Slide Rule
A fantastic story of a life in the aviation industry, including being the senior mathematician on the R100 airship in Yorkshire and a co-founder of the Airspeed aircraft company.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
6mentions
6people
2016–2023years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Well, the kind of computer you have in mind used to be electronic computer to distinguish it from a computer or calculator which described a human being who computed. See, for instance, Nevil Shute's biography Slide Rule in which he describes being in charge of a department of calculators when working on the R100.
It's a fascinating read. You can get it from Anna's Archive.
- Two rather old autobiographies might be interesting to you:
"Slide Rule" by Nevil Shute [0]
A large part of this recounts the development of the R100 airship in Britain.
"Jet: The Story of a Pioneer" by Frank Whittle [1]
A substantial part of this is about the invention of the Jet engine.
Obviously they're both focused on the individual but hopefully that's ok.
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- Also see "Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer" by Nevil Shute, who was the senior stress engineer of the British R100.. (beside being a famous author, eg "On the Beach", "A Town like Alice", etc)
- > math we hide in our design programs was worked out on paper
The Boeing 747 was worked out with paper and slide rules. The 757 was in transition from paper calculations to CAD.
See "Slide Rule" by Nevil Shute.
- In Shute Norway's autobiography, Slide Rule, he describes the design and construction of the [R100](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R100), an airship of which he was one of the leading engineers.
The R100 design was "competing" with the design for the R101; both design teams were simultaneously tasked with constructing a viable airship to make a long-range trip (in the case of R100, crossing the Atlantic in 78 hours, which was a remarkable achievement for the time). The difference was that the R101 project was state-owned whereas the R100 was privately-owned.
R101 crashed and burned in France, en route to India on 5th of October, 1930, likely due to structural issues damaging the airships gasbags, of which the only survivors were those lucky enough to be in the engine cars.
In the autobiography, Norway describes how the difference in program management led to the disaster. There are a lot of factors that led to the crash, as you might imagine, but one of the points he makes is that the publically-owned project was not held to strict requirements in its design process. The privately-owned R101 had a strict contract that they needed to complete, with a tight budget to complete it. They had constraints. Whereas the public-sector project was allowed to continually revise their design as they went, making many successive rewrites and changes without much structure. In particular, they cut the ship in half and rebuilt it at one point in it's development. And when they arrived at the end of their development cycle, they had no leeway to maneuver because they had a lot of public money wrapped up in the project, along with a lot of public visibility and responsibility, pressuring them into rushing the launch without complete trust in their design, and into terrible weather conditions.
*13. Design is based on requirements. There's no justification for designing something one bit "better" than the requirements dictate.*
Decide/envision your outcome, and set your constraints correspondingly early on in development, aligned with realistic expectations of resources, folks.
To underline my point, here's a quote from the Wikipedia page.
"Shortly before R101's flights in June 1930, the Cardington [R101] engineers tentatively suggested that the long flights to Canada and India might be postponed until 1931 on the grounds that neither of the two airships was fit to make a lengthy flight at their current developmental stage. The R100 team replied that their airship was perfectly capable of flying to Canada, and that the Canadian flight was a part of their contract."
R101 did not have a contractual obligation to meet, but did not want to outright state they needed more time, lest admit defeat. R100 had requirements that they needed to meet, which they were ready to meet, as they had them written from the start in clear. R100 launched successfully. R101 was forced to launch to compete before it was ready, due to this "spontaneous requirement". R101 burned for it.
- Barnes Wallace had previously designed the R100 [1] airship for Vickers - the one that didn't crash. The one that did crash was an RAF project. The govt. was having a competition to see which design would be best.
The R100 flew to Canada and back without incident, setting various records on the way.
The fatal R101 flight to India was insisted on by the Air Ministry in response. A deadly effect of "ship it when we say" rather than "ship it when it's ready"
One interesting fact from the R100 story : the stress calculations of their airframe were obviously done by hand and took 3 months to complete, something one could do in Excel nowadays, even without CAD.
The figures are almost unimaginable :
Wallis finally settled on the use of six reconditioned Rolls-Royce Condor petrol engines for propulsion. [2] Each of which generated 500 hp (373 Kw) and weighed 1,504 lbs (682 kg).
From wikipedia :
Nevil Shute later suggested in Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer that the success of R100's Canadian flight indirectly led to the R101 disaster. Prior to the transatlantic flight, the Cardington team could suggest that neither airship was ready for a performance of such duration. However, when R100 returned in triumph they had to either make the flight to India or admit defeat – which would have meant discredit with the consequent danger of losing their jobs.
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