Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Graham Hoyland 2020

Images © individual copyright holders

Cover illustration by Neil Gower

Graham Hoyland asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008359263

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008359287

Version: 2020-04-20

Dedication

To the many, who designed, built and serviced the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  Introduction

7  Chapter One

8 Chapter Two

9 Chapter Three

10 Chapter Four

11  Chapter Five

12  Chapter Six

13  Chapter Seven

14  Chapter Eight

15  Chapter Nine

16  Chapter Ten

17  Chapter Eleven

18  Chapter Twelve

19  Chapter Thirteen

20  Chapter Fourteen

21  Chapter Fifteen

22  Chapter Sixteen

23  Chapter Seventeen

24  Chapter Eighteen

25  Chapter Nineteen

26  Epilogue

27  In Memoriam

28  Acknowledgements

29  Notes

30  Bibliography

31  Index

32  Also by Graham Hoyland

33  About the Author

34  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

List of Pagesiiiivv1235678910111213141516171819212223242526293031323334373839404142434447484950515253545556575859606162636465666768697071727374777879808182838485868990919293949596979899100101102103104105106107108109110111113114115116117118119120121123124125126127128129130131133134135136137138139140141142143144145146147148149150151152153154155157158159160161162163164165166167168169170171172173174175177178179180181182183184185186187188189190191192193194195196197198201202203204205206207208209211212213214215216217218219220221222223224225226227228229230231232233234235236237239240241242243244245246247248249250251252253254255256257258259260261262263264265266267268269271272273274275276277278279280281282283284285286287289290291292293294295296297298299301302303304305306307308309310311312313314315316317319320321322323324325326327328329330331332333335337338339340341342343344345346347348349350353354355356357358

Introduction

‘The Rolls-Royce Merlin was simply an astonishing engine. There have undoubtedly been aero engines that were better designed; it is possible but unlikely that there have been some that were better made; but beyond a shadow of a doubt there has never been another engine more thoroughly, continuously, aggressively, successfully and amazingly developed than the Merlin.’1

The story of the aero engine is as rich and strange and wonderful as anything found in the science and art of the Renaissance. In just 50 years, driven by two world wars and intense national competition, piston engines increased from a couple of horsepower to several thousands. In so doing they realised the eternal dream of humanity: the surreal experience of flight.

Far from the oily and inconvenient machines of popular imagination, these piston engines were dynamic sculptures of polished metal, designed using the intense application of physics, mathematics, metallurgy, chemistry and endless rigorous experimentation. The breakage of the tiniest part of many hundreds could lead to disaster and death. The failure of an engine design could lead to the loss of a war, because the Second World War above all others was decided through air power: all the decisive campaigns were won or lost by piston-engined fighters and bombers. The winner would be the side that could build the most powerful and reliable aero engines, and in this war the winner would take all.

The children ran around the school playground, arms extended, machine-gun thumbs out, shooting down their opponents in mock dogfights. The Second World War was only 20 years distant and most of their fathers had served in the forces. There was a wartime RAF station on the hill. I was reading the Biggles books by then and the Spitfire was the magic name on everyone’s lips. The noises we were making, I now realise, were a childish imitation of the Merlin engine.

Later, thanks to help from kindly adults, I became interested in repairing piston engines. I marvelled at the finely carved pieces of metal that I knew grew into weights of over a ton at high speed. I saw the consequences of engines that burst from too many revs or seized due to the lack of oil.

Then one evening in the Peak District, many years later, I heard a distinctive drumming roar in the sky and, looking up, saw the elegant elliptical wings. It was a lone Spitfire heading home into the sunset after a day at a display somewhere in the South. I became curious. What was a Merlin engine? Why was it held in such esteem by aviation historians? Was it true that this was the engine that won the war? And had a wealthy woman really been behind both the engine and the aeroplane?

The Rolls-Royce Merlin was the aero engine that powered the Supermarine Spitfire, the Hawker Hurricane, the de Havilland Mosquito and the Avro Lancaster bomber, the aircraft that together turned the tide of the Second World War.

Eighty years ago, the distinctive roar of Derby-built Merlins was heard over the fields of southern England during the summer of 1940 as ‘the Few’ fought hordes of German aircraft during the Battle of Britain. Without such a powerful and reliable power unit at such a crucial time Britain would have lost the battle for the skies and the war could well have been won by the Axis powers.

It nearly didn’t happen. At the last minute a wealthy benefactress, Lady Lucy Houston, had to provide the funds for the Rolls-Royce ‘R’ racing engine that sired the Merlin. Her money helped to nurture the new power unit. However, the Merlin had growing pains, being troublesome in its development and slow to come to maturity.

This story of powered flight is a story of our species at its best and worst: human inventiveness versus intellectual theft; human persistence versus jealousy and duplicity; human patriotism and courage versus hatred and dogma.

Chapter One

Non est ad astra mollis e terris via –

There is no easy way from the earth to the stars

The Langley ‘Aerodrome’ in flight – just. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

As a child Albert Einstein was given a Russian toy steam train by a favourite uncle. Three years after winning the Nobel Prize for Physics he wrote to Caesar Koch to thank him once again. Einstein, the author of the theory of relativity, maintained that it was the steam engine that initiated his interest in science.

Steam engines are easy to understand and easy to love, as Thomas the Tank Engine shows. Fuel, either alcohol in the case of Einstein’s toy or coal in a full-sized engine, is burned outside a water-filled boiler. This is external combustion. Steam is generated and tries to expand a thousandfold in volume. It passes through pipes and valves into a cylinder, where it pushes a piston down. The piston is connected by a rod to a crank which drives a wheel round, which drives the steam engine along. You can see the whole process going on, together with delightful smells of fuel, hot oil and smoke and the vision of an animate machine with long metal legs and pumping lungs.

The brilliance of the invention of the internal combustion piston engine was that it dispensed with a man shovelling coal, the filthy firebox, the water, steam and heavy boiler, and instead burned petroleum fuel inside the cylinder. Everything else – pistons, connecting rods, crankshafts and flywheels – remained recognisably related to steam engines. Sadly though, these engines are hard to appreciate in the same way as steam. If you lift the engine cover of a car all you can see is an immobile cylinder block made of aluminium or cast iron, and all you can hear is the whirring and clicking of innumerable parts: valves, camshafts, pistons and crankshafts. It’s all going on inside. Drive or fly behind a piston engine, though, and listen to the operatic howl of many cylinders, and your soul may begin to be stirred by something beyond words.

The story of the piston aero engine is surely the most romantic story in engineering history. Heavier-than-air machines were dreamed of but literally could not take off until light and powerful internal combustion engines were built. Steam engines were simply too heavy.

Mankind had always dreamed of flight. And made up stories about flight. According to the scholar Ben Sherira, flying carpets were issued to readers in the ancient library of Alexandria (c. 283 BCE) in exchange for their slippers. Reclined on their carpet, students were able to reach the highest shelves and hovered near the ceiling, engrossed in their studies. Later, in the Baopuzi text (320 CE), the Chinese master Ge Hong described the principles of ascending into the vast inane: ‘some have made flying cars with wood from the inner part of a jujube tree, using ox or leather straps fastened to blades so as to set the machine in motion.’1 He seems to be describing a Jin dynasty helicopter.

