Oral History of British Science

The Man From The Ministry

Tom Lean, project interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

Once upon a time the British government maintained an extensive network of research establishments, which carried out advanced research into everything from radar and the atom bomb to mechanical engineering and house building materials. After changes in the 1980s, the establishments were run down and much research farmed out to universities and private companies. But many of our interviewees passed through posts in government laboratories over the years and I've got really interested in the stories of former scientific civil servants and the window they offer into a closed world now vanished.

Sally Horrocks (the Senior Academic Advisor for the project) and myself attended the splendid Governance in Science conference at the University of Kent earlier this month. For myself, this was a great opportunity to use some of the project material to try and build up a portrait of the scientific civil servant in context. I've been particularly interested in how the unique conditions of government service, such as secrecy, direct duty to the state, and the intricacies of civil service system shape scientific careers.

There can be, as we might expect, an element of duty to government scientific service. For example Sir Alan Cottrell, a metallurgist at the Atomic Energy Establishment Harwell in the 1950s and government Chief Scientific Advisor in the 1970s, reflected how being directed to work as a scientist on military research in the 1940s left him wanting his work to contribute something to the nation:

Sir Alan Cottrell - being a scientist during WW2

Despite what we might expect about scientists working to the direction of the state under secretive conditions, interviewees often remark on the generous degrees of freedom they worked under. For example former Royal Aircraft Establishment materials scientist Roger Moreton, one of the team that pioneered carbon fibre in the the 1960s recalled on several occasions in his interview the considerable freedoms to scientists working at Farnborough:

Roger Moreton - freedoms at Farnborough

*n.b. clips from two different parts of the interview.

However, for all the freedoms that interviewees explicitly talk about they also implicitly acknowledge their position as components in a wider system of government science. They describe careers in which they were directed into certain posts where their skills were needed, of moral compromises over their work, the intricacies of career hierarchies and civil service rank structures, and the tricks needed to progress within them. The impression we are left with is of individuals who were free to pursue their scientific interests, but at the same time caught within a government machine that imposed structures on them directed their freedoms to achieve wider goals. Two different perspectives on the scientific civil servant, but mutually compatible and both of them true.

Why not check out some of An Oral History of British Science's recordings with former government scientists?

• Sir Alan Cottrell - Atomic Energy Agency, Chief Scientific Advisor.
• Geoff Tootill - Telecommunications Research Establishment, Royal Aircraft Establishment, European Space Research Organisation, National Physical Laboratory.
• Desmond King-Hele - Royal Aircraft Establishment.

 

Success and Failure and Video

Tom Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

It's been rather a busy month for the video element of Made in Britain, with three new video interviews with engineers and the technologies they helped to create. First up, we've filmed a fascinating interview at Brooklands Museum with aeronautical engineer Ralph Hooper talking us through the design history of the Harrier jump jet and prototype P1127, which he lead the design of at Hawker Siddeley in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Last week, at the Rolls Royce Heritage Trust Centre at Derby, we recorded John Scott-Scott with the turbopump he designed for the Black Arrow satellite launcher rocket and John Coplin, lead designer of the Rolls-Royce RB211 jet engine.

There are lots of advantages of filming the designer and their 'invention' in this way. We get extra visual explanation of technicalities, little details that didn't come out in the audio interview, and nothing can really match seeing the thing for yourself. But it goes deeper than that. In their own way each of these technologies is like a work of art, an interacting system made up of thousands of individual parts going to make a whole that does something remarkable and possess an engineering beauty that few would appreciate. Each of these videos is a unique portrait of the relationship between designer and designed, and in recording this we are personally guided into an appreciation of the technology on a level we might not normally consider.

 

 
John Coplin, lead designer of the RB211 jet engine, and videographer Matt Casswell at the Rolls Royce Heritage Trust Centre, Derby. July 2011

What each of these videos show us about the history of aeronautical engineering in Britain is also significant. After the build up of the Second World War, post-war Britain was home to an innovative aircraft industry which pushed the boundaries to create rocket powered aircraft, jet airliners, supersonic planes and other advanced concepts. But it was a changing world, where technological development was rapid and the costs high, which could be ill-afforded by a Britain whose priorities were changing and whose economy was weakened. Each of the stories we've recorded is a little part of this bigger picture, where the line between success and failure could be a narrow one.

