Barnes Wallis
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Sir Barnes Neville Wallis, Kt, CBE, FRS, RDI, commonly known as Barnes Wallis, (September 26, 1887 – October 30, 1979) was an English scientist, engineer and inventor. He is best known for inventing the bouncing bomb used by the RAF in Operation Chastise (the Dambusters Raid) to attack the Möhne and Eder dams in the Ruhr area in May 1943, during World War II.
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[edit] Career
Barnes Wallis was born in Ripley, Derbyshire, and educated at Christ's Hospital in Horsham, leaving school at sixteen to start work in a shipyard. He originally trained as a marine engineer but turned his hand to airship design and then aircraft design. He worked for Vickers and its successor companies including British Aircraft Corporation from 1913 until his retirement in 1971.
His many achievements include the first use of geodetic design in engineering, in the gasbag wiring of the R100, in 1930; which, at the time, was the largest airship ever designed. He also pioneered the use of light alloy and production engineering in the structure design of R100. Despite a better-than-expected performance and a successful return flight to Canada in 1930, the R100 was broken up following the tragedy that befell its "sister" ship, the R101 (which was designed and built by a separate Government-led team); the later crash of the Hindenburg led to the abandonment of airships as a mode of mass transport. Wallis was not involved with either of these airships.
Wallis' pre-war aircraft designs included the Vickers Wellesley and the Vickers Wellington, both also employing a geodesic design in the fuselage and wing structure. The latter was one of the most robust airframes ever developed, and pictures of its skeleton largely shot away, but still sound enough to bring its crew home safely, still astonish today. The geodesic construction offered a light and strong airframe (compared to conventional designs) with clearly defined space within for fuel tanks, payload etc.
On the 1st of September in 1939, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. Wallis saw a need for strategic bombing to destroy the enemy's ability to wage war, writing a paper titled A Note on a Method of Attacking the Axis Powers. Referring in it to the enemy's power supplies he wrote (as Axiom 3): "If their destruction or paralysis can be accomplished THEY OFFER A MEANS OF RENDERING THE ENEMY UTTERLY INCAPABLE OF CONTINUING TO PROSECUTE THE WAR". He put forward the means to do this: huge bombs that could concentrate their force and destroy targets which were otherwise unlikely to be affected. Wallis' first super-large bomb design came out at some ten tonnes, far larger than any current plane could carry. This led him to suggest a plane that could carry it, the "Victory bomber", rather than drop the idea. His second paper, in 1942, was Spherical Bomb — Surface Torpedo, which heralded the development of the bouncing bomb, immortalised in Paul Brickhill's 1951 book The Dam Busters and the 1954 film of the same name. After the success of the bouncing bomb, Wallis was able to return to his huge bombs, producing first the Tallboy (6 tonnes) and then Grand Slam (10 tonnes) deep-penetration earth quake bombs. These were used on strategic German targets such as V1 rocket launch sites, submarine pens, and other reinforced structures, large civil constructions such as viaducts and bridges, as well as the German battleship Tirpitz. These two bombs were the fore-runners of modern bunker-busting bomb, and could enter the earth at supersonic velocity. The Tallboy should not be confused with the 5 tonne "blockbuster" bomb, which was a conventional blast bomb.
Wallis did much pioneering engineering work to make the swing-wing concept functional (though he did not invent the concept). However, despite very promising wind tunnel and model work, his designs were not taken up. His early Wild Goose (designed in the late 1940s) hoped to use laminar flow, but when this was shown to be unworkable, he developed the swing-wing further for the Swallow (designed in the mid-1950s) which could have been developed for either military or civil applications. On UK government instructions Vickers passed over the swing wing designs to the US Government and instead adopted the BAC TSR-2 (which Wallis did not work on, though one of his sons did) and Concorde. In fact, Wallis was quite critical of the BAC TSR-2, and stated that the "swing-wing" design would be more appropriate - scale models of which he had eventually flown without a tailplane. The BAC TSR-2 project was ignominiously scrapped in the mid-1960s in favour of the American F-111 which had swing wings based on Wallis's work, though this order was also subsequently cancelled.
Wallis also proposed using large cargo submarines to transport oil undersea, hence avoiding surface weather conditions. This idea was put into practice on a tactical level by the Germans, with their milch cows.
During the 1960s and into his retirement, he developed ideas for an "all-speed" aircraft, capable of efficient flight at all speed ranges from subsonic to hypersonic.
The story described in The Dam Busters reflected a trend throughout his lifetime, that his ideas were rejected by those in authority (and who controlled funding sources).
Following the terrible death toll of the aircrews involved in the Dambusters raid, he made a conscious effort never again to endanger the lives of his test pilots and his designs were extensively tested in model form, and consequently he became a pioneer in the remote control of aircraft.
Wallis became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1945 and was knighted in 1968.
[edit] Personal
In April of 1922, Wallis met his cousin-in-law, Molly Bloxam, at a family tea party. She was only 17 and he was 35, and her father forbade them from courting. However, he allowed Wallis to assist Molly with her mathematics courses by correspondence, and they wrote some 250 letters, enlivening them with fictional characters such as "Duke Delta X". The letters gradually became personal, and Wallis proposed marriage on her 20th birthday. They married on the 23rd of April in 1925, and had 54 years together before his death.
(Source: this article, which cites Mathematics with Love: The Courtship Correspondence of Barnes Wallis, a collection of the letters edited by their daughter Mary Stopes-Roe.)
He lived with his family in Effingham, Surrey where he was the first Chairman of a local playing field charity, negotiating with Surrey CC to move the main road and landscape a superb flat cricket pitch and sports field for the benefit of the community. Source: KGV Effingham
His great-grandson, Benjamin Wallis is currently a member of the Air Training Corps and as such carrying on the family affiliation with the Air Force. Source: 59 Sqn ATC Website (Far right on image)
[edit] Books
Barnes Wallis by Prof. J.E. Morpurgo. Longman Group Ltd 1972 ISBN 0-582-10360-6
Mathematics with Love by Dr. Mary Stopes-Roe Macmillan 2005 ISBN 1403944989
Barnes Wallis Dambuster by Peter Pugh Icon Books 2005 ISBN 1-84046-685-5
[edit] Fiction
Wallis appears as a fictionalized character in Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships, the authorised sequel to The Time Machine. He is portrayed as a British engineer in an alternate history, where the First World War does not end in 1918, and Wallis concentrates his energies on developing a machine for time travel. As a consequence, it is the Germans who develop the bouncing bomb.
[edit] Trivia
- The Student Union Building on the University of Manchester North Campus is named in Barnes Wallis' honour.