In around 559 the Emperor Wenxuan of Northern Qi decided to conduct experiments with flight. Volunteers failed to come forward, so prisoners were forced to leap off a tower attached to man-carrying kites. There was only one survivor, Yuan Huangtou of Ye, who successfully managed to glide over the city walls and land safely. He was later executed.2 In the eleventh century Eilmer of Malmesbury, an English Benedictine monk, attempted to emulate Daedalus of the Greek myth by attaching wings and leaping off a hill near the abbey. He flew for a furlong (200 metres), but crashed more like Icarus, breaking both legs, which rendered him lame for life. ‘I lacked a tail,’ he remarked ruefully later, showing that at least he had a grasp of aeronautics.3

These stories make Leonardo da Vinci’s interest in flight seem rather late in the day. In 1485 he drew a man-powered rotor that could not have flown, as the body of the machine would have rotated in the opposite direction to the rotor. He drew other man-powered flying machines with flapping wings which are unlikely to have got very far. However, he also designed a hang glider which could have flown, and indeed flying examples have been built. But what Leonardo needed was more power, and he realised this. He didn’t know that what he really needed was a petrol engine, and he would probably have swapped a couple of dozen sketches for a really good lawnmower.

Balloons were the first successful aircraft, and they relied on weighing less than the air they displaced, but they were large, delicate and slow, blown across the sky like tender elephants. Balloonists wanted to progress in their own choice of direction instead of that of the wind, so various methods of propulsion were tried. Human-powered flapping wings were employed in 1784 by the balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard who, helped by the wind, managed to cross the English Channel, flapping manfully and steering with a bird-like tail. In 1852 another Frenchman, Henri Giffard, combined a highly explosive hydrogen balloon with a disturbingly flammable steam engine, which proved able to perform limited manoeuvres but was not powerful enough to fly against the wind. This was clearly not the way to go.

Countless attempts were made to build a heavier-than-air machine, but the mistake the inventors usually made was to try to copy the flapping motion of birds’ wings. One honourable exception was the Frenchman Alphonse Pénaud. He pioneered the use of rubber-band-powered model aircraft with fixed wings and a propeller rather like the children’s toys available today. His model aeroplane of 1871, which he called the Planophore, was the first aerodynamically stable flying model. Poor Pénaud tried to attract interest and funds for a full-sized machine, but failed. He committed suicide in despair, aged just 30.

The immortal Robert Hooke, inventor of the sash window and theorist of springs, realised that manpower was insufficient and built a spring-powered winged ornithopter. The flapping wings theme was pursued by the inventive Frenchman Gustave Trouvé, whose model of 1890 flew for 80 metres in a demonstration for the French Academy of Sciences. His wings were flapped by gunpowder in cartridges exploding in sequence. We can only be grateful that his style of flight did not catch on. Someone had to apply some proper science.

At last someone did exactly that: the Yorkshireman Sir George Cayley (1773–1857).4 He observed the soaring flight of seagulls and realised that it was the angle and shape of the wings that produced lift. Flapping produced propulsion, not lift. This was a moment of epiphany, similar to the inspirational moment that produced the wheel axle, the screw-thread or the lever.

Cayley then described four paired forces acting upon a flying machine: weight and lift, thrust and drag. He had a silver disc engraved with a design for an aircraft, with the four forces engraved on the reverse side of it. He decided that fixed-wing flight was easier to achieve than trying to imitate the flapping wings of birds, and that cambered wings set at an angle to the wind would provide lift. He realised the importance of the dihedral angle: the upwards tilt of aircraft wings that provides stability. He also predicted that sustained flight would not be achieved until a lightweight source of power could be invented to provide thrust and lift. And he even attempted to invent a suitable internal combustion engine.

Cayley didn’t know that in 1806 two French brothers, Nicéphore and Claude Niépce, had made what was probably the world’s first internal combustion engine, which they called the Pyréolophore. Bizarrely, it was fuelled by lycopodium powder (dried spores of the lycopodium clubmoss plant) and coal dust. It worked rather like a toy steam pop-pop boat but would only operate in water. The brothers’ patent was signed by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, but the brothers failed to capitalise on their engine. Claude moved to Kew, London, to spend all the family fortune on trying to sell the Pyréolophore and descended into delirium, and his brother got on with inventing photography.

Cayley wrote a treatise entitled On Aerial Navigation and continued his experiments. In the pursuit of lightness for his aircraft he reinvented the wheel: wire-spoked wheels, which suspend the load from wires in tension rather than using heavy wooden spokes in compression. His wheels are still in use today on bicycles. He realised that he lacked a suitable source of power and tried to build internal combustion engines running on gunpowder or hot air, but the technology still eluded him.

Finally, at the age of 75, Sir George and his helpers at Wydale Hall flew a full-sized glider across Brompton Dale in 1853. According to one author the pilot was his ten-year-old grandson George. So a boy could well have been the first person to be carried by a modern fixed-wing heavier-than-air flying machine.

Sir George Cayley was one of the most important pioneers of flight, and was the first to take a truly scientific approach to the study of aeronautics. He really deserves his title of ‘father of aeronautics’. If he’d only had a suitable lightweight engine the world’s first pilot-controlled powered flight could have taken place over the moors of North Yorkshire in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Then in 1876, after the efforts of dozens of engineers and scientists, a viable internal combustion piston engine finally arrived. This engine had been developed by a Belgian, Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir, but his machine was heavy and inefficient, as it followed the old steam engines in its design. Running on lighting gas, it produced only 2 horsepower for 18 litres of cylinder capacity. This design was then considerably improved by the German Nikolaus Otto, who perfected a way of compressing air and fuel and igniting it to provide power using four distinct strokes of the piston. This was the inventive step that made powered flight possible.

The way an Otto-cycle four-stroke petrol engine works is the same in a Merlin or a modern car engine (my apologies to those readers who already know this). A piston, which looks like a soup can with one end removed, slides up and down a tube or cylinder. The piston is connected to a rod called, unsurprisingly, a connecting rod. This is attached to a crankshaft so that the piston sliding up and down pushes the crankshaft around rather as a cyclist’s leg pushes a pedal crank around. The crankshaft can be connected to car wheels or to an airscrew propeller.

Above the piston is where the magic of internal combustion takes place. The top of the cylinder is closed but is provided with an inlet ‘poppet’ valve to let in a mixture of air and fuel as the piston descends on the first, or inlet, stroke. This valve then closes when the piston reaches the bottom and starts up again on the second, or compression stroke. The gaseous mixture of air and fuel is now squeezed tightly and is highly explosive. At the top of the compression stroke a sparking plug ignites the mixture and it duly explodes. The piston is now pushed down on its third stroke, the power stroke. On its way back up an exhaust valve opens, and the hot gas is forced out by the ascending piston on the fourth, exhaust, stroke.* Just think ‘suck, squeeze, bang, blow’.

Otto’s inventive step was to manage these four distinct phases inside a cylinder with a piston travelling up and down, and he did this by arranging the valves to open at specific times during two revolutions of the crankshaft, or four strokes of the piston. This was done by using a camshaft, which looks something like a knobbly stick, to push the valves open with oval-shaped lobes. By making the camshaft rotate only once for every two rotations of the crankshaft the valves open at the correct times.

Now speed the whole engine up to make more power. A modern 1-litre car engine can run its crankshaft at 6,000 revolutions per minute (rpm), which means that it rotates 100 times in a second. So a piston is going down, stopping, reversing direction and going up again 200 times a second, and the four Otto cycles are happening in milliseconds. A typical car piston weighs around 0.3 kilograms at rest, but when changing direction at 6,000 rpm it would effectively ‘weigh’ 900 kilograms! That’s as much as a car. No wonder pistons are made of immensely strong and light aluminium alloy. A 27-litre Rolls-Royce Merlin revolves at only 3,000 rpm, but even then the load on the crankshaft main bearings is around nine tonnes – the weight of a bus.

