Cornwall, on the other hand, is beautiful, and whilst it is rather a change of pace from London or Manchester, the area has gone some way to mollifying even such a committed urban-dweller as myself. The main down-side is that it is rather remote from, well, anywhere, and so I will be becoming even better acquainted with the long-distance rail network than I have been for the past few years…

Anyhow, my next major milestone for the thesis is to produce a draft second chapter by Christmas, which will deal in some more detail with the collaboration between Metrovick and the RAE, and the evolution of the MV work from an experimental turbocompressor to a flight-capable jet engine. In the next couple of posts I hope to explore some of the theoretical and analytical approaches that I’ve been trying out on my material, and how these might be used to illuminate the project.

To aviation enthusiasts, Shilling is perhaps best known for her work on carburettors at the RAE. At the beginning of the Second World War it became clear that the Rolls-Royce Merlin would cut out when subjected to negative-g, such as when a fighter nosed over into a dive; this was because of fuel floating clear of the feed pipe in the carburettor. Spitfires and Hurricanes were therefore at a disadvantage when trying to follow fuel-injected Bf 109s and 110s through such a manoeuvre. The RAE were asked to come up with a fix, and Beatrice came up with a restrictor plate that would ensure continued fuel flow to the engine under temporary negative-g. Perhaps inevitably, the modification became known to the RAF as ‘Miss Shilling’s Orifice.’¹

But her other achievements are perhaps even more interesting. She was born to a middle-class family, and as a child showed a great aptitude for mechanical pursuits (amongst others, maintaining her own motorcycle.) By the age of 15, she had decided she wanted to be an engineer. This was not an easy profession for a young woman to enter, but fortunately her school had been sent a job advertisment for an apprenticeship in electrical engineering.

This had been sent by Margaret Partridge, who ran an electrical engineering company, and who was also involved with the Women’s Engineering Society (WES). At the time, County Councils were tendering for the installation of electricity supplies in country areas, and Partridge’s company had a number of contracts in Devon. Shilling joined the company in the summer of 1926, and spent the next three years installing wiring and generators, both domestic and industrial. Beatrice showed great promise as an electrical engineer,  and Partridge convinced her to apply for an engineering degree at Manchester’s Victoria University. The WES was also able to offer Shilling support, by helping her get her applied mathematics up to the entrance standard, as well as providing her with an interest-free loan for her tuition.

She enrolled on the Electrical Engineering degree as one of two women students in 1929; the first year that any had joined the course. Whilst there, she took up motorcycle racing with the university club, using her engineering skills to keep her bike in racing trim. Graduating with honours in 1932, she stayed on at Manchester for another year to do an MSc in Mechanical Engineering, which had developed into her true passion. Having impressed the Mechanical Engineering staff and looking for a job, she was taken on as a research assistant for GF Mucklow’s work on single-cylinder supercharged engines. She was still racing motorcycles, and had started racing at Brooklands. Beatrice was determined and a skilled rider, and in August 1934 she became only the second woman to gain a Brooklands Gold Star for lapping the track at over 100mph.

She continued to race bikes and cars until the 1960s along with her husband George, an RAE mathematican whom she had met shortly after joining the RAE in 1936. He was also a keen racer and mechanic; Beatrice supposedly refused to marry him until he gained his Brooklands Gold Star, which he achieved in 1938!

In her time at the RAE she worked on engine accessories, and then later in the Mechanical Engineering department on problems of heat transfer, working on projects such as ramjets and on the Blue Streak IRBM (and, as a side project, designing a bobsleigh for the RAF team!) Although well respected as an engineer by her peers, Shilling never achieved high rank at the RAE.  She did not suffer fools gladly, and although she could display tact when working with industry representitives, her manner generally tended towards the brusque. She was contemptuous of bureaucracy and impatient with hierarchy; qualities which did not endear her to the management. There was also prejudice against women engineers, and the fact that she was seen as ‘difficult’ on issues such as pay and conditions meant she did not have an easy relationship with her superiors. She retired in the late 1960s, being awarded an honorary doctorate in 1969.

