Although the greater part of my working life has been concerned with aviation—and particularly with aircraft propulsion—I have never really regarded myself as a dyed-in-the-wool aeronautical pioneer. It has been my good fortune to collaborate with many whose names will long live in the history of aviation, and to have been able to play some part in the development of powerplant engineering over the past half century. I feel honoured, therefore, by being invited to contribute some personal anecdotes and views to the Centenary Issue of the Society's Journal.

When one is young a century seems almost an aeon, mythical in its earlier days, peopled with men whose names are forgotten, or remembered only as seen on mouldering tomb stones in village churchyards. But to me, although only in the earlier seventies, the hundred years spanned by the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain (as it was originally called) is little more than “an evening gone”.

P. Y. Alexander, an engine enthusiast, was one of its early members, and a close friend of an uncle of mine, and I met him in his later years.

My First active acquaintance with the Schneider Trophy Contests came in 1927 when I was chief experimental engineer to Peter Hooker Ltd of Walthamstow, generally known as the British Gnôme and Le Rhône engine company—since they had taken the licence for Gnôme engines as early as 1913. I was asked by H. C. Tryon, that grand experimental engineer of Napier, if I would come over to Acton and give them some advice on the high compression racing Lion engines they were preparing for the first official, British Government, participation in the Schneider Contest at Venice that year.

It makes me somewhat pensive to reflect that the whole era of powered flight has taken place in my lifetime—even though I was too young when the Wright brothers first flew to realise what it would mean to the world in general and myself in particular. Nor could I have dreamt that I should one day have the privilege, in 1938, of meeting Mr. Orville Wright at his home in Dayton and hearing his views on the astonishing development of the art which he and his brother pioneered.

The key to an understanding of the National Gas Turbine Establishment at Pyestock lies, perhaps, in the large engineering bias of the professional scientific and technical staff of this advanced research and development organisation, of whom over eighty per cent are engineers by training, so that in every direction the thirst for knowledge and the pursuit of novel techniques is tempered by engineering judgment. For example, even among the specialists, materials science is not narrowly equated with crystallography, chemistry or metallurgy, but is considered largely as the art of exploiting all likely materials to maximum advantage in air breathing propulsion systems.

Little Attention was paid to the characteristics of the fuel for the early aircraft engines. They had available to them a gasoline primarily intended for automobile engines, the earliest of which used wick carburettors. These carburettors required a fuel of extremely high volatility and with the straight run gasolines available at the time, volatility could be related to specific gravity. The lower the specific gravity, the better the volatility and the requirement for low specific gravity endured for about the first twenty years of the life of the aircraft engine.

Those who have taken an untried aeroplane into the air for its first flight will know there is a quality about that moment which goes far beyond the coldly scientific assessment of which it is part. Here is a new creation which feels as though imbued with life, and one becomes its very heart and brain. It is a joint endeavour and a double proving—an embarkation into a beckoning unknown, however familiar the sky has become through previous flights in other aircraft.

In 1965 we see a world around us seemingly inharmonious and suffering from uncertainty in the regions of religions, politics, economics and culture. How different away back in 1908! Most people in those far off days had convictions and held them to be first principles.

They really did believe in the verity of the words of the hymn from which this phrase is quoted—“God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate.” People in 1908 saw nothing peculiar in holding such beliefs. This was the atmosphere in which the activities of the Society were being conducted and was largely the matrix of the thinking of its illustrious and inspired membership.

On 1st March 1911, the four officers, including myself, selected for the first flying course, assembled at Eastchurch in Isle of Sheppey. The others were Lieutenants Samson and Gregory, RN, and Lieutenant Gerrard of the Royal Marines. Samson had been in the Persian Gulf with the naval small boats trying to stop the slave trade, flourishing at that time along the Trucial and Arabian coasts. He turned out to be a first class pilot and in the 1914-18 War a very brave one. He was an individualist and difficult to work with but a popular leader with his juniors in any enterprise.

The Royal Air Force came into being towards the end of the 1914–18 War. In the time and space available it is impossible to write anything approaching a full history of it from its inception to the present day. I shall, therefore, only attempt to mention those events which have impressed themselves on my mind as landmarks in the history of the Service.