Virtually all petrol and diesel engines share the same kinds of pistons, cylinders and valves. There may be as many as 36 cylinders in various configurations, and the Merlin and most modern cars have two inlet valves and two exhaust valves per cylinder. A typical car engine will have four cylinders in a row above the crankshaft, but a rotary aero engine has the cylinders and propeller whirling around a stationary crankshaft. A radial aero engine has stationary cylinders arranged in a star shape, with a rotating crankshaft driving the propeller. And the Rolls-Royce Merlin had 12 cylinders arranged in two rows of six sharing one crankshaft: a V12 configuration. There are advantages and disadvantages for all these formats.

A word about horsepower. This is a much-abused measure of the power of an engine, originally invented by the Scottish engineer James Watt in the late eighteenth century to compare the power of mine horses with his steam engines. So does one horse produce one horsepower? Well, no. The maximum power of a horse has been measured at 14.9 horsepower for a few seconds, and as for humans, the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt produced 3.5 horsepower during his 100-metre world record in 2009. How so?

The point is that you would need to keep around 15 horses to provide a continual 1 horsepower: after all, the poor creatures need to be rested and fed. Watt’s estimate was based on mine horses working a four-hour shift.

A story goes that the measurement was created by Watt when one of his customers, a rascally brewer, demanded a steam engine that could match his horse. He chose the strongest horse he could find and drove it to exhaustion. Watt, well aware of what was going on, accepted the brewer’s challenge and built an engine that exceeded the figure achieved by the poor horse. When calculating the measurement Watt allowed for the fact that a single horse cannot work day and night and adjusted accordingly.

The accepted measure of one mechanical horsepower is the ability to lift 550 pounds one foot in one second, or 745.7 Watts.† You can calculate horsepower by multiplying the torque (or twisting force) by revolutions (the distance travelled) and then dividing by 5,252 (the time – don’t ask).

At least the suffering of countless draught horses was alleviated by engines. But horsepower as a measure has attracted so many qualifications and fudges that it has to be used with caution.

Nikolaus Otto and his factory manager Gottlieb Daimler disagreed about what to do next with his four-stroke invention. Otto wasn’t really interested in transport and wanted his engine to replace large stationary steam engines. Daimler wanted to make small engines suitable for bicycles or carriages. As a result, Daimler left Otto and set about evading his patents so that he could avoid paying royalties. By a subterfuge involving the ‘previous art’ of a patent granted in 1862, Daimler overturned Otto’s patent and went on to build an empire. In 1885 he and Wilhelm Maybach built a small single-cylindered half-horsepower engine and put it in a bicycle. So the first person in the world to ride an Otto-cycle motorised vehicle was Adolf, Daimler’s 14-year-old son.

We now have to uncover an extraordinary attempt to unfairly claim the first powered flight by that most upright and sober of American institutions: the Smithsonian. Samuel Langley was the founder of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, but he then took up an interest in aviation, building rubber-band-powered model aircraft based on Pénaud’s designs. Colleagues noticed that his models did not seem to stay in the air very long. Then he managed to make steam-engined flying models. Around this time Rudyard Kipling was visiting his friend (and soon to be president) Teddy Roosevelt in Washington. He encountered the professor with the passion for toy aircraft:

Through Roosevelt I met Professor Langley of the Smithsonian, an old man who had designed a model aeroplane driven – for petrol had not yet arrived – by a miniature flash-boiler engine, a marvel of delicate craftsmanship. It flew on trial over two hundred yards, and drowned itself in the waters of the Potomac, which was cause of great mirth and humour to the Press of his country. Langley took it coolly enough and said to me that, though he would never live till then, I should see the aeroplane established.5

This mockery by the press may have provoked the Smithsonian into their later claims of success on the part of their colleague. Langley’s models flew further and further until his No. 6 flew for nearly a mile. The Smithsonian then granted him $20,000 to develop a full-sized man-carrying machine. To this the US War Department added $50,000, a huge sum of money at the time. The stakes were correspondingly high.

Langley called his pilot-carrying machine ‘The Aerodrome’, which translates as ‘air runner’ in Greek. The name has lived on to denote the runways that aircraft fly from. The younger man Langley hired to be the pilot was a brilliant American engineer, Charles Manly. And realising that the power-to-weight ratio of a steam engine was too low to propel a full-sized aircraft, Langley looked for someone to build him one of the exciting new Otto-cycle engines.

Professor Langley commissioned a Hungarian-born engineer, Stephen Balzer, to build him an engine for the Aerodrome. Balzer had built his first motor car in New York, a car that featured a lightweight rotary three-cylinder engine which he thought he could enlarge for the Aerodrome. Car and motorcycle engines are usually too small for aircraft. His five-cylindered prototype was disappointing, only producing 8 to10 horsepower compared with the minimum of 12 hp that Langley needed. It only ran for a few minutes. As many engineers have found to their cost, simply enlarging a design doesn’t always work.

Langley asked his engineer/pilot Charles Manly to intervene, and so he took on the mammoth job of redesigning the engine. A trip to Europe in 1900 to speak to other engine designers convinced him that the rotary design was not the way to go. So he designed the engine with fixed radial engine cylinders. And he designed a masterpiece.

Charles Manly made, largely with his own hands, a five-cylindered four-stroke radial engine, nearly 9 litres in total cylinder capacity. Five cylinders would give smooth running, and they were laid out somewhat like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, in a star shape.

He put a cast-iron liner into each spun-steel cylinder, something his local machine shops said couldn’t be done, and so he did it himself. He also welded steel water jackets around the cylinders for cooling and brazed ports on for the valves. In so doing he permanently damaged his eyesight.

Why the need for cooling? It may shock the reader to be told that the average petrol engine is as little as 25 per cent efficient. That means that up to 75 per cent of the expensive fuel we buy disappears as wasted heat from the cylinders and down the exhaust. This has enormous consequences now in a warming world, but the problem for an early engine designer was how to remove all this excess heat without melting pistons and cylinders together in a red-hot mass. One solution was to put cooling fins on the outside of the cylinders, and this worked well enough for small motorcycle engines: we call this air-cooled. But when there are rows of cylinders, the rearmost do not receive enough cooling draught. The other solution is to place a jacket of cooling water around the cylinder and pump the near-boiling water away to a radiator well away from the engine: water-cooled. This was the route that Manly took.

The rest of his engine was no less remarkable. Manly had to make every part himself, as there were no lightweight aircraft-engine accessories available off the shelf. His ignition system using a high-voltage coil and spark distributor was the first of its kind. His sparking plugs featured a platinum electrode, a choice of material years ahead of time. But his carburettor was a chamber filled with wooden balls soaked in petrol which produced a vapour that was drawn into the cylinders. This was like someone building a Concorde out of corrugated iron: Manly simply didn’t have specialised materials such as aluminium, and so he had to make the crankcase out of steel and the pistons out of cast iron. He invented a drum-type cam to open the valves and evolved the idea of having a master connecting rod and the remaining rods as slaves. The results were outstanding: the performance of this engine was prodigious. Aircraft builders are obsessed with the weight-to-power ratio of the engines they buy for obvious reasons: every extra pound or kilogram in the engine has to be supported by thin air. For a dry weight of 125 pounds, Manly’s engine gave over 52 horsepower, a weight-to-power ratio of 2.4 pounds per horsepower, which was not beaten until 1916 by an engine designed and built in a fully equipped factory during wartime. Furthermore, his engine ran reliably for ten hours without getting hot and bothered.

