Oral History of British Science

Personal Geographies of Science

Thomas Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

I was reading an article by Janet Vertesi a little while ago on how the distinctive London Underground Map, with its differences from a 'real' map of London has affected how travellers think about the representations of urban space (Vertesi, Social Studies of Science, 2008). It got me thinking a little bit on how my own perception of the geography of Britain has been warped somewhat over the last few years by talking so much to scientists about the scientific places they once worked in.

For example, I can't see a train to Malvern any more without instantly thinking “TRE” - the home of Britain's wartime radar research. Place names instantly connect themselves to companies and establishments and technologies in my mind. Farnborough = the RAE = Aeroplanes. Wembley = GEC = All manner of electronics. Warton = English Electric = Aeroplanes. Bristol = Jet engines. The Isle of Wight = Saunders Roe = Hovercraft and Rockets (definitely not sandcastles and beaches). And so on. My whole knowledge of places has been subtly conditioned my learning about the history of science. Fortunately enough, looking at the British Society for the History of Science travel guide, it seems I'm not the only one. But actually trundling across much of this landscape myself, visiting scientists who retired near the places they worked, I get a rather personal take on it.

I wondered for a while why I spent so much time going through Reading on my travels. But a quick look at the place names around it on the map makes it clear, if you know what you are looking for: the old International Computers Limited [ICL] facilities at Reading and Bracknell, the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, the Vickers aircraft factory at Weybridge; to the West, the nuclear research sites of Aldermaston, Harwell and Culham lie within about 30 miles of each other, conveniently close to Oxford, with its university, and Abingdon, home of high-tech manufacturer Oxford Instruments. I could go on, but the clustering of high-tech industries is a well known phenomena. Companies and establishments need to work together, need a supply of trained staff, need each other's services, and often spin-off new organisations in new fields.

The other interesting thing is how much these places themselves have changed. A couple of years ago I strolled hrough the housing estate that had once been the Hawker's aircraft factory in Kingston with aircraft designer Ralph Hooper, marvelling at the way all the road names were named after aeroplanes. One of the pleasing things of our project is how much we've been able to record places that don't exist any more, in the words of those who worked in them, and the great changes in other locations over the years. As the following video, featuring Sir John Charnley discussing the contrast between A-shed in Farnborough in the 1950s and 2011, neatly demonstrates, place can be a powerful focus point for understanding change.

 

Sir John Charnley's audio and video interview are catalogued on the Sound & Moving Image Catalogue under reference C1379/30.

Alan Turing Centenary

Thomas Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

Today marks the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, mathematician, logician, wartime codebreaker, and computer scientist. Widely recognised as one of the fathers of computer science and artificial intelligence, Turing's mathematics research in the 1930s led him to the concept of the Universal Turing Machine, an idea which predicted the ability of stored program computers to perform any task they were programmed to do. He spent the Second World War working on ultra top secret code-breaking at Bletchley Park, devising the Turing-Welchman Bombe, to automate part of the process of decrypting German codes. Postwar he joined the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) where he designed one of the first stored program computers, the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE).

Frustrated in his efforts to get ACE built at the NPL, Turing joined the University of Manchester, which had recently completed the world's first operational electronic stored program computer. At Manchester he became deputy director of the computing laboratory in 1949 and worked on early software development and mathematical biology. In 1950 he introduced the famous idea of the Turing Test to define a standard by which a machine could be deemed intelligent. This stream of ideas was tragically cut short. In 1952, at a time when homosexual acts were illegal in Britain, Turing was convicted of having a sexual relationship with another man. As a result he lost his security clearance to work on code breaking, and was chemically castrated by hormone injections, whose side effects caused him even further discomfort. In 1954 he died, poisoned by a cyanide laced apple, in a probable case of suicide.

Popularly regarded as a brilliant but sometimes eccentric character, Turing has become one of the best known of the pioneers of computing. However, perhaps as a result of his early death, aged just 41, Turing sometimes feels like he belongs to a more distant age than he does. In fact many of Turing's contemporaries are still alive, and several of them have been interviewed as part of An Oral History Of British Science. We routinely ask interviewees to describe their colleagues, famous or otherwise, and unsurprisingly Turing has appeared several times in the supporting cast of the life stories on our project, such as in the following two clips from Geoff Tootill and Tony Brooker.

Geoff Tootill was one of the small team of electronic engineers who built the first stored program computer, at Manchester in 1948. In the following clip Geoff describes his surprise at having to correct some errors in program by Turing.

Geoff Tootill on working with Alan Turing

Computer scientist Tony Brooker joined the University of Manchester in 1951 to take over the day-to-day running of the computer user service from Turing. In the following clip discusses what it was like working with Turing at Manchester in the early 1950s.