In retirement, she continued to race cars with George until their health made this impractical; instead they took up target shooting. She died in 1990.

For more information on this extraordinary person,  see Matthew Freudenberg’s Biography Negative Gravity: A Life of Beatrice Shilling (Taunton: Charlton Publications, 2003)

1. According to her biographer, this may have been coined by Stanley Hooker, and was intended as friendly informality rather than disrespect.

In going through the meeting minutes, I’ve come across some wild and wacky powerplant ideas that the ESC asked to consider in the 1930s, some of which I thought I’d share below.  Most of these remained paper ideas, but they’re still of interest, as they were all thought at some point to offer a chance of being useful aero-engines. One of the problems in the history of technology is the ways in which the roads never taken are later written out of the story, making the choices taken retrospectively the obvious ones. This whiggish approach flattens the rich texture of history, making actors’ choices seem inexplicable and  ‘wrong’ when they do not back the ultimate winners. I’m not going to go into the gas turbine discussions in any detail, which will be no doubt fully covered in future posts; this is about the also- and never-rans.

Interestingly in light of what I’ve said previously about the needs of air defence driving high-powered engine development, one of the earliest explicit statements about the need for very big engines was made in February 1935. The chairman noted that the ARC had referred the issue of powerplants for very large seaplanes to the sub-committee, and he asked them  ‘to consider the possibility of producing engines of the order of 10,000 h.p., and to make suggestions as to lines of investigation that might facilitate their production. Further, in considering this problem the Sub-Committee should not confine itself to the internal combustion engine if other types of prime mover appeared to be more hopeful.’ This was an order of magnitude more than contemporary engines, and the sub-committee concluded that cylinder sizes could not be greatly increased without a loss in combustion efficiency and specific weight. Harry Ricardo suggested that a two-stroke might be suited to larger cylinders, as the gas pressure would counteract the inertia forces on the piston. W.S. Farren suggested that since six-throw crankshafts and a 9-cylinder radial engines were currently possible, it should be possible to combine these and build a six-row 54-cylinder liquid-cooled radial – with the caveat that there might be problems in manufacturing the crank-case, and ‘difficulties of a mechanical nature’ might arise!

Summing up, Tizard observed that ‘the general opinion seemed to be that the best method of producing the power was to use small cylinders and devise some method by which their combined power could be delivered to a single shaft. This might take 10 years and hence the question arose as to whether it might not be advisable to concentrate on the C.I. engine.’  Diesels are an interesting case of a road never taken; despite lots of support for them due to the possible advantages in fuel consumption, resistance to detonation (and – possibly – fire safety), they never took off for aviation use; partly because improvements in fuel chemistry meant that petrol engines could be developed to give more power, and partly perhaps because they were perceived to be too heavy, which meant that they were not developed as intensively as they might have been.

Tizard remarked that nobody had suggested using a lightweight turbine with a high-temperature working fluid, and the committee discussed some of the heat transfer reuquirements for such a system. Interestingly, the Velox boiler was mentioned as an example of a technology giving very high rates of heat transfer. Often cited as one of the progenitors of the gas turbine, the Velox boiler consisted of a burner supercharged by a turbine-driven axial compressor; although it was efficient enough to produce a small amount of shaft output, the main point was to achieve high rates of combustion in a limited space. A.A. Griffith was asked to prepare a note for the sub-committee on the practicality of such a system.

At the next meeting, in April 1935, Griffith stated that his preliminary calculations suggested that a condensing turbine would compare ‘very unfavourably’ with an internal combustion engine for aircraft purposes. One of the committee members then asked whether a swash-plate engine had been considered, but in the ensuing discussion Farren pointed out that the number of cylinders – and hence the power output – was limited in this type.

