| Sir Barnes Wallis | |
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| Born | Barnes Neville Wallis 26 September 1887 Ripley, Derbyshire, England |
| Died | 30 October 1979 (aged 92) Effingham, Surrey, England |
| Resting place | St Lawrence's Church, Effingham, Surrey |
| Residence | Effingham, Surrey |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Scientist, engineer and inventor |
| Known for | Inventing the bouncing bomb |
Sir Barnes Neville Wallis, CBE [1] FRS, RDI, FRAeS (26 September 1887 – 30 October 1979), was an English scientist, engineer and inventor. He is best known for inventing the bouncing bomb used by the RAF in Operation Chastise (the "Dambusters" raid) to attack the Möhne, Sorpe, and Eder dams in the Ruhr area in May 1943, during World War II. The raid was the subject of the 1954 film The Dam Busters, in which Wallis was played by Michael Redgrave. Among his other inventions were the geodesic airframe and the earth quake bomb.
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Career
Barnes Wallis was born in Ripley, Derbyshire and educated at Christ's Hospital in Horsham, leaving school at seventeen to start work in January 1905 at Thames Engineering Works at Blackheath, South East London. He subsequently changed his apprenticeship to J. Samuel White's, the shipbuilders based at Cowes in the Isle of Wight. He originally trained as a marine engineer and only much later in 1922 did he take an external degree in engineering via the University of London External Programme.[2] He left J Samuel White's in 1913 when an opportunity arose for him to work on airship design and then aircraft design. He worked for Vickers until his retirement in 1971.
Aircraft design
His many achievements include the first use of geodesic design in engineering and in the gasbag wiring of Vickers's R100 in 1930, which, at the time, was the largest airship ever designed. He also pioneered the use of light alloy and production engineering in the structural design of the R100. Despite a better-than-expected performance and a successful return flight to Canada in 1930, the R100 was broken up following the tragedy that befell its "sister" ship, the R101 (which was designed and built by a team from the Government's Air Ministry); the later crash of the Hindenburg led to the abandonment of airships as a mode of mass transport.
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By the time of the R101 crash, Wallis had moved to Vickers' aircraft division. The pre-war aircraft designs of Rex Pierson, the Vickers Wellesley and the Vickers Wellington, both employed Wallis's geodetic design in the fuselage and wing structures. The latter was one of the most robust airframes ever developed, and pictures of its skeleton largely shot away, but still sound enough to bring its crew home safely, are still impressive.[3] The geodesic construction offered a light and strong airframe (compared to conventional designs) with clearly defined space within for fuel tanks, payload etc. However the technique was not easily transferred to other aircraft manufacturers nor was Vickers able to build other designs in factories tooled for geodesic work.
Bomb design
After the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe in 1939, Wallis saw a need for strategic bombing to destroy the enemy's ability to wage war and he wrote a paper entitled "A Note on a Method of Attacking the Axis Powers". Referring to the enemy's power supplies he wrote (as Axiom 3): "If their destruction or paralysis can be accomplished they offer a means of rendering the enemy utterly incapable of continuing to prosecute the war". As a means to do this he proposed huge bombs that could concentrate their force and destroy targets which were otherwise unlikely to be affected. Wallis's first super-large bomb design came out at some ten tonnes, far larger than any current plane could carry. This led him to suggest a plane that could carry it, the "Victory Bomber", rather than drop the idea.
Early in 1942, Wallis began experimenting with skipping marbles over water tanks in his garden, leading to his April 1942 paper "Spherical Bomb — Surface Torpedo". The idea was that a bomb could skip over the surface of water (avoiding torpedo nets) and sink directly next to a battleship or dam wall as a depth charge, with the surrounding water concentrating the force of the explosion on the target. A crucial innovation was the addition of backspin, which caused the bomb to trail behind the dropping aircraft, increased the range of the bomb, and also prevented it from moving away from the target wall as it sank. After some initial scepticism, the Air Force accepted Wallis's bouncing bomb for attacks on the dams of the Ruhr Valley. The raid on these dams (Operation Chastise) was immortalised in Paul Brickhill's 1951 book The Dam Busters and the 1954 film of the same name.
After the success of the bouncing bomb, Wallis was able to return to his huge bombs, producing first the Tallboy (6 tonnes) and then Grand Slam (10 tonnes) deep-penetration earth quake bombs. These were used on strategic German targets such as V1 rocket launch sites, submarine pens, and other reinforced structures, large civil constructions such as viaducts and bridges, as well as the German battleship Tirpitz. These two bombs were the fore-runners of modern bunker-busting bomb, and could enter the earth at supersonic velocity. The Tallboy should not be confused with the 5-tonne "blockbuster" bomb, which was a conventional blast bomb.
After the War
Though he did not invent the concept, Wallis did much pioneering engineering work to make the swing-wing concept functional. However, despite very promising wind tunnel and model work, his designs were not adopted. His early "Wild Goose", designed in the late 1940s, was intended to use laminar flow, but when this was shown to be unworkable, he developed the swing-wing further for the "Swallow", designed in the mid-1950s, which could have been developed for either military or civil applications. On UK government instructions, however, Vickers passed the swing-wing designs to the US Government and instead adopted the BAC TSR-2 (on which one of Wallis' sons worked) and Concorde. Wallis was quite critical of the BAC TSR-2, stating that a swing-wing design would be more appropriate and demonstrating the concept by flying scale models without tailplanes. In the mid-1960s, The BAC TSR-2 project was ignominiously scrapped in favour of the American F-111 – which had swing wings based on Wallis's work – though this order was also subsequently cancelled.