Tony Brooker on working With Turing

Dennis Higton (1921-2012)

Thomas Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

We were very sad to learn of the recent death of Dennis Higton, one of the interviewees for Made in Britain, at the age of 90. By any measure, Dennis lived a remarkable life. He grew up in difficult circumstances and with limited prospects in the hungry years of the 1920s and 1930s depression, until a position as an engineering apprentice at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough offered him his one big chance. It was an opportunity he made the most of, as Dennis recalled, “I can’t tell you the resolve that I put upon myself not to cheat, not to slack, to become absurdly diligent because I wouldn’t have another chance.” His practical skills and hard work at night-school won him a position in the Aerodynamics Department when he completed his apprenticeship. As a practical engineer, without a university education, Dennis faced a daunting challenge joining a group that included some of the nation's finest theoretical aerodynamicists and mathematicians.

 Dennis Higton being The Boy at RAE

However, this very difference from those around him helped make Dennis an even more valuable member of the team. His start as an apprentice meant that he could bridge the divide, social and educational, between technical workshop staff and aeronautical scientists, and his ingenuity as a practical engineer would prove invaluable to more theoretically inclined colleagues.

In the 1940s and 1950s Farnborough was heavily involved in trying to understand the behaviour of aircraft flying at high speed. With wind tunnels unable to function accurately at speeds approaching the speed of sound, much of this work had to be based on data collected 'live' by instruments fitted to aircraft which were then recorded as the planes flew high speed test flights. Not only were the test flights dangerous, but the primitive nature of the instruments available and the tiny spaces on aircraft to fit the equipment in created great problems for accurately measuring flight data. Dennis devised a range of ingenious instrumentation installations for recording data in flight, including the instruments for the first official flight test programme of Britain's very first jet aircraft, the Gloster E.28/39 in 1942 and 1943. These instruments provided invaluable data for other aeronautical engineers of a more theoretical bent to base their calculations on.

Dennis Higton on the Gloster E.28-39

Working with John Charnley (C1379/30) Dennis was responsible for a range of other experimental installations on aircraft at Farnborough, including a test rig for controlling vertical take off aircraft, which predated the systems later used on the Harrier jump jet. In the early 1950s he transferred to Boscombe Down, where he was intimately connected with the flight testing of naval aircraft, building up a good working relationship with the Navy and flying as an observer on aircraft trials, in spite of the dangers involved. He spent several years in the 1960s leading technical liason efforts at the British Embassy in Washington, an important posting at this time of Cold War cooperation. Dennis returned to a series of senior posts in London, ending his career as Director General of Military Aircraft Projects, responsible for resolving all manner of problems in the manufacture of military aircraft, a situation far removed from that of an engineering apprentice of 1938.

Dennis Higton (in white shirt) talking to test pilot and navigator of the Buccaneer under test on board the aircraft carrier USS Lexington.  Photo courtesy of David Eagles.

RB211 - Big Fan, Big Engine, Big Problems, Bigger Success

Tom Lean, interviewer for Made in Britian, writes:

In the following video clip, filmed at the Rolls Royce heritage centre in Derby, John Coplin discusses the early history of the Rolls Royce RB211 jet engine, of which he was chief designer.  Intended for use aboard the Lockheed Tristar airliner, the RB211 was designed to deliver much greater efficiency than older engines and make use of new lightweight composite materials, such as carbon fibre, to keep its weight down. However, problems with the development of such an innovative engine led its builders Rolls Royce into a crisis and receivership in 1971. Supported by a government nationalisation, Rolls Royce redesigned and completed the RB211, which went on to become one of their most successful products, powering hundreds of airliners the world over.

 

 

The audio and video interviews with John Coplin are catalogued on the Sound and Moving Image catalogue under the reference C1379/37.

Politics and the English language

Tom Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

Every now and again I'm struck by how I seem to have vocabulary I didn't use to have, or at least didn't use to use. A bit of this is technical – I now know about wave guides, stators, spars, oscillators, Curta calculators, wiffle trees and goodness knows what else – and I suspect that my technical vocabulary probably includes terms that many modern scientists and engineers would scratch their heads at.

The language of science is often technical and filled with jargon, which has to be negotiated and unpacked in the interview, and which I need to know a bit about.  It's important to ask, for example, how being a TA Grade III differed to being a JSO.

But its not just technical vocabulary, it's about normal words being used in ways that non-scientists wouldn't use them, an issue that causes rather frequent problems for our transcribers. For example, the difference between the “mask of the chip” and the “mast of the ship” is really rather significant. One is about making microchips. The other is about boats.