The Harrier jump jet was one of a handful of British aircraft that survived in the wake of the Sandy's Defence White Paper of 1957, which devastated the British aircraft industry with its unrealistic expectation that guided missiles would replaced manned combat aircraft. The Harrier's entrance into service was partly the result of the cancellation of a much larger and more sophisticated supersonic jump jet, the P1154 in 1965. In 1971 a Black Arrow rocket launched from Australia put the Prospero satellite into orbit - Britain’s first satellite launch, but also its last, as the project was cancelled at its moment of success. In the same year Rolls-Royce went bankrupt over problems with the development of the advanced RB211 jet engine, and were promptly nationalised by the government. But the company carried on to fix the problems with the RB211, which went on to be a great success, established a position for Rolls as one of the leading producers of airliner engines and acted as the basis for today's Trent series of jet engines.

Today Rolls-Royce is one of the world’s big three aircraft engine companies. The Harrier jump jet, while retired from British service in the last round of defence cuts, still flies for other nations. And Britain hasn't launched a satellite since 1971.

Location, Location, Location...

Tom Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

We've recently completed another couple of video interviews with retired scientists and engineers, along a slightly different tack to those which we've done before. Science is an activity that happens in special places that are often hidden from public view, often for good reason, such as commercial or national security issues. Laboratories, research establishments and other facilities are places that the public rarely get to see the inside of and, in any case, may have changed dramatically between when our interviewees worked there and the present day. Our most recent interviews have been based on recording interviewees, namely aeronautical engineer Sir John Charnley, and satellite orbit pioneer Desmond King Helle, at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) Farnborough, where both of them worked at points during their respective careers.

Following the dismantling of the old scientific civil service, these days Farnborough is mainly a commercial airport and business park, and is probably most famous for the airshow. However, in its heyday Farnborough was one of the biggest and most important applied science sites in Western Europe, influential in the development of the jet engine, aircraft, carbon fibre, computing, rocketry, satellites, air traffic control systems, and much more besides. Recording video interviews in these locations has given us a fantastic opportunity to put our interviewees literally into their context, making clear the scale of the work they were involved in and allowing them to discuss the contrast between the site today and their memories of it.

The end results, some of which should available online shortly, have been very impressive indeed, bringing out social interactions, atmosphere and change in a way that is all the more powerful for being able to see it. Much science in the 20th Century has been characterised as big science, not just the small research team or individual in the laboratory, but state resourced scientific projects on a vast scale, equipped with impressive facilities. Standing in Farnborough's 24 foot 1940s Wind Tunnel, location for one of our videos, it's quite clear just how big even little parts of 'big science' can be...


Tom in a wind tunnel at RAE Farnborough, 7th April 2011

Nuclear fears

Tom Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain writes:

The ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan has reignited the debate about the use of nuclear power.  Following accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island the problems of nuclear energy are well known and widely debated today; but in the 1950s nuclear power was seen in a much more positive light than it is now. In a world that was learning to live in the shadow of the atomic bomb, the harnessing of the destructive power of the atom to provide limitless "energy too cheap to meter" was seen as a futuristic and positive development, but the risks were little known or understood.

In 1957 a fire at a military reactor at Windscale in Cumbria released radioactive contamination into the surrounding area.  Although a full scale disaster was averted, in the aftermath of the fire the dangers of nuclear power came to the attention of an ill-informed wider public.  Made in Britain interviewee Roy Gibson (catalogue no. C1379/19) was recruited to the Atomic Energy Agency shortly after the Windscale Fire. In the following clip, Roy discusses some of his experiences working in the Atomic Energy Agency's health and safety department in the late 1950s.

Roy Gibson on attitudes to radioactivity in the 1950s

The stuff that engineering is made of

Tom Lean, interviewer for 'Made in Britain' writes:

After spending most of the last year interviewing engineers I've started to begin to scope out the material sciences, and it's presenting a few interesting challenges.  Like pretty much everything else we're trying to cover, the area of interest is rather large. Material science takes in metallurgy, nanotechnology, carbon-fibre, composites, polymers, semi-conductors, smart materials, fabrics, ceramics and so on... Part of my thinking at the moment as I enter this area is how best to consider these various fields and who to interview?