I shall also endeavour to outline briefly some of the achievements of some of our pilots between the Wars as they illustrate the development of aeroplane performance, followed by a few reminiscences and digressions in an attempt to illustrate the post-War trend.

I will describe some interesting work that was done in the First World War by S. Keith-Lucas who, like many of us, had been called up from his university to work, during the war, in what is now known as the Royal Aircraft Establishment, at Farnborough.

After doing some experiments in flight, with ordinary compasses, he designed a special compass with which pilots could maintain a straight course and navigate, quite accurately, in clouds.

It was early in the war that many pilots told us that, in clouds, their compasses went all wrong and pointed in almost any direction.

To tell the story of Naval aviation from the end of the First World War to the present requires a book but, within the confines of this short article, I shall hope to trace the changing pattern of Naval aviation in this country against the background of the aircraft which were developed and used, the carriers, the catapults and the miscellany of equipment. I shall omit the technical details of the aircraft themselves, because to include them would add greatly to the length and the details are, in any case, available in the usual reference books.

It is only in recent years that aircraft have become firmly established, like tanks or trucks, as integral vehicles of the British Army. The interest of the Army in the third dimension, however, is as old as War itself, and as soon as aircraft became available the Army made use of them. In this short article we shall trace the development of our Army aviation, and deduce perhaps to what extent it has contributed to the aeronautical scene.

One hundred years of aircraft production in 5000 words leaves little enough space for a systematic treatment of any aspect! Looking back personally over 46 of these years also makes the task one of peril. First, lest one should lose friends by not including a mention of their achievements, and second, over-simplification of the steps in the historical chain leading to today.

If one looks back over the half century, or there abouts, of practical aviation, the enormous changes in aircraft and powerplants have been accompanied by an equal metamorphosis in their accessories. As soon as aeroplanes progressed beyond the stage of short hops from skids, the accessories began to develop: in the cockpit, the air speed indicator, the altimeter and the bubble levels; in the structure, the undercarriage and its shock absorbers.

In this Centenary Year of our Society I look back over the last fifty years in which I have been actively engaged in aviation. During this time the development of aircraft and now aerospace vehicles has been spectacular. It must be very difficult for younger members of the Society whose activities in aviation may have started after 1945 to visualise the intense activity in aircraft development which occurred before the last War, and which laid the foundations for the present complex aircraft.

The Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service, which were combined in 1918 to form the Royal Air Force, both ended the First World War with radio communication by telegraphy and telephony between aircraft and ground stations and between actual aircraft.

The equipment to achieve this was the result of research and development carried out for the Royal Flying Corps at various military establishments such as the Signals Experimental Establishment at Woolwich and for the Royal Naval Air Service, first at Eastchurch, Isle of Sheppey, and latterly at Cranwell.

The celebration of an individual human birthday is an almost completely one-sided recapitulation of pleasant experiences in earlier years, together with a warmly optimistic forecast for coming years. This is wholly right and proper, although even here an occasional muted warning is of genuine value.

The celebration of a “technological birthday”, the review of the partial success, through one or more years of operation, of a man-sustained project, deserves notice of the same general type of review, promising further success, warning of potential difficulty, hoping for circumstances and facilities favourable to continued satisfaction, continuously qualified by mention of possible—indeed probable— change in the social climate, for good or ill.

This brief historical note on British rotorcraft may be likened to the small visible part of a large iceberg and the reasons for it are these.

When I was asked to write this note for the Society's Journal I agreed to undertake the task with certain reservations. In the first instance there was very little time in which to do it. While it was relatively easy to collect the early history from well-established records this did not apply to the more recent developments and here the material needed to be collected from primary sources and to be collated.

This is not intended to be a treatise on the way to investigate air accidents. That story has been told many times and there is much authoritative literature on the subject already—besides I am thirteen years out of date. My aim is to tell something about the way it began and how, in little more than 30 years, it has become a really scientific art, always keeping step with the advance of aircraft and powerplant design and yet never gaining a sufficient lead to put a stop to accidents.