Perhaps more conventional – if only slightly- were Harry Ricardo’s plans for diesel two-strokes. Andrew Nahum’s excellent paper ‘Two-Stroke or Turbine’ examines these engines in detail, but these were to be ‘sprint’ engines of very high power/weight ratio, with the added advantage of running on 87 octane fuel, at a time when it was uncertain how much 100 octane would be available in wartime. The outcome was the Rolls-Royce Crecy, which never entered production. The final idea I want to mention in this post was a suggestion for a gas turbine that was to be driven by the hot gas output of a Pescara free-piston engine; the idea was that the compressor could be located in the fuselage of a large aircraft, and the hot gas could be piped to turbines in the wings providing power to propellers. Overly complex though this may sound, it was seriously considered by the ESC in late 1938, after it had committed to supporting the gas turbine projects underway at the RAE and at Power Jets. Clearly, even at this point, the ESC did not think that their advantages were so obvious as to rule out considering other options, and in my next posts I will look at what the RAE’s early gas turbine projects actually entailed.

Good afternoon, and thank you to the organisers for having me. My name’s Jakob Whitfield, and I’m a first-year doctoral student at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester. My project is an examination of the Gas Turbine work done by the Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Engineering Co. (M-V or Metrovick) from just before the Second World War to about 1960. This talk is based on materials from my MSc thesis, as well as some of the work I have done so far in my PhD.

In 1940 the British Ministry of Aircraft Production awarded Metrovick a contract to build a jet engine based on a design by the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE.) The question I hope to answer in this talk is how did a company best known for building kit like this:

To go into places like this:

End up building one of these:

To power this?

In order to answer this question, we need to go back to the early 1930s, and the fear of this:

The background is a still from the Korda film version of H.G. Wells’s ‘Things to Come,’ and the image is a propaganda poster from the Spanish Civil War. Both of these are from later in the 1930s; the fear was in fact inspired by this:

This is a Hawker Hart. In 1931 it was possibly the fastest bomber in the world; when introduced it had been faster than any RAF fighter in service, and in the the 1931 air exercises none of the defending fighters could catch these aircraft – an event which inspired Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, to state in parliament that ‘the bomber would always get through.’

Clearly the RAF needed a more powerful engine for its fighters, and the man to help with this was Henry Thomas Tizard.

Tizard had fingers in many establishment pies: an Oxford chemist, he had done aeronautical research in the First World War, and had then moved to the DSIR. In 1929 he had become the Rector of the elite Imperial College of Science and Technology, but remained involved with many government institutions. One of these was the Engine Sub-Committee of the Aeronautical Research Committee (ESC,) which advised the Air Ministry, and helped set the programme for its research establishment at Farnborough.

The requirements for air defence led the RAF, and thus the ESC, to look for solutions that would give lightweight engines of very high power, even at the cost of other aspects of performance such as range or endurance. Thankfully here Tizard had an ace up his sleeve:

The Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, or ‘Tizard Committee’, had overseen the first British radar experiments. Tizard was thus aware that radar-guided interception might allow fighters to be designed with lower endurance requirements, as they would no longer need to perform standing patrols. This meant that high-fuel-consumption engines of high power might have a practical military application. One of the many technologies that the ESC was considering was the Gas Turbine.

One of the members of the engine sub-committee was A.A. Griffith, who was a senior scientist at the RAE. Griffith had first started to think about gas turbines in the 1920s, and had realised that the component efficiencies of the compressor and turbine needed to be significantly higher if a gas turbine was to provide a useful power output. Up to that point, most designers had analysed turbines and axial blowers as a series of rotating nozzles and passages, rather than as aerofoils. Applying aerodynamic theory, Griffith realised that in most blowers the compressor blades were operating in a stalled state, with a dramatic loss of efficiency. In 1926, he published his work in the report ‘An Aerodynamic Theory of Turbine Design.’ In order to test his theories, the RAE workshop built a number of experimental models, some of which are shown above. The results were encouraging, suggesting that the axial blower could achieve the efficiencies claimed.