Not only did Manly produce the world’s first purpose-made aircraft engine, he did it largely on his own. L. J. K. Setright,‡ the sage of aero engineering, wrote this: ‘As an example of brilliant originality in design and virtuoso ability in workmanship, the Manly radial remains to this day one of the most outstanding aero-engines in history.’6

The sequel to this story is a sad one. After this jewel of an engine was fitted into Professor Langley’s Aerodrome, the aircraft was loaded onto a catapult mounted onto a houseboat moored on the Potomac River. It was 7 October 1903. But the aircraft had been scaled up from models and was structurally far too weak. Control was virtually non-existent, with two sets of wings in tandem and a central rudder. Manly took the controls, the engine roared, the whole contraption slid down the ramp … and promptly flopped into the water. Manly had to be rescued.

On the second attempt on 8 December Manly tried again, and this time the Aerodrome nearly killed him. It collapsed into the water again, trapping him under a tangle of wires and canvas. He was dragged out just in time.

Professor Langley made no further attempts, and the whole expensive project was ridiculed by the press. Then just nine days afterwards on 17 December 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright conducted four successful flights near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina with an engine of their own construction.

We are not quite finished with the Aerodrome. Professor Samuel Langley was clearly an honourable man, and when a colleague was found to have been embezzling funds from the Smithsonian he held himself responsible and refused his salary. The pressure proved too much, he suffered a stroke and died in 1906.

In a dubious alliance, the Smithsonian allowed the aircraft manufacturer Glenn Curtiss to make extensive modifications to the Aerodrome to enable it to fly. Curtiss wanted to prove it was the first flying machine so that he could defeat the Wright brothers’ patent lawsuits against him after he appropriated their ideas. And the Smithsonian wished to salvage their deceased secretary’s aeronautical reputation. After a few short hops by Curtiss during which daylight was seen under the Aerodrome, the Institution was sufficiently emboldened to display the machine in its museum. ‘The first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight,’ the placard boasted. ‘Invented, built and tested by Samuel Pierpont Langley in 1903.’ This relegated the Wright Brothers’ 1903 Kitty Hawk Flyer to also-ran status.

‘It was a lie pure and simple, but it bore the imprimatur of the venerable Smithsonian and over the years would find its way into magazines, history books, and encyclopaedias, much to the annoyance of those familiar with the facts,’ wrote the aviation historian Fred Howard.7 ‘To Orville Wright it was more than an annoyance. It was the culmination of Glenn Curtiss’s campaign to demean and devalue all that the Wright brothers had accomplished.’

Orville Wright was quite rightly furious (his brother Wilbur had died two years previously), and he accused the Institution of misrepresenting American aviation history. He found out the extent of the Curtiss modifications from a close friend of the Wright brothers, Griffith Brewer, who had photographed the tests. He then refused to donate the original Flyer to the Smithsonian, instead giving it to the Science Museum of London, which had a more objective view of aviation history. The feud eventually ended, but not until the Smithsonian published details of the Curtiss modifications to their Aerodrome and recanted their claims for precedence.

At last, the executors of Orville’s estate signed an agreement for the Smithsonian to purchase the Wright Kitty Hawk Flyer for one dollar. At the insistence of the executors, their agreement included conditions for display of the aeroplane: if any associated institution dared to claim precedence for any other aircraft, then the Flyer would be forfeited to the heir of the Wright brothers.

* A glance at an online animated graphic will explain it all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine.

† The Watt is an SI unit created in 1882 to measure power – usually electricity. It was named for James Watt.

‡ Setright was the paragon of technical writers: car journalism’s Prospero to Jeremy Clarkson’s Caliban. Concert musician, Jewish scholar and epicure, in appearance he was a gaunt Old Testament prophet draped in a Savile Row suit. More English than the English, he smoked Black Russian Sobranie cigarettes and drove a Bristol motor car.

Chapter Two

Nobody ever understands what

a pioneer is doing1

‘Surely we’re flying this in the wrong direction?’ – Wilbur Wright on the Wright Flyer in 1903. (Wikimedia Commons/US Library of Congress)

So how did two humble bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio change history? A host of French, British and German engineers and inventors knew that powered heavier-than-air flight was coming and were racing to be the first. There was also a horde of frauds, stuntmen and profiteers. They all thought that the new petrol engine was going to provide the breakthrough they craved, but what they didn’t know was how they were going to control the aircraft once it left the ground. And that is exactly what Orville and Wilbur Wright figured out.

Like Einstein’s steam engine, it’s another story of an inspirational toy: when they were boys their father Milton brought home a toy flying machine. It was a form of helicopter based, like Professor Langley’s, on a design by Alphonse Pénaud. It was powered by a rubber band that drove a rotor. Wilbur and Orville were fascinated and played with it until it broke, and so they built their own. Like Albert Einstein, they later maintained that it was this toy that initiated their lifelong interests.

After a career together building a printing press and running a newspaper, the brothers, neither of whom married, turned their attention to the new craze of bicycling and built up their own safety bicycle manufacturing company. This funded their new interest in flight, triggered by Professor Langley’s steam-driven model aircraft flights at the Smithsonian and the exploits of the German hang-gliding pilot Otto Lilienthal, who was killed in August 1896. Wilbur said of him: ‘Lilienthal was without question the greatest of the precursors, and the world owes to him a great debt.’

The brothers decided that pilot control was vital and first learned to build gliders. They evolved the idea of banking, or leaning the aircraft into turns – rather like riding a bicycle. They achieved this by twisting the ends of the wings, or ‘warping’ as they called it. They experimented with gliders at an area of sand dunes called Kill Devil Hills at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, using a local boy as pilot, as did Sir George Cayley. They then tested 200 types of wing in their home-made wind tunnel, and also figured out the best kind of propeller, which they eventually realised was a form of rotating wing.

After their experience with bicycles and studying the observations of predecessors such as Sir George Cayley, the Wright brothers realised that pilot control was essential for such a dangerous and unstable machine as an aircraft. Wilbur Wright acknowledged Cayley’s importance to the development of aviation: ‘About 100 years ago, an Englishman, Sir George Cayley, carried the science of flight to a point which it had never reached before and which it scarcely reached again during the last century.’2 The Wrights’ inventive breakthrough was three-axis control, which is still used to this day. In their earlier unpowered gliders they learned how to control roll, pitch and yaw, partly by twisting the wings, partly by using a rudder.

Compared with Manly’s jewel their engine was fairly unremarkable, but it did the job. The first engine to propel a heavier-than-air machine was not the best of those early engines, but it was the first. They could not buy one that would do the job, so they set about building one out of local materials. Largely following the contemporary 1900s automobile practice of ‘4x4x4’, it had four cylinders measuring 4 inches in diameter with a 4-inch piston stroke. These were laid flat in a row and a four-throw crankshaft was carved out of a solid billet of steel by the Wrights’ machinist, Charlie Taylor. Here’s Taylor’s story in his own words:

We didn’t make any drawings. One of us would sketch out the part we were talking about on a piece of scratch paper, and I’d spike the sketch over my bench. It took me six weeks to make that engine. The only metal-working machines we had were a lathe and a drill press, run by belts from the stationary gas engine.

This single-cylindered engine was one they had built earlier to test their skills:

The crankshaft was made out of a block of machine steel 6 by 31 inches and 1-5/8 inch thick. I traced the outline on the slab, then drilled through with the drill press until I could knock out the surplus pieces with a hammer and chisel. Then I put it in the lathe and turned it down to size and smoothness …

This crankshaft was literally hacked out from the solid by Taylor. It lacked any balance weights, so the vibration must have been numbing for the pilot, lying prone next to the engine.

