and mechanics, or were by dint of academic qualification physicists.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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 \u2013 their engineering skills were firmly rooted in scientific principle, and they more than held their own with colleagues boasting a more traditional academic background.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Other than a keen sense of enterprise, common to all of them was a talent for mathematics.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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<\/em> the contribution of physics<\/em> as a multi-faceted discipline was absolutely crucial \u2013 and<\/em>, to the credit of all involved, from the boardroom to the shop floor, was seen to be so.<\/p>\n

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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.\u00a0 This Thursday of course marks the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.\u00a0 As well as … <\/p>\n

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