Hayne Constant was another researcher in the RAE’s engine department, who had returned to Farnborough in 1936 after some time spent lecturing at Imperial College. He had found teaching not to his liking, and the College’s rector had suggested that he might want to return to the RAE, as there was interesting work to be done on gas turbines. As Imperial’s rector was Henry Tizard, he clearly knew a thing or two about the engine research being done at Farnborough, and on his return Constant was put in charge of the engine department’s supercharger section, which was investigating axial compressors.

At around the same time, the RAF officer Frank Whittle had succeeded in bench-running his first gas turbine, and in 1937 he submitted a report to the ARC in the hope of obtaining financial support for his work. At the engine sub-committee’s meeting of March 1937, the committee discussed a report on Whittle’s work by Griffith, as well as a report by Constant on ‘The internal combustion turbine as a power plant for aircraft.’ The committee’s conclusions were that Whittle’s work was deserving of support, but that the RAE’s work promised greater efficiencies. It recommended that the Air Ministry fund Whittle’s work for further tests, and that the RAE should seek an industrial partner for the purpose of developing a gas turbine.

There were important differences between the Whittle and RAE schemes. The most fundamental was that Whittle was thinking in terms of jet propulsion, whereas the RAE were aiming to produce a turboprop. Component efficiency was less important with the jet scheme, as it did not have to produce shaft horsepower. Whittle’s choice of the less efficient but mechanically simpler centrifugal compressor was a result of this emphasis. From the Air Ministry’s point of view, both forms of gas turbine were medium to long-term prospects; at the same time, the engine sub-committee was investigating various more or less exotic forms of internal combustion piston engine, as well as considering hybrids such as gas turbines driven by piston gas generators.

The Engine Sub-committee recommended that the RAE should team up with an existing steam turbine manufacturer to develop its gas turbine, and suggested that Metropolitan Vickers would be ideal, as they had expressed an interest. Apart from the obvious similarities between steam and gas turbines, traditional aero-engine manufacturers were fully occupied in trying to increase production to meet the RAF’s expansion targets. Metrovick had a reputation as a forward-looking and ‘scientific’ company. This was due in large part to the company’s well-equipped research department, which had built experimental equipment for places like the Cavendish Lab. In addition, M-V employed an unusually high number of scientifically-trained staff with advanced qualifications, of whom at least four were elected FRS. Although the research department’s staff promoted the spin-off benefits of their research, the advantages to the company were as much rhetorical as economic. Metrovick was seen as modern; a fact which in itself led to contracts such as for the gas turbine.

What was in it for M-V? One of the senior research staff at the company had been investigating the high-temperature creep behaviour of materials, and in the mid-1930s had suggested that new materials might make gas turbines a practical possibility. Certainly Metrovick were not motivated by immediate financial gain; the initial contracts for the research turbines were on a cost-plus basis, for which the fees were a couple of hundred pounds. This was not to say that later production runs might not be substantial; as the Engine Sub-Committee’s chair pointed out when discussing the issue, ‘the Air Force might want 2 million horsepower, and this should be worth catering for.’

In the event, the RAF was to take delivery of engine horsepower totally many multiples of that figure, but Metrovicks was not to have any substantive part of it; although they were to develop perhaps the best jet engine of the war, it was never to enter series production, and shortly after the war the company was to leave the aircraft propulsion field. My next step will be to examine exactly how the RAE-MV collaboration worked in practice, and how the RAE’s theories were turned into engineering hardware, with all the tensions inherent therein. Thank you.

I was presenting at the British Society for the History of Science‘s  Postgraduate Conference in Cambridge. It was a very enjoyable experience; there were some very interesting talks on a variety of subjects, and we were very well looked after by the organisers. Although there weren’t many other Cambridge looked very picturesque under 2 inches of snow, which compensated somewhat for the freezing cold. An added surprise was seeing the 20-year-old departmental photos of my supervisor…

My talk was based on the work I did for my MSc, as well as some of the research I’ve done so far for the PhD, and was about the background to the award of the jet engine contract to Metrovick; I’ll put a version up soon when I’ve got my notes together.

