E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
Reihe: The The 50
Pugh The 50 Most Influential Britons of the Past 100 Years The 50 Most Influential Britons of the Past 100 Years
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78578-035-6
Verlag: Icon Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
Reihe: The The 50
ISBN: 978-1-78578-035-6
Verlag: Icon Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Peter Pugh is a businessperson and company historian who has written more than 50 company histories on businesses from Rolls-Royce to Iceland. He is also the author of Introducing Thatcherism and Introducing Keynes, and lives by the sea in north Norfolk, and in Cambridge.
Autoren/Hrsg.
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25. SIR FRANK WHITTLE
The jet engine transformed both peaceful air travel and war in the air and the man most responsible for its invention and development is Frank, later Sir Frank, Whittle.
Born in June 1907 in Coventry, Whittle grew up acquiring engineering skills from his father who was a practical engineer and mechanic. He was determined to join the newly formed Royal Air Force and passed the entrance exam with a high mark at the age of sixteen. However, he was rejected on medical grounds because he was only five feet tall and had a small chest measurement. He built up his chest and reapplied when he was taller but was rejected again. Undeterred, he tried once more under an assumed name and this time got into the School of Technical Training at RAF Cranwell.
In 1928 he produced a thesis, Future Developments in Aircraft Design. In it he showed that a high altitude aircraft could fly faster because of the reduced air resistance and that ‘the turbine is the most efficient prime mover known so it is possible it will be developed for aircraft, especially if some means of driving it by petrol could be devised’.
As Andrew Nahum pointed out in his book Frank Whittle, Invention of the Jet:
The gas turbine, in a heavy, industrial and relatively inefficient form, already existed and was employed in industrial plants where a cheap supply of combustible gas was available. For example, from 1914 the Thyssen company installed them at several steelworks in Germany where they ran on waste blast furnace gas.
However, the jet propulsion idea made the Whittle gas turbine/jet engine conceptually different from the propeller turbine, in which as much energy as possible is extracted as rotary shaft horsepower from the exhaust by the turbine stages. Whittle’s idea instead left as much energy as possible in the gas stream to form a high velocity exhaust jet. This simplification of the gas turbine made Whittle’s jet proposal attractive for development at a time when the combined inefficiencies of the compressor, the turbine and the required reduction gearing and propeller drive seemed, in aggregate, too great to make a propeller turbine unit viable.
Whittle asked himself, ‘Why not substitute a turbine for the piston engine?’
He felt that, instead of using a piston engine to provide the compressed air for the burner, a turbine could be used to extract some power from the exhaust and drive a similar compressor to those used for superchargers. The remaining exhaust would power the aircraft.
In 1929 Whittle sent his concept to the Air Ministry but was turned down. However, a Flying Officer, formerly a patent examiner, suggested he patent the idea, which he did.
Not much further happened until 1935 when Whittle was introduced to two investment bankers at O.T. Falk & Partners, and one of them, Lancelot Law Whyte, said:
The impression he made was overwhelming. I have never been so quickly convinced, or so happy to find one’s highest standard met … This was genius, not talent. Whittle expressed his idea with superb conciseness: ‘Reciprocating engines are exhausted. They have hundreds of parts jerking to and fro, and they cannot be made more powerful without becoming complicated. The engine of the future must produce 2,000 hp with one moving part: a spinning turbine and compressor.
Falk & Partners financed a new company, Power Jets Ltd, which entered into an agreement with steam turbine specialists, British Thomson-Houston, to build an experimental engine facility at a BTH factory near Rugby.
Financial problems continued to delay progress and it was not until January 1940 (four months into the Second World War) that the Air Ministry finally placed a contract with the Gloster Aircraft Company for an aircraft to test the Whittle Supercharger W1.
Finally on 12 April 1941 a W1 powered aircraft took off at RAF Cranwell. It flew for seventeen minutes and reached a speed of 340 mph. At the end of this successful flight a colleague said to Whittle, ‘Frank, it flies,’ to which Whittle replied, ‘Well, that’s what it was bloody well designed to do, wasn’t it?’
