Not Much Of An Engineer:- An Autobiography

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He won a scholarship for Imperial College London to study mathematics, and in particular, hydrodynamics. At the same time Rolls decided that their existing piston engines were a dead end, and moved all future jet work from Barnoldswick to Derby, their main engine site. After a few days spent reading The Times, Hooker timidly ventured into surrounding work spaces, where young men were hard at work over drawing boards.

Covering, his university studies to his doctorate has a brilliant mathematician , thence to his little known or understood work with the Admiralty calculating the size of a liquid fuelled rocket to attack Berlin. A lesson in management as well as engineering, it tells of engine development from the WW2 Merlin to the first gas turbines, then on to the Concorde's Olympus, the Pegasus of the Harrier and the engine that very nearly scuppered Rolls-Royce, the RB211, as well as many more from both Rolls Royce and Bristol and all told with anecdotal experiences of a most interesting life. In the late 1980s, test pilot Bill Bedford gave a talk in Christie's auction room in South Kensington in London. There is an oblique reference to his stay in hospital in 1982, and his book was “ assisted by Bill Gunston” (1927–2013) an eminent aviation author and historian.Bairstow decided to try to solve them by numerical methods, and employed two ladies to operate with numbers, just as present-day computers do, although the ladies were a few million times slower. Off they went to visit Whittle, and a “ Send us the drawings…and we will make them for you”, with no mention of payment.

But your skill set needs to go much deeper than frameworks if you’re going to have success in your next job — the one where you get hired because you had 3–5 years of “engineering” experience on your resume. He was permitted to study anything that caught his fancy, and soon moved into the supercharger design department. But fate intervened, and in December 1929, I suffered a broken leg in a football match against University College Hospital. The early pages spring from such a different era, and the man himself seems still to be steeped in it, with that typical English middle class reserve and understatement. Hooker convinced Hives that pounds of thrust from a gas turbine, puny though the 800 lb from Whittle’s engine sounded when compared with the Merlin’s horsepower, when he told him that the Merlin engine produced 840 lb from the then 70% efficient propeller, but enough to propel the Spitfire at 300 mph.A remarkable story of the hugely talented engineer who put the power into the Merlin, enabled Rolls Royce to take on Whittle's jet and developed it and other variant designs for military and civilian aircraft, who went on to develop the Bristol Siddeley Olympus engine which powered the V bombers and Concorde. He made it clear that the achievements in engine development made could in no way be attributable to any single person. I will address one niggle I read from another review stating that Hooker was in some way trying to suggest he was the be all and end all of jet turbines. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. If you know a framework, you can often get a job that has the word “engineer” in the title, and possibly “machine learning”.

A must read for all budding engineers, which is both light and easy to follow despite the complex engineering involved. They were full of high spirits and fun, and, once the initial pain of the break had subsided, they took particular pleasure in giving me ‘blanket baths’ in bed.Some terminology that may be used in this description includes: Jacket Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps. Just prior to the bankruptcy, at the end of 1970, Hugh Conway (group managing director, gas turbines) agreed that Hooker should come out of retirement to go to Derby to survey the situation, insisting Hooker be accorded the status of technical director at Derby. Thus, Hives to Spencer Wilkes, “ Hooker, here, seems to get on very well with Whittle, and knows all about his jet engine.

Ric gained the CBE for Services to Engineering in 2013 and was named European CTO of the Year in 2014. It was Levy who introduced me to the Kármán Vortex Street, which is the series of eddies which are shed alternately from each side of a body moving through a fluid such as air or water. Hooker’s work with ducting came together with the design of Sidney Camm (the same man who had designed the Hawker Hurricane in the early 1930s) to produce the Hawker-Siddeley Harrier.Hooker also worked on finishing the Olympus, developing later versions that would be used on the Avro Vulcan and Concorde and a further development for the stillborn TSR2. In the real world in which we live air’s viscosity gradually dissipates, like friction, all air motion into heat. Bedford talked about the various fighters he had flown, many of which had been powered by Hooker's engines. Years later this was to prove an enormous advantage to me and of great benefit to the British aero industry.