My literature review has rather stalled, partly because I need to rethink what I’ve done so far, and partly because I’ve been doing some empirical work. For the past few weeks I’ve been spending time looking at correspondence and papers in archives, both at the National Archives and at the Museum of Science and Industry. For the next couple of weeks I’m going to have to be spending more time at MOSI, as their archives are shutting after Christmas for three months as part of the museum’s refurbishment.

Archival work has its intellectual pleasures – the thrill of discovery, the hunt through the files – but I’ve been quite taken with the sensual pleasures of some of the material. I used to work with technical documentation and so I’ve handled more than my fair share of ring-binders stuffed with laser printer output. In the National Archives, I’ve been looking at ARC engine sub-committee minutes, and have greatly enjoyed the retro charms of the 1930s files as physical objects.  One way in which things were better in the old days would appear to be in the choice of paper. This is lovely cream heavy laid foolscap (did A4 even exist?)  with an SO – Stationery Office? – watermark. As the minutes go into the war years, signs of  rationing show up – the nice paper is replaced with nasty flimsy economy stuff, and later both sides are used;  The text becomes a blurry carbon copy, and the paper is covered with handwritten amendments – no retyping of a clean copy especially for the file.

Sadly, most of the the correspondence between Metrovicks and the RAE seems to have used the contemporary equivalent of bog-standard office copier paper, so for the next few weeks I’ll have to content myself with the occasional look at the company’s leather-bound minute books…

As background my supervisor suggested that I try and get a feel for where Metrovicks fitted in to the electrical engineering sector, and to try and get an overview of the interwar economy more generally. The idea is to try and understand why a heavy plant manufacturer would be given a contract to build a jet engine. Due to a variety of reasons I’ve been making slow progress, and my first draft was rather cursory – and, as was pointed out, lacking in any discussion of the historiography.

So, as well as revising my first draft, I’ve now been set the task of looking at British interwar military procurement policy. I’ve got a reasonable sense of the RAF side of things, but am pretty much at sea  for the Naval and Army arrangements. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Formally, the project title is ‘Power and Propulsion in the Jet Age: A Socio-Technical History of Gas Turbine Development at Metropolitan-Vickers, 1937-1965,’ which is a bit of a mouthful. Founded at the turn of the twentieth century as British Westinghouse, Metropolitan Vickers (M-V or Metrovick) were a Manchester electrical engineering firm. As a producer of steam generating plant they had an appreciation of the requirements of  high-temperature turbines, and they also had a strong culture of in-house research.¹ In the late 1930s RAE Farnborough awarded M-V contracts to build some axial compressors, which were followed by contracts for a gas turbine test rig, and eventually M-V was given the task of developing the RAE’s F.2 jet engine design. Post-war Metrovick’s jet division was sold to Armstrong Siddeley as part of the rationalisation of the post-war aviation industry, but the Manchester company continued to build gas turbines for power generation and other uses, building the world’s first naval gas turbine in the late 1940s.

There are a number of themes and areas that I suspect will be worth exploring over the course of the PhD:

• The post-war uses of high technology as a signifier of modernity, and as a tool for confirming Britain’s world status; This links in with the idea of ‘New Elizabethans.’
• The Warfare State and Industry
• British cultures of engineering

More on that later. For now, though, when asked, I just say I’m looking at the history of jet engines in Manchester…

¹ Including building experimental particle physics equipment for the Cavendish Lab.

The argument against Farnborough, which Driver makes, is that the the RFC’s procurement decisions were biased in favour of the state design facility. Because they were both organs of the War Office, this closeness led to the exclusion of private enterprise, retarding the development of a native aircraft industry. Coupled with this is often the charge that Farnborough’s staff were interested in academic aeronautics rather than practical applications.  For Driver, the main villain of the piece is Lord Haldane, who as Secretary of State for War shaped the UK’s policy on Aerial Navigation. Driver argues that Haldane’s enthusiasm for German science, philosophy, and administrative methods led him to create institutions such as the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and to reorganise the institutions of military aeronautics. Driver claims that Haldane influenced the committee that decided to cancel all work on heavier-than-air research at Farnborough, concentrating instead on airships. The fact that the Germans were into Zeppelins in a big way didn’t hurt.