In terms of mass production of Whittle’s engines he was involved with Rover for a time but then he was introduced to Rolls-Royce who were already mass-producing the Merlin engines that had been so successful powering the Spitfire and Hurricane in the Battle of Britain. Rolls-Royce gradually took over production of Whittle’s engine and Ernest, later Lord, Hives, Managing Director of Rolls-Royce, became convinced that the company’s future lay with the jet engine. He was quite correct.
24. DR BEECHING
Dr, later Baron, Beeching had a dramatic effect on the lives of the majority of Britons with his report The Reshaping of British Railways, published on 27 March 1963.
It called for the closure of no less than one-third of the country’s 7,000 railway stations, and the removal of passenger services from around 5,000 miles of existing routes.
The rail transport system had grown from zero to a complete coverage of the country in the nineteenth century, built by a number of private companies. However, it was nationalised in 1948 under the Labour Government’s nationalisation programme.
Prompting Beecham’s report was the fact that the existing railway system was highly complicated and inefficient and losing millions of pounds a year. In 1961 it was calculated to be losing £300,000 (nearly £1 million today) every day. Its traffic was also declining in terms of both passengers and goods due to the growth of motor traffic. For example, one third of the network was carrying one per cent of the traffic and, of 18,000 passenger coaches, 6,000 were only used 18 times a year or less. The system was costing £3 million to £4 million a year (£75 million to £100 million today) to maintain and earning only £0.5 million (£12.5 million today).
The closures were carried out from 1963 to 1970 and were heavily criticised, especially of course by those affected.
Another explosion of criticism was caused by the salary paid to Beeching as the First Chairman of the British Railways Board. He was paid £24,000 a year (about £600,000 today) which was the same as he had been receiving as a director of ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries). This was £14,000 more than the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, and two and a half times more than any head of a nationalised industry at the time.
Needless to say, the cuts meant loss of jobs and there was plenty of opposition from the trade unions. Beeching was unrepentant, saying, ‘I suppose I’ll be looked upon as the axe man, but it was surgery, not mad chopping.’
And, as well as cuts, there was also some modernisation carried out as a result of Beeching’s report. For example, there was a greater emphasis on block trains, a rail cargo shipping method whereby all the storage cars were shipped from the same point and arrived at the same destination, which did not require expensive and time-consuming shunting en route.
After all the drama of the first Beeching Report, he produced a second one in February 1965. This time he said that of the 7,500 miles of trunk railway throughout Britain only 3,000 miles ‘should be selected for future development’ and therefore have further investment.
The achievements and long-term influence of Richard Beeching were very well summarised in the biography written by R.H.N. Hardy, a railway manager himself. He wrote:
Richard Beeching became a remarkable, indeed an outstanding, Chairman of the Board and leader of the railway industry … his famous Reshaping Report was constructive and for us within the system, his work changed our thinking, our methods of doing things, our ideas on assessment of managers and our systems – such as they were – of financial control. He was a great believer in forward planning but, in the railway industry, he went further than that and his influence is felt to this day …
… if it was by bringing to the attention of the country the critical situation facing the railways and the taxpayer, if it was to make the public face up to the question of striking a balance between the social need for public transport where it could not pay its way and the financial burden on the community if it were to be provided, if it was to create a basic internal organisation that stood the test of time for many years, then he succeeded and succeeded magnificently.
23. SIR HENRY ROYCE
Henry Royce, the partner of Charles Rolls in the foundation of Rolls-Royce Ltd, was influential not only for the development of the Rolls-Royce cars but, more importantly, for the development of Rolls-Royce aero engines.
Rolls-Royce Ltd was founded in 1904 to produce cars and, as is well known, the company was soon producing what became known by many as ‘the best car in the world’. However, the future of the company was thrown into jeopardy by the outbreak of the First World War on 4 August 1914. At the first board meeting after the outbreak of war, Claude Johnson, the Managing Director, was authorised ‘to reduce the works wages to about one fourth by discharging about half the hands and allowing the remainder to work only half time’. More surprisingly, the board decided that the company ‘would not avail itself of the opportunity, now possibly arising, of making or assembling aero engines for the British Government’.
This decision was soon reversed and Henry Royce began to develop his first aero...