… the ignition was the make-and-break type. No spark plugs. The spark was made by the opening and closing of two contact points inside the combustion chamber. These were operated by shafts and cams geared to the main camshaft. The ignition switch was an ordinary single-throw knife switch we bought at the hardware store. Dry batteries were used for starting the engine, and then we switched onto a magneto bought from the Dayton Electric Company.3

The engine’s capacity was 3.3 litres. It had an overhead camshaft, which opened the exhaust valves only, as the spring-loaded inlet valves were sucked open automatically by the descending pistons, which was common practice at the time.

What was remarkable was the material used for the crankcase. Unlike Manly, the Wrights managed to find the latest precipitate-hardened aluminium, and this was also a first in aircraft construction. They contracted a local Dayton foundry, the Buckeye Iron and Brass Works, to cast the aluminium crankcase. Buckeye acquired their raw aluminium from the nearby Pittsburgh Reduction Company, which was renamed Alcoa in 1907 and later became the world’s leading producer of aluminium. Here’s Charlie Taylor again:

The body of the first engine was of cast aluminum and was bored out on the lathe for independent cylinders. The pistons were cast iron, and these were turned down and grooved for piston rings …4

Amazingly, the engine had no fuel pump and no carburettor, but a crude form of fuel injection which allowed a trickle of petrol to leak into a water-heated inlet manifold where it vaporised and was sucked in through the automatic inlet valves. So the pilot had no throttle to control the engine power, just an ordinary tap, and therefore the engine ran at full speed or not at all. Presumably the pilot was otherwise occupied in learning how to fly the world’s first aeroplane on its very first flight.

All of this hard work and inventiveness resulted in a dry weight of 179 pounds, quite a bit more than Manly’s engine at 125 pounds. The specific power was 15 lb/hp instead of his 2.4 lb/hp. It also only produced 12 horsepower instead of Manly’s 52 horsepower, and it couldn’t produce that power for long. After a few minutes heat would build up and the inlet manifold would get too hot, reducing the density of the air and thus reducing power to around 8 horsepower.5 It was enough power – but only just.

The Wright engine was first run on the bench on 12 February 1903, but on the very next day (Friday the 13th, as it happened) it overheated and seized up on a test run. Overheating was to be a constant bugbear of aero-engine manufacture over the next century, as we will discover. New castings had to be ordered from the foundry, and Charlie had their engine rebuilt and ready to go in early June.

What was even more impressive than building an engine literally from scratch is that the brothers realised the importance of running the two propellers slower than the engine and revolving them in opposite directions to counteract gyroscopic forces (these two facts didn’t dawn on some aircraft manufacturers until well into the Second World War). They did this by the simple expedient of using long bicycle-style chains and different-sized sprockets to gear down the 8-foot (2.5-metre) spruce propellers, then simply twisting just one of these chains into a figure-of-eight to reverse the direction! The brothers’ bicycle experience had certainly paid off. The result of all this was just 90 pounds (40 kg) of thrust (the most recent Rolls-Royce Trent jet engine generates 97,000 pounds (44,000 kg), well over a thousand times as much as that first aircraft engine).

This historic engine came to a sad end. After powering the Flyer on four flights at Kitty Hawk on 17 December 1903, it suffered serious damage, splitting the crankcase when a gust of wind overturned the aircraft. It wasn’t perhaps the best engine built for pioneer flight – that was Manly’s. But it was the first engine to fly.

We are nearly at the point of lift-off. In 1903 the brothers built their aeroplane, the Wright Flyer, adding Charlie Taylor’s engine. The whole aircraft cost less than a thousand dollars, in contrast to the $70,000 total of government and Smithsonian funds spent by Professor Langley on his Aerodrome.

Finally, on 14 December 1903 Wilbur and Orville tossed a coin to see who would go first. Wilbur won the toss and the two brothers shook hands. John T. Daniels, a lifesaver crewman, was struck by the feelings between the two brothers: ‘After a while they shook hands, and we couldn’t help notice how they held on to each other’s hand, sort o’ like they hated to let go; like two folks parting who weren’t sure they’d ever see each other again.’6

The two brothers wouldn’t see each other again, not in a flightless world. A few minutes later Wilbur lay down on the lower wing, the Flyer’s engine roared, the aircraft trundled down the launch rail and an aircraft took off under its own power for the first time in history. The Age of Aviation had begun.

Chapter Three

Prometheus’s gift

The first successful flight of the Wright Flyer, 1903. Wilber has just let go of the wing. (Wikimedia Commons/US Library of Congress)

After a three-and-a-half-second flight the Wright Flyer lurched up steeply, stalled and crashed nose-first into the sands of Kill Devil Hills. Wilbur was slightly shaken, but the canard elevator at the front had taken most of the impact. He wrote home: ‘the power is ample, and but for a trifling error due to lack of experience with this machine and this method of starting, the machine would undoubtedly have flown beautifully … there is now no question of final success.’

So was this the first successful flight? Or not? This is a problem for historians who try to hammer solid markers into the ever-shifting sands of time. Geologists also like to mark the transition between geological eras with what they call the ‘golden spike’, referring to the ceremonial gold final spike that was used to join two railway tracks when they met in the middle of the US in 1869, forming the transcontinental railroad.

The two men made a far more successful flight on their next outing: on their next test day, 17 December 1903, the Wrights arrived on site in a freezing wind of 27 mph (43 km/h), and with the damaged elevator repaired Orville took off at 10.35 a.m. The over-sensitive front elevator caused the Flyer to swoop up and down in a sickening way, but it landed safely after a flight of 120 feet (36 metres) in 12 seconds. This flight was the subject of the famous photograph (his first) taken by John T. Daniels. This is generally accepted as the first heavier-than-air flight in history. Significantly the aircraft landed at the same level as the take-off: it hadn’t just floated off a hill like a glider.

Wilbur managed 175 feet (52 metres) on the second flight, again struggling for control. On the third flight Orville achieved 200 feet (60 metres) in 15 seconds. And the fourth and final flight of Flyer 1 was more controlled. Orville recorded what happened:

Wilbur started the fourth and last flight at just about 12 o’clock. The first few hundred feet were up and down, as before, but by the time three hundred feet had been covered, the machine was under much better control. The course for the next four or five hundred feet had but little undulation. However, when out about eight hundred feet the machine began pitching again, and, in one of its darts downward, struck the ground. The distance over the ground was measured to be 852 feet; the time of the flight was 59 seconds. The frame supporting the front rudder was badly broken, but the main part of the machine was not injured at all. We estimated that the machine could be put in condition for flight again in about a day or two.1

This was more like it. Wilbur Wright had managed nearly a minute of sustained, controlled flight. The engine had run reliably throughout. They had a photograph and five witnesses, and Flyer had done her duty. Unfortunately the fragile aircraft was then caught by a huge gust of wind and rolled over several times, despite desperate attempts to hang on to it. As we have seen, the engine crankcase was split in half, and that was the end of the engine. This is the aircraft that Orville donated to the Science Museum in London and that now resides in the Smithsonian.

The brothers now had to capitalise on their invention, and that proved much harder. The Wrights began applying for a patent, but it described the 1902 warping wings on their glider, not the 1903 powered Flyer. It took over three years to be granted, and this patent was to be the basis for the many patent-infringement suits which exhausted the brothers (and probably led to Wilbur’s premature death at only 45). In 1904 they built another Flyer with an enlarged version of the same engine and managed to fly in a large circle for one and a half minutes, but still the aircraft was difficult to control. There was a reason for that.