When the Royal Aircraft Factory (as it was now named) did turn to practical aircraft design, argues Driver, they had to hire one of the pioneer empirical experimenters to help them. Geoffrey de Havilland was the man hired, and the Factory’s successful BE2 was mainly his design. This aircraft was used as a benchmark for the Military Aircraft trials of 1912, and although it was not formally entered, its performance was so much superior to the aircraft that was deemed to have won that it was accepted as the RFC’s standard type. The Factory itself did not manufacture many BE2s; instead contracts were given to a number of firms to build them, including such pioneer firms as Handley Page. However, Driver argues that this deprived the pioneer firms of design experience. He contrasts RFC procurement with that of the RNAS; the Navy ordered private designs from companies such as Sopwith.

It seems to me that Driver is rather unfairly critical of the Factory, and underestimates the advantages to the military of a standard aircraft type. Whilst the BE2 was aproaching obsolesence in 1915, the Farnborough staff were aware of this and were designing new aircraft to meet new requirements. The fact that it was produced in such large number was mainly because it was perhaps the only aircraft with suitable production blueprints.¹ Farnborough was an important vehicle for the professionalisation of the aircraft industry; through the letting of sub-contracts it gave the early industry valuable production experience, and it helped transmit the methods of engineering science to industry. One of the ways this was done was through its role in checking the structural calculations on aircraft selected for military service.

Many of the RFC’s early-war procurement problems can be traced not to government interference in aircraft design, but simply to the challenges of expanding production to meet the needs of mass warfare. As David Edgerton points out,² in 1914 the UK had the world’s largest air force relative to the size of its army. (As aircraft were used mainly for reconnaissance and observation, this is the relevant comparator.) As the market for aircraft was mainly a military one, it is hard to see how a larger industry could have been sustained. Much of the performance advantage of the RNAS’s aircraft was due to the fact that the naval service had a better supply of high-powered rotary engines.³ At war’s outbreak there was no high-powered British aero-engine for the same reason that there was not a mass aviation industry: the market could not support the capital investment required.

In the ‘Fokker Scourge’ of 1915-16, the RFC’s BE2s proved themselves to be vulnerable to enemy aircraft equipped with synchronised machine-guns. Because of the observer’s location in front of the pilot, it proved difficult to fit the BE2 with defensive armament; in any case, by this time the BE2′s performance was pedestrian at best. As a result of the RFC losses, a number of parliamentary enquiries were held. Their recommendation was that the Royal Aircraft Factory be turned into a research and development facility, and it had its design authority removed in late 1916. Perhaps ironically, by this point Factory staff had designed one of the war’s finest scouts, the SE5, and until war’s end Farnborough continued to produce small batches of aircraft to assist commercial producers.

¹ This was the War Office’s rationale;  sub-contractors complained about inaccurate drawings and changes made after the start of production. The BE2 was certainly the design with which companies had the most experience of mass production.

² In his England and the Aeroplane.

³ At one point the RFC and RNAS both had procurement officers in Paris attempting to buy whatever Gnome-Rhone engines could be found; This competition seems to have been resolved by the RFC agreeing to (temporarily) manage with its RAF engines.

The PhD is due to start with induction on Monday; after much prodding of universtity admin I seem to have completed all the registration I can do ahead of time, apart from (what else?) getting my grant payments sorted, something that will take priority when I arrive.

I don’t actually get my formal MSc result until the exam board meets in mid-November. This is slightly annoying, as I technically have a conditional PhD offer, but my supervisor should have seen the dissertation by now and he hasn’t raised any issues – in this case no news is good news. I’m not entirely happy with the dissertation as submitted; another week to let it mature and add more analysis would have been nice, and another month would have allowed me more time to look at more materials at the National Archives, but it should do. I’d like to think about getting some of the info published somewhere, but I’ll have to discuss this with my supervisor, as I suspect it will need serious re-drafting. Anyhow, onward!