In the 1960s, Wallis also proposed using large nuclear-powered cargo submarines to transport oil and other goods, thus avoiding surface weather conditions. Moreover, Wallis' calculations indicated, the power requirements for an underwater vessel are lower than for a comparable conventional ship and they can be made to travel at a much higher speed.[4] In the end, nothing came of Wallis's submarine ideas.
In the 1950s, Wallis developed an experimental rocket-propelled torpedo codename HEYDAY. It was powered by compressed air and hydrogen peroxide. Tests were conducted from Portland Breakwater in Dorset. The unusual shape was designed to maintain laminar flow over much of its length. The only surviving example is on display in Explosion! Museum of Naval Firepower at Gosport.
During the 1960s and into his retirement, he developed ideas for an "all-speed" aircraft, capable of efficient flight at all speed ranges from subsonic to hypersonic.
The story described in The Dam Busters reflected the difficulties Wallis often faced in persuading those in authority or who controlled funding sources to support his ideas.
Following the terrible death toll of the aircrews involved in the Dambusters raid, he made a conscious effort never again to endanger the lives of his test pilots. His designs were extensively tested in model form, and consequently he became a pioneer in the remote control of aircraft.
Wallis became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1945 and was knighted in 1968.
Personal
In April 1922, Wallis met his cousin-in-law, Molly Bloxam, at a family tea party. She was only 17 and he was 35, and her father forbade them from courting. However, he allowed Wallis to assist Molly with her mathematics courses by correspondence, and they wrote some 250 letters, enlivening them with fictional characters such as "Duke Delta X". The letters gradually became personal, and Wallis proposed marriage on her 20th birthday. They married on 23 April 1925, and were married for 54 years before his death in 1979.[5]
He lived with his family in Effingham, Surrey, from 1930 until his death.
His daughter Mary Eyre Wallis later married Harry Stopes-Roe, a son of Marie Stopes.[6]
Fiction
Wallis appears as a fictionalized character in Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships, the authorised sequel to The Time Machine. He is portrayed as a British engineer in an alternate history, where the First World War does not end in 1918, and Wallis concentrates his energies on developing a machine for time travel. As a consequence, it is the Germans who develop the bouncing bomb.
In Scarlet Traces: The Great Game, he is said to have developed the Cavorite weapon used to win the war on Mars after the suicide of Cavor.
Memorials
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This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2008) |
- There is a statue to Barnes Wallis in Herne Bay, Kent just a short distance from Reculver where his bouncing bomb was tested.
- A Red Wheel heritage plaque commemorating Barnes Wallis's contribution as "Designer of airships, aeroplanes, the 'Bouncing Bomb' and swing-wing aircraft" was erected by the Transport Trust at Wallis' birthplace in Ripley, Derbyshire on 31 May, 2009.
- A Red Wheel heritage plaque is also located on New Cross Road in New Cross, London.
- The Student Union Building on the University of Manchester North Campus is named in Barnes Wallis's honour; Wallis was awarded lifetime membership of the Students' Union in 1967.
- Nottingham Trent University also has a building named after Barnes Wallis, on Goldsmith Street.
- QinetiQ's site in Farnborough, Hampshire includes a building named in Barnes Wallis's honour, being the former site of the Royal Aircraft Establishment.
- There is a Barnes Wallis public house by the side of Howden railway station on the Hull to Selby line. It is in view of the site of the airship hangars.
- There is a Barnes Wallis Drive in Byfleet in Surrey on the approach to what was the Vickers/British Aerospace complex, within the former Brooklands race circuit. Additionally, there is a Barnes Wallis Close in Chickerell, Weymouth which is within sight of the Fleet Lagoon bounded by Chesil Beach where Wallis tested the bouncing bomb.
- A "Barnes Wallis" in golf is a shot that bounces over a water hazard.
Notes
- ^ London Gazette Issue 44735 published on the 13 December 1968. Page 1 of 82
- ^ Tatum Anderson "History lessons at the people's university," Guardian Weekly, 16 May 2007
- ^ http://www.geocities.com/skrzydla/300/pics/Zoska.html
- ^ Morpurgo, J.E.. Barnes Wallis, A Biography.
- ^ See this article, which cites Mathematics with Love: The Courtship Correspondence of Barnes Wallis, a collection of the letters edited by their daughter Mary Stopes-Roe.
- ^ Pugh, Peter. Barnes Wallis Dambuster. p. 180.
References
- Morpurgo, J.E. (1972). Barnes Wallis, A Biography. London: Longman. ISBN 0-582-10360-6.
- Stopes-Roe, Mary (2005). Mathematics with Love: The Courtship Correspondence of Barnes Wallis, Inventor of the Bouncing Bomb. Macmillan. ISBN 1403944989.
- Pugh, Peter (2005). Barnes Wallis Dambuster. Icon. ISBN 1840466855.
External links
- Examples of papers from RAF museum
- The Papers of Sir Barnes Neville Wallis, Janus Archive, Cambridge
- A short biography of Wallis
- The Barnes Wallis Memorial Trust
- Sir Barnes Wallis, Iain Murray
- BBC history page on Barnes Wallis
- The Dambusters (617 Squadron) and Barnes Wallis
- Photograph of HEYDAY torpedo
- Wallis's impact on Effingham where he lived and the story of the swing-wing aircraft that flew without a tail
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