An amateur might be forgiven for thinking that the Wright Flyer 1 was flying backwards.* It had no tail, but instead a large appendage at the front. The propellers were at the back, pushing forwards. The Wrights were trying to fly their contraption in the wrong direction, in fact the whole thing was dangerously unstable, as modern analysis shows. An attempt to re-stage the hundredth anniversary of the first flight on 17 December 2003, using an exact replica, failed because the pilot simply could not control it. It was like a flying shopping trolley.

The Wrights struggled with their reputation at first. They refused to show anyone their machine as they feared their ideas would be stolen – and in that they were right. In Europe, aviation enthusiasts were certain that the French were on the brink of powered flight. The pioneer French aviator Captain Ferdinand Ferber had even written to his fellow countryman Ernest Archdeacon, founder of the Aéro-Club de France: ‘Do not let the aeroplane be achieved in America first!’

It seems hard to believe in this world of 24/7 online news, but the only press coverage the Wrights received in 1904 was an article written by one Amos Root in Gleanings, a bee-keeping magazine, alongside articles such as ‘How to get bees into the cellar’ and ‘Mid-winter flights of cellared bees’. In 1905 the Wrights’ local newspaper, the Dayton Daily News, finally reported Wilbur’s 5 October flight of 24.5 miles – a world-shattering achievement – on page 9, alongside farming news.

The mainstream press refused to take the brothers seriously, and the New York Herald was positively insulting: ‘The Wrights have flown or they have not flown. They possess a machine or they do not possess one. They are in fact either fliers or liars. It is difficult to fly. It is easy to say, “We have flown.”’2

The Wrights tried to interest the US Army in their invention, and made demonstration flights. On 17 September 1908 a propeller disintegrated in mid-air and Orville suffered a dreadful crash. His passenger, Army observer Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, was killed, and thus entered history as the first person to die in an aviation accident. Orville was badly injured.

Prophets are not without honour, except in their own country. It wasn’t until Wilbur took Flyer Model A to Europe in May 1908 that the international aeronautical community at last believed the Wrights’ claims. His first flight near Le Mans only lasted 1 minute 45 seconds, but he made banking turns and described a complete circle. During later flights he made figures-of-eight and performed manoeuvres surpassing anything rival pioneering aircraft could achieve.

The plaudits flooded in, at last. The sceptics apologised and praised the brothers. The public loved Wilbur’s flight demonstrations, and when Orville and their sister Katharine joined him in 1909, they were briefly world-famous. Kings came to see the flights. Previous sceptics now hastened to make amends. The Aérophile magazine, which had once sneered, now hastened to proclaim that the flights ‘have completely dissipated all doubts. Not one of the former detractors of the Wrights dare question, today, the previous experiments of the men who were truly the first to fly.’3 And Ernest Archdeacon, who had once written that the French would make the first public demonstration of powered flight, now wrote: ‘For a long time, the Wright brothers have been accused in Europe of bluff … They are today hallowed in France, and I feel an intense pleasure … to make amends.’4

All very gratifying, but the Wrights struggled to make a success of their business. The crashes began to mount up. All six Wright C model aircraft bought by the Army crashed, and by 1913 the death toll had reached 11. Eventually the military refused to buy aircraft with ‘pusher’ type propellers with the engine behind the pilot as it was apt to crush him when the aircraft crashed into the ground. The competition in Europe and the USA was ferocious, and in the end patent struggles proved too much for the fledgling business.

Many years later Orville struck a sad note about the horrors brought about by the bombers of the Second World War:

We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong … No, I don’t have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I do the destruction it has caused. I feel about the airplane much the same as I do in regard to fire. That is, I regret all the terrible damage caused by fire, but I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires and that we have learned how to put fire to thousands of important uses.5

Prometheus brought fire to humanity. It was up to humanity to know what to do with it.

* The Soviet Antonov A-2 biplane really could fly backwards. Its stall speed was so low that a pilot could hold it into a head wind near the ground at around 25 mph (40 km/h) and if the wind was strong enough, this manoeuvre would make the plane move backwards very slowly while still under full control. Biplanes were flown by the all-women crews of the Soviet 588th Night Bomber Regiment.

Chapter Four

Primum movens –

‘Prime mover’ – a new engine for a new century

A nine-cylinder Gnome rotary engine, circa 1916. The inlet valves are hiding in the piston crowns. (Wikimedia Commons/US Library of Congress)

Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines was a 1965 comedy caper film that featured authentic flying replicas of early aeroplanes. In it, the English press baron Lord Rawnsley puts up a £10,000 prize for the winner of a 1910 London-to-Paris air race. Many of the pioneer aircraft and their piston engines can be seen flying, but the authenticity of the cars, aircraft and sets is somewhat let down by feeble performances and a predictable script. Watching the stunt pilots getting these contraptions into the air gives an idea of just how dangerous this new sport was. Landing them again was potentially lethal.

As the Wright brothers built up their flying hours they ran into an engine problem. As they rotate, in-line four-cylindered engines’ pistons stop and start all at the same time, and as a result such an engine can never have perfect balance. The vibrations of their engine were so bad that they threatened the structure of the aircraft. More power was needed, too, so the brothers increased the power of the four-cylinder engine to 25 horsepower by 1906, and in 1908 they made a six-cylindered engine of 39 hp.

Six-cylindered engines are smoother because the crank throws are at 120° to each other instead of the 180° of a four-cylinder. This means that paired pistons are at equal distance from the centre of the engine (nos 1 and 6 cylinders, nos 2 and 5, nos 3 and 4), and they are always moving together, which results in good balance in the reciprocating mass. The overlapping torque is generated every 120°, which helps for smoothness, too. However, you cannot keep adding cylinders in a line indefinitely – the crankshaft grows so long that it starts to twist and vibrate. This is because as each cylinder fires it imparts a slight twist to the crankshaft, rather like winding a spring. This sets up a torsional vibration that eventually snaps the crankshaft. The Wright brothers did not dare to run their new six-cylinder engine at the high revolutions at which this vibration set in. It was left for others to solve this problem.

One way to avoid a long crankshaft is to use a short four-throw crankshaft with a bank of four cylinders, then add an extra bank of four cylinders and pistons at 90° to the first bank, driving the same crankshaft and sharing big-end journals. And this is exactly what the French engineer Léon Levavasseur did when he invented and patented the V8 engine, the elegantly built and named Antoinette 8V.

Levavasseur was a fine arts student who clearly had an eye for aesthetics. He switched to engineering and started building petrol engines for motorboats. His V-shape motors fitted neatly into the bilges of a boat, as V-shaped steam engines had before them. In 1903 he persuaded the French industrialist Jules Gastambide that his engines would be light and powerful enough for speedboats and for the aircraft that were clearly on the horizon; furthermore, he suggested that the engine should be named after his patron’s daughter: Antoinette.*

Levavasseur had patented a fuel-injected 8-litre V8 engine, a machine now so identified with the American muscle-car culture of the Sixties that it might come as a surprise that it was invented by a Frenchman. It was rather more beautiful than the average Detroit cast-iron lump; for a start each cylinder was surrounded by a thin water jacket made of electrolytically deposited copper, and these contained water that was turned to steam by the heat of the cylinders. This rose through copper pipes and was evaporatively cooled back to liquid water. The fuel was injected into each inlet port through a decidedly modern-looking stack of inlet pipes. When all the copper was polished this was a lovely piece of sculpture. The power, though, was only 50 hp, a figure that could be achieved today by a motorbike of only a quarter of 1 litre: 250 cc. By 1904 most of the prize-winning speedboats in Europe were running the Antoinette 8V engine.

Aircraft designers need lightness as well as power, though, and the specific power was 4.6 lb per hp, half that of the Manly engine. The Antoinette 8V was fitted into the first French aircraft, 14b (Quatorze-bis), built by the Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont. This aeroplane refused to take off with its first engine, and so an Antoinette 8V was fitted instead.