Materials may be an applied science, but they are fundamental to much of engineering, and perhaps this would be a good way of starting to cover the area, by picking up on those material science developments which underlay the work of the engineers I've been talking to so far.  Developments in semi-conductors, for example, led to the replacement of bulky thermionic valves with transistors and integrated circuits. This allowed computer designers to build more powerful and reliable computers in smaller and cheaper packages.  Developments in metallurgy gave aeronautical engineers metals which could withstand higher temperatures and increased stresses, allowing aircraft to fly faster propelled by more powerful, hotter running, jet engines.

By starting on those areas of material science which relate to those engineering topics we've already covered, we'd also be increasing the overlaps between our interviews, building up a more linked up picture of British science and technology and relating interviews back to the overall strand theme of Made in Britain.

Difficult Choices

Tom Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain writes:

“How do you decide who to interview?” Is one of the questions I frequently get asked. Really, it breaks down to two separate issues. Who could we interview? And, out of these possibles, who shall we interview?

Who could we interview?

An Oral History of British Science started off with a scoping study, researched and written by Dr Simone Turchetti at the University of Manchester's Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. As well as outlining the subject area and possible approaches to it, Simone also included a list of possible interviewees across the various fields of science and engineering, giving us a good starting list of people to potentially interview.

As we approach each new topic of the project Paul and myself will carry out our own research to give us a feel for the area and its issues. We'll go down into more detail to identify subjects, projects and places of interest and the people connected to them. We'll also consult others who already know the area, such as heritage groups, museum curators and historians who are willing to lend us their expertise and experience. Interviewees themselves are often good at suggesting other people, such as former colleagues and others in the field.

At the end of all this, we're left with a lot of people we could interview and some hard choices to make.

Who shall we interview?

In an ideal world we'd record everybody, but time and resources mean we have to be a bit more selective. There isn't really a hard and fast answer to choosing people, more a range of guiding concerns. Even with this, it's still a hard choice between a lot of interesting looking people and I'm quite glad the decision isn't mine. Rather, the decisions are made by the science project team as a whole, with the guidance of the project's advisory council, made up of historians of science, science writers and scientists.

As I've touched on before there are always particular individual reasons why we'll ask someone to take part in An Oral History of British Science but we have overarching concerns too. Obviously in any area there are certain 'key' people who leap out for inclusion. However, our aim isn't just to record key players, but to get a deeper collection of viewpoints including everyone from professors to lab technicians. As well as thinking about depth we're also distributing interviews around the various fields of science and engineering to try and get some representation of the breadth of scientific activity in Britain.

There are other ways of breaking down interviews, apart from by the fields that people worked in too. For example, within Made in Britain I sometimes find myself thinking of a triangle of private industry/ commercial science, university academic science, and government research establishment science – three different but interlocking spheres of activity with their own salient issues. This cuts across field divisions and so it's important to make sure we've got representatives from all three.

There's rarely one reason why we'll choose to interview anybody. Ultimately it comes down to a combination of individual merits and representation of a part of the bigger picture.

Musings from your oral historian in the field (or at least on the platform)

Tom Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

So, thanks to a missed connection, I find myself standing at Bristol Temple Meads railway station on a rainy afternoon with little to do other than appreciate the Victorian architecture. Wandering the platforms seeking a hot coffee to keep the cold at bay, I am struck by the effort made to celebrate the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.    A grand 1860's marble plaque trumpets his role in the building of the station and the Great Western Railway that runs through it, highlighting the recognition Brunel received in his own lifetime. However, it is the modern day posters imagining how a young Isambard could have been inspired by his engineer father Marc that most catch my eye, and for two reasons:

Firstly, Marc and Isambard's relationship, that between a parent with an interest in building things and a child who goes on to become an engineer of some type or other, is something that occurs so frequently in my own interviews it almost seems the 'standard' background for an engineer. I find myself wondering what it would be like to interview Isambard. What would he say about his father's influence on him? How would their relationship compare to those of my interviewees of a century later?

Secondly, I wonder why Brunel is so well known, both in his own time and in our own, when so many other engineers whose creations were just as innovative and influential are so little remembered? However much C.P. Snow may deride them, forgotten engineers made the modern world as much as any famous scientist with a big idea, and in ways which have often had far more immediate effects on how we live our lives.

"You don't want to be talking to the likes of me"

Posted on behalf of Tom Lean, project interviewer for 'Made in Britain'

As an interviewer, one of the first questions that I often get asked by an interviewee is "why choose me?" The answer to that question is rarely a simple one.