It's also about turns of phrase I didn't use to use, but seem to crop up when talking about certain places and certain times. I'll find myself asking civil servants about running their bailiwick, and enquiring of ageing aircraft designers “what sort of chap was he?” when discussing their past colleagues.

I was born in 1981. The word 'chap' is not of my generation and the fact that I ask about a 'chap' more often than a 'person' is quite telling in itself. But other than noticing a mirroring of my interviewees words and trying to make them comfortable with my own use of language, it makes me wonder just what else is caught up not in the things we talk about with scientists, but in the words we use in the process.

Professor Sir Alan Cottrell (1919-2012)

Tom Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

The Oral History of British Science team were saddened to learn of the death last week of interviewee Sir Alan Cottrell.  Sir Alan was born in Birmingham in 1919 and studied at the University there. A centrally important figure in the modern history of metallurgy, he spent the second Second World War improving the hardening of tank armour, before moving postwar to atomic research establishment at Harwell, where he worked ensuring the safety of the Magnox nuclear reactors. As Goldsmiths Professor of Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge he became a champion of new approaches to metallurgy and understanding how materials behave on an atomic level. In 1965 he left academic life to serve in a succession of senior posts in the scientific civil service, and succeeded Sir Solly Zuckerman as Chief Scientific Adviser in 1971.

In the following clip from his interview, recorded last year, Sir Alan reflected on the long term influence that being a scientist in wartime had on him.

 

Sir Alan Cottrell - being a scientist during WW2

 

The interview with Sir Alan can be accessed online via British Library Sounds.

From P.1127 to Harrier Jump Jet

Dr Thomas Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

The 1950s were a time of dramatic change in aircraft design. Aeronautical engineers experimented with the new jet and rocket engines, delta and swept wing aircraft shapes, and new concepts for flight, such as supersonic speeds and vertical take off and landing. Excited by the growing power of jet engines, aircraft designers reasoned that aircraft may no longer need conventional runways - they could simply blast themselves vertically into the sky on take off, and land on a cushion of jet thrust on return.

And yet for all the many vertical take off prototypes and projects that were started across the world in this time, only one led to a truly successful production aircraft - the Hawker P.1127, which evolved into the Harrier.

Last summer we took Made in Britain interviewee Ralph Hooper to Brooklands Museum in Surrey, home to one of the prototype P.1127s which he began the original design of in 1957. In the following video clip Ralph discusses the early days of this long lived aircraft.

  

The life story audio interview with Ralph is catalogued as C1379/27 on the British Library Sound Archive catalogue whilst the video interview is catalogued as C1379/27A.

Broken Black Arrow

Tom Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

Forty years ago, on October 28th 1971, Britain took a small step of its own into joining the space race with the launch of Prospero X-3, a 66kg scientific satellite, lifted into low earth orbit about a 40 foot tall rocket codenamed BLACK ARROW.

Launched from Woomera in Australia, Black Arrow was uniquely a British effort. The rocket and its payload were designed and built by several British companies and government labs in such places as the Isle of Wight, Ansty, Westcott, and Farnborough. However, after the failure of two of the three earlier test flights, at the time of its success Black Arrow had already been cancelled on economic grounds, but permission was given to fire the last rocket, Black Arrow R3 anyway.

Despite its eventual success Black Arrow remained cancelled. Britain abandoned the development of space rockets in favour of using American launchers and channelled available resources into satellite development instead. To those making political decisions an independent space launcher was seen as an unaffordably expensive luxury at a time of economic hardships and when the Americans were offering to launch British satellites aboard their rockets at lower cost. And as it was, Black Arrow was too small to carry a large telecommunication satellite made with the bulky electronics of the day, the potential area of profit at the time.

However, to the engineers involved in creating Black Arrow it was a tough decision. It could have been the basis for a British space rocket industry, particularly as improvements in electronics soon made smaller satellites possible, and bought national pride to a country whose fortunes were at a low. Despite early setbacks it had been a great technical achievement for a bargain price. By developing the rocket from existing technology used in the smaller Black Knight scientific rocket, Black Arrow cost around £10,000,000 – peanuts compared to the $25,000,000,000 NASA was spending at same the time to put a man onto the moon.

Whatever the rights and wrong of the situation, Black Arrow was an incredible achievement for British technology, attested to by the fact that four decades later the Prospero satellite is still in orbit around the earth, a tantalising hint to what a British space programme could have achieved.

The following video clip was filmed with the lower section of a Black Arrow at the Rolls Royce Heritage Centre in Derby. In it John Scott-Scott, one of the engineers at Bristol-Siddeley involved with the development of Black Arrow's rocket engines, reflects on the success and cancellation of the project. 

   

The audio and video interviews with John Scott-Scott are archived at the British Library under the Sound Archive Catalogue reference C1379/32.