On 13 September 1906 at the Bois de Boulogne, Quatorze-bis was just able to take off, and it flew for around 5 metres (16 feet) and reached a dizzying altitude of 70 cm (28 in). Many still claim that this was the world’s first true powered flight, as the aircraft took off and landed on its own undercarriage wheels, whereas the Wright Flyer took off from a launch rail, leaving a wheeled dolly on the ground.

This beauty of an engine was definitely the first to power an aeroplane flight in Britain, though, and this happened at Farnborough in 1908. But it was still too heavy for its limited power.

At this point we should briefly consider the arguments between air and water cooling, a battle between wind and water which was later epitomised by the competition between the Bristol Hercules air-cooled radial engines and the Rolls-Royce Merlin water-cooled engines of the Second World War. As we know, internal combustion engines have a vast amount of waste heat to dispose of, particularly from inside the cylinder head where most of that combustion is happening. For a small single-cylindered motorbike engine, simple cooling fins all around the cylinder and head will suffice, as you can check yourself the next time you see a suitable bike parked up.

Weight is the first consideration for aero-engine designers, and so it is natural for them to be attracted to air for cooling; after all it is cheap, light and easily obtainable. The fact that you need four thousand times more air volume than water volume to remove the same amount of heat doesn’t matter: you can suck it up and eject it as you fly along. You will be carrying less weight around if you let air do the cooling.

There were other advantages of air cooling that soon became apparent as the nascent aero industry arose and the first decade of the century gave way to the second. Although the first aero engines were water-cooled, the most popular early aero engines were the air-cooled French Gnome rotary engines, designed and built by the French brothers Louis and Laurent Seguin. Based on a German single-cylinder design, their purpose-built aircraft engine had seven cylinders and produced the same 50 horsepower as the Antoinette 8V, but it weighed 44 lb (20 kg) less. It was launched in 1909 as the rotary Gnome Omega, and it was so utterly different from the V8 Antoinette that it is hard to believe that they shared anything at all in common.

For a start, instead of having stationary cylinders and a revolving crankshaft, the Gnome had a stationary crankshaft fixed to the aircraft, and the crankcase, cylinders and propeller all whirled around like a demented Catherine wheel. As a result the finned cylinders and cylinder heads were efficiently cooled by churning through the air. An amateur mechanic examining a Gnome rotary for the first time might be foxed by seeing only a single exhaust valve at the top of each cylinder. Where was the inlet? The secret was that the inlet valve was hidden in the crown of the piston, and the fuel and air mixture was inhaled through the hollow crankshaft into the crankcase and up through this valve. The Gnome was delicately made – each cylinder barrel had a wall thickness of only 1.5 mm – and yet it had been machined out of a solid steel billet, fins and all; a huge machining job. Like the Wright Flyer’s engine,† the Gnome had no throttle, and if the pilot wanted fewer horses all he could do was to switch the ignition off with a joystick-mounted control. The torque reversals produced by this technique exerted terrific strains on the aircraft.

These rotaries dominated the early aviation scene partly because they were light, and this was a by-product of the circumferential layout of the cylinders, which saved a lot of crankcase weight. They were also smooth-running, well balanced, and suffered no vibration. Vibrating engines quite literally shook those early aircraft apart. Watching a vibratory engine running on the ground is quite a sight; the whole machine seems to be a blur.

There was a further advantage of the air-cooled engine: in wartime a bullet or piece of shrapnel might break off a cooling fin without affecting the running, whereas if a water jacket, pipeline or radiator was punctured it would stop the engine in minutes. They were so popular that more than 1,700 Gnomes were built across Europe.

These rotary engines were memorable in many ways. Apart from all the ironmongery spinning around, which would disconcert a car-owner, the rotary also flung castor oil around in a half-burned spray. This stuff has the most delightful, evocative smell, but after breathing it in for a while pilots found they were attacked by violent diarrhoea, an affliction difficult to cope with at altitude in a cramped cockpit wearing tight-fitting breeches.

There were disadvantages of air cooling that emerged as the number of cylinders multiplied. The last cylinders in an in-line row would be shrouded by the others and wouldn’t feel enough of the cooling draught. They would start to grow too hot, and shortly afterwards a piston would seize inside a cylinder and the whole thing would then clank to a halt. There were disadvantages, too, of rotary engines. The weight of the whirling mass of metal resulted in gyroscopic precessions which had a dangerous effect on the aircraft’s manoeuvrability – imagine trying to steer a bicycle with a spinning flywheel attached to the handlebars. As rotary engines grew more powerful and heavier this effect became so pronounced that the aircraft fitted with them became almost unmanageable.

In 1908 Fiat in Italy produced its delectable SA8/75, a lightweight air-cooled V8 aiming at a specific power of 3.3 lb/hp and in fact achieving a 150 lb engine delivering 50 horsepower. This was a featherweight delight, with gearwheels like cobwebs, slender valve-rockers, and even a hollow camshaft to save vital weight. Sadly it suffered from overheating like so many in-line air-cooled engines, partly because the Fiat engineers insisted on discharging the hot exhaust gases into the cooling airflow. Renault also produced an air-cooled V8 of 80 hp and solved the overheating problem by the use of an excessively rich fuel mixture: the petrol literally cooled it from within. It was more reliable but inefficient.

The French were at the forefront of this new technology; the little 20 hp Anzani that Blériot used to cross the English Channel in 1909 was built in Paris. The British were next to get in on the act, with Gustavus Green designing a 60 hp aero engine. Germany was relatively slow to get going, but then ran national competitions which were successful in producing good designs. On the Kaiser’s birthday in 1912 it was announced that he was to award a prize for the best German aero engine, and this was won by a Mercedes engine which embodied a construction technique they had copied from a French Panhard engine of 1903 and the Antoinette 8V. It consisted of separate steel cylinders surrounded by welded-on cooling water jackets, and the engine was upside down, with inverted cylinders hanging below the crankcase.

Other European nations realised the importance of the new prime mover and hundreds of companies started making internal combustion piston engines of all configurations. All at once the steam engine looked heavy, dirty and outmoded.

Why did modern science arise in Europe? What was it about Europe that made the pace of progress so furious? How, for example, did powered flight advance from the Wright Flyer to the Spitfire in just 30 years? The answer goes back to Galileo. Modern science developed at the time of Galileo in the late Renaissance, namely the application of hypotheses to Nature, the use of the experimental method and the acceptance of a mechanical model of reality. Hypotheses of the medieval past tended to be vague (‘God created everything’) and numbers were manipulated in number mysticism a priori instead of being used to measure experiments a posteriori. For all his inventive genius, Leonardo da Vinci still lived in the old world, but by his mathematisation of hypotheses about the universe Galileo broke through the walls and shaped a new world.

Europe was ready for it. The Enlightenment incorporated science and reason, and these intellectual shifts made the British culture, in particular, receptive to new mechanical and financial inventions. The first Industrial Revolution began in Britain with textile spinning, steam power, iron making and machine tools at the forefront, all capitalised by central banks and stock markets and protected by patents until this small island off the coast of Europe was so wealthy that it acquired the largest empire the world had ever seen. Once the northern cities where the wealth was generated echoed with the tramp of thousands of boots into the mills and factories every morning, and streets were lined with fine new stone buildings along the Mersey, the Clyde and the Tyne. Now those same mills stand empty with the eyeless gaze of smashed panes, and charity shops line the streets where once they stamped ‘Made in England’.