There are always particular individual reasons why we'll ask someone to take part in An Oral History of British Science - they may have been a key individual in an important scientific or engineering organisation, or have been personally responsible for some great innovation. They may have had a varied career rich in insights of different places and practices, or have been a technician or lab assistant, whose hidden work supported a breakthrough. The individual in question matters. But at the same time we always have to consider the big picture of British science and technology in choosing people to talk to.

The 200 odd interviews we plan for An Oral History of British Science sounds a lot. It is a lot, a couple of thousand hours of recordings at least, but consider the sheer size of the topic area to cover. Not only are there dozens of different subjects and disciplines, but many different companies, universities, and research establishments, with unique cultures of their own. When you consider that some interviewees started their careers in the 1930s and 40s, that also gives us about 75 years of scientific history to range across.

Given the size of this subject area, its important to select interviewees in such a way that their viewpoints provide a cross section of British science and technology, across its various subject areas and with a range of different viewpoints from different levels and organisations. To return to a subject area I've touched on before, for aeronautical engineering we've broken the topic down in a number of ways. Our cross section is made up of interviewees who've worked in private industry, government research establishments, and universities. At the same time, we've broken aircraft themselves down and interviewed people who've worked designing aircraft, avionics systems, and engines. The bonus of the life story is that it covers how people's careers change, providing insight into a number of different levels and departments at different times. The result isn't just a set of interesting life stories, but should add up to an overlapping collection of individual insights, with something to say about the bigger picture of the history of British science and engineering.

Sir Maurice Wilkes, Pioneer of Computing

Posted by Tilly Blyth

The team was saddened to hear the announcement on Monday that one of our interviewees, Sir Maurice Wilkes, DFBCS FREng FRS, had passed away. Maurice developed an interest in radio as a child and specialized in radar research during World War II. After the war he was central to the development of the EDSAC computer (1949) at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory (then University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory). The development of the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer) then fed into the creation of the world's first commercial computer, the Lyons Electronic Office (LEO).

Thanks to David Hartley, the Chair of the Computer Conservation Society (CCS), Maurice agreed to an interview for the Oral History of British Science programme in June this year. He intended that this short recording would complement his published memoirs. The interview will be available immediately to readers to listen to onsite at the BL, or in a month through the BL's free-to-access Archival Sound Recordings website.

Unlike many other early computers, EDSAC was not just an experimental machine but was designed with practical applications in mind from the start. In the following short clip Maurice Wilkes discusses some of his early thoughts about EDSAC's use.

Prof Sir Maurice Wilkes discusses EDSAC's early uses

Aeroplane Tales

Posted on behalf of Tom Lean, project interviewer for 'Made in Britain'

I've been researching aeronautical engineering for Made in Britain of late and it's throwing up a few interesting issues. Postwar Britain was home to a thriving aeronautics industry backed by cutting edge research at the government's Royal Aircraft Establishment, which worked on some of the most cutting-edge and exciting projects in the aircraft world. It's an area rich in innovation, such as jet engines, airborne radar and blind landing systems, and radical new concepts like vertical take-off aircraft and rocket propelled fighters. On the other hand it's also a story of unrealised hopes, technological failures, cancelled projects, damaging government policies and competition with powerful overseas rivals, all of which were played out against a changing Britain unsure of its new place in the world.

Science and engineering typically involve teams of individuals working together towards a common goal. In some cases the team may be small - a few scientists backed up by a couple of technicians, albeit just part of a bigger laboratory. But the design of an aircraft is a major undertaking, with dozens of individuals split into small specialised teams working on different aspects of development. A new experimental aircraft might involve groups of aerodynamicists, structural engineers and stressmen, draughtsman, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, flight test engineers, material scientists, test pilots and more - each group working on its own highly specialised task, but at the same time working together and contributing to the finished product in some way. And that's without thinking about the teams in other companies designing the engines, radar, communications or weapon systems. The question is: when all of them are important, who in the team do you interview?

The challenge for us remains how best to capture a flavour of this wide and varied activity. It is vital to ask interviewees to talk about the details of their own specialised part of the process, but at the same time asking them how their work fits into the bigger picture around them. It's likely that shorter group interviews or witness seminars will be of particular value in aeronautical engineering as a way of understanding this teamwork activity. It's also important to select people not just because they have interesting careers in their own right, but because they complement the perspectives of other interviewees as well. With a bit of thought, the end result should be something quite special and quite comprehensive indeed, which will document the big picture of British aeronautical engineering as well as the lives of some of the individuals involved.