Oral History of British Science Interviewees and the Holocaust

Dr Sally Horrocks, Senior Academic Consultant for An Oral History of British Science, writes:

My Leicester colleagues Olaf Jensen and Alex Korb, who run the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, have organised a Holocaust Awareness Week from 24-27 October.  This has prompted me to think about the ways in which memories linked with the Holocaust, the impact of Nazi racial policies and associated events emerge from several OHBS interviews.  The ‘life story’ nature of the interviews means that although interviewees are selected because of their involvement with science and technology, their memories cover a wide range of topics outside these areas, ensuring that they will provide a resource for historians and other users with interests that have nothing to do with science!

 

Among our interviewees have been three, Frank Land, Stephen Moorbath and Stephanie Shirley, who as children fled from Germany during the late 1930s along with some, but not all, of their family members.  These interviews contain poignant accounts of childhoods and families disrupted and relatives left behind. They compliment a substantial body of existing oral history that the British Library already holds on this topic and I would be interested to know whether our accounts differ from those that were collected with an explicit focus on this aspect of interviewees lives, and if so how. 

Stephen Moorbath, who was interviewed for the Changing Planet strand for his work in geochemistry, was born in Magdeburg in 1929.  When he was nine his father, a Jewish doctor, was interned. Here he discusses how his family coped with his father’s internment, and the moment of his release.

Stephen Moorbath on father's internment

Stephen Moorbath, C1379/36 Track 2 (00:10:52 - 00:12:35)

 

Soon after this release Moorbath and his father left for Britain, arriving on 24^th May 1939.  His mother was left behind, but arrangements were in hand for her to leave Germany when war broke out, as he explains here.

Stephen Moorbath on moving to England

Stephen Moorbath, C1379/36 Track 2 (00:15:28 - 00:16:52)

 

Soon afterwards Moorbath’s father was interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien, leaving Stephen to be cared for with other Jewish refugee children by a series of hosts, some of them far from sympathetic to their charges.

Stephen Moorbath on refugee homes

Stephen Moorbath, C1379/36 Track 2 (00:18:32 - 00:22:37)

 

Frank Land, interviewed for Made in Britain as a member of the pioneering LEO computer team at Lyons, also experienced the internment of his father on the Isle of Man.  Unlike Stephen Moorbath, however, he had been fortunate enough to arrive in England with his twin brother, Richard, and his mother, Zoscha and to have a number of relatives already resident in Britain.  With the family breadwinner absent Land’s mother established a successful business which she continued once her husband was released.

Frank Land on his mother's business

Frank Land, C1379/17 Track 2 (00:02:13 - 00:03:43)

 

Land also recollected the impressions he had gained from his father about the experience of internment, which was far from being wholly negative.

Frank Land on father's internment

Frank Land, C1379/17 Track 5 (00:02:17 - 00:03:32)

 

Unfortunately our project has come too late to include émigré scientist from Germany and central Europe who came to Britain during the 1930s, but earlier NLS projects carried out extensive interviews with two of them, Joseph Rotblat and Max Perutz.  What several of our interviewees do mention is the impact of the conviction for spying of one of these émigrés, Klaus Fuchs on security procedures, particularly at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell.  Stephen Moorbath worked at Harwell between 1948 and 1951 and so was there when Fuchs’ activities became public.

Stephen Moorbath on the Klaus Fuchs scandal

Stephen Moorbath, C1379/36 Track 4 (00:05:43 - 00:07:22)

By HEC! An Electronic Brain For Business?!

Tom Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

Consider how many computers fill the typical modern workplace, all those dozens of laptops, desktops, mobile phones, and other gizmos. Now, take a step back to the office of the late 1940s and count the computers. Or, more likely, notice their complete absence. But not for long...

After its early development by scientists and engineers in the 1940s, it was only a few years before people started putting the 'electronic brain' to work on commercial problems. Lyons' LEO office computers have become well known, but they weren't the only ones producing computers for business. The British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM), saw the development of computers as putting at risk its existing market of mechanical punched-card office machines. The solution? Build a computer of their own to offer to customers...

In the early 1950s Made in Britain interviewee Dr Raymond Bird was asked to build a computer for BTM based on a prototype built by Birkbeck College's Andrew Donald Booth. The resultant Hollerith Electronic Computer, or HEC1 was a compact and handy machine, which was the origin for the most commercially successful series of business computers in 1950s Britain, the HEC4 or BTM1200 series. Last year we reunited Ray with the HEC1 computer he built in 1951, now stored by Birmingham Museums, and filmed a video interview, excerpts of which are now on the British Library's YouTube channel.

The entire video interview is archived at the British Library (Sound Archive catalogue reference C1379/04A)