The second Industrial Revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century is our subject: mass production on assembly lines, new steel-making processes, the rise of the internal combustion engine and the invention of cars and aircraft. Intense competition arose in Belgium, Germany and France, and they raced to industrialise at the same pace. Some prophesied war. The stage is now set for the birth of an extraordinary company: Rolls-Royce, the maker of the Merlin.

* In the same year the daughter of the owner of the Daimler Motors corporation gave her name to the cars: Mercedes. Hitler perhaps never realised that his favourite Mercedes-Benz parade car was named after the granddaughter of a rabbi.

† The Wrights didn’t fit a throttle to their engines until 1913. A butterfly throttle restricts the air/fuel mixture to the cylinders, and is usually a centrally pivoted metal disc that allows the mixture to flow to the cylinders.

Chapter Five

When Mr Rolls met Mr Royce

Charles Stewart Rolls at the wheel, circa 1905. ‘Charlie Rolls was the strangest of men and one of the most loveable.’ (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Rolls-Royce is perhaps the most prestigious manufacturer’s name of all. The genius of Henry Royce and the flair of Charles Rolls together with their determination to make the best car in the world resulted in the immortal 40/50 Silver Ghost, whose engine led them on to the manufacture of aircraft engines. That expertise led to the subject of this book, the Rolls-Royce Merlin.

There have been many books written about Rolls-Royce over the years, at least 100 or so about the cars or aero engines or both, and dozens that devote thousands of words to biographies of the leading personalities. But few seem to get to the nub of the matter: what exactly was so special about this company and its products?

I have great respect for the old British engineers. I can just remember them, serious men of the middle class, adept with micrometer and slide rule. Often classically schooled, they named their companies Acme, Invicta, Phoenix, Vulcan. They may have done this because they were looked down upon by the literary and administrative elite as being ‘trade’ (compare that with the situation in Germany, where a fully trained engineer earned the right to the honorific ‘Doktor’). The corrosive effect of Britain’s old caste system held back our finest scientists and engineers, as C. P. Snow, a chemist and novelist, lamented in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.1 Victorian schooling had overemphasised the humanities in the form of Latin and Greek at the expense of scientific education.

Alan Turing’s wartime work at Bletchley Park on computing led him to crack German Navy Enigma machine codes, and he is now regarded as the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. However, he struggled to be accepted at Sherborne, his public school. His headmaster wrote: ‘If he is to stay at Public School, he must aim at becoming educated. If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a Public School.’2

For this ignorant attitude we can probably thank Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby school and an immensely influential educationalist, who wrote:

rather than have [physical science] the principal thing in my son’s mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament. Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an Englishman to study is Christian and moral and political philosophy.3

This medieval outlook led to the British political and administrative elites being deprived of vital preparation for managing the scientific world, as we will see in that most scientific of wars: the Second World War.

And Rolls-Royce was the most scientific of British engineering companies.

When Mr Rolls met Mr Royce they each found the man the other had been looking for. The story of how they met is a locus classicus in the history books, on hotel plaques and over 11,000 webpages: how electrical engineer Henry Edmunds accompanied Charles Rolls to Manchester on a train with a dining car on the morning of 4 May 1904. They got off the train and met Henry Royce in the Midland Hotel. Manchester tour guides still stand outside the Midland Hotel, point to the two plaques and repeat this story: ‘Here’s where Rolls met Royce.’ And every year on 4 May Rolls-Royce enthusiasts celebrate the event at the hotel.

But it isn’t true. What Edmunds actually wrote was this: ‘I remember we went to the Great Central Hotel at Manchester and lunched together. I think both men took to each other at first sight, and they eagerly discussed the prospects and requirements of the motor industry which was then in its earliest infancy.’

There was no Great Central Hotel in Manchester. Neither Rolls nor Royce mentioned the meeting. And the assumption of historians has been that the men left the train at the Central Station and walked into the hotel next door, which Edmunds must have mistakenly called ‘the Great Central’. However, as the author Ed Glinert points out, there was no train with a dining car arriving in time for lunch that week that stopped at Central Station. The only such train they could have caught was one that stopped at London Road (now Piccadilly) Station, which was the Great Central Railway’s Manchester headquarters, not Central Station. Glinert writes:

I consulted Kelly’s Post Office Directory for 1904. First, I verified that under ‘Hotels’ there was no Great Central Hotel. Then I turned to the entries for the surrounding streets. Under ‘London Road’ there was the usual Edwardian paraphernalia – tobacconist, blacksmith, draper, ostler, French polisher – then there was the entry for ‘London Road station’, an entrance from the street below the station, and right bang next door ‘the Great Central Refreshment Rooms’ – just the kind of smart, no nonsense place two hungry men, with no time to waste, might meet a third to do a bit of business.4

Does this kind of nit-picking matter? Well, yes. If this story, central to Rolls-Royce mythology, is untrue, how much else do we have to approach with caution? And it’s strange to think of how many worthies in Rolls-Royce motor cars have been going to the wrong venue for years.

The fact that the men were pleased to meet each other is beyond doubt. Rolls said afterwards: ‘I could not find any English-made car I really liked … eventually, however, I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of Mr. Royce and in him I found the man I had been looking for for years.’ And Rolls commemorated that first meeting by sending Royce a silver Vesta case engraved with the date: May 4th, 1904, the conception of the company.

Frederick Henry Royce (Henry) was 14 years older than his new partner. He was born in 1863 in the village of Alwalton near Peterborough. The Royce family were millers and lived at one time in South Luffenham, the village in which I grew up, and his mother Mary King came from North Luffenham. We knew her family, and I know this as a deeply rural part of inner England: the country of the Northamptonshire peasant poet John Clare. Henry Royce’s father James was also a miller, but suffered from the fatiguing Hodgkin’s disease and died in a poorhouse at the age of 41. Henry, like John Clare, therefore experienced poverty from early youth, and was sent out bird-scaring in the fields when he was still three years old. Many years later the little scarecrow would be Baron of Seaton, a village not far away in Rutland where his family had once been millers.

At this time, however, the family had no money and moved down to London, where one of the jobs Henry undertook was telegram boy. Curiously enough he is said by Rolls-Royce historians to have delivered telegrams of congratulations to 35 Hill Street, Berkeley Square, in the Mayfair district of London on the occasion of the Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls’s birth on 27 August 1877. It is hard to imagine two Englishmen born further apart along the social spectrum.

Henry Royce showed an aptitude for engineering and was sponsored by his aunt to undertake a premium apprenticeship at the Great Northern Railway works at Peterborough. Working under one of the best engineers of the day, he took every opportunity to educate himself, spending his evenings studying algebra, French and electrical engineering. For a young man of the working class the profession of engineer would be an honourable occupation. But after his aunt could no longer support him he struggled to find employment in one of the periodic economic downturns. He ended up in Leeds as a toolmaker working a 54-hour week for 11 shillings, about £90 in today’s values (£1.67p an hour). For several months he worked from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. and all through Friday night, and eventually this was the kind of commitment he expected from his own workers when he started his own business. He also neglected to eat properly, and this affected his health.

Royce showed talent as an electrician and was eventually given the technical responsibility for the installation of lighting in several streets in Liverpool. However, his employers were bankrupted, and so he set up in business as F. H. Royce & Co. in Blake Street, Manchester with his fellow engineer friend Ernest Claremont, who invested £50. They lived together in a room over the workshop, rigging up hammocks and cooking their meals in an enamelling stove, a practice that may have led to the gastric problems both men suffered in later life. According to the Rolls-Royce historian Harold Nockolds:

Their only diversion at this time was a card game called ‘Grab’, which appears to have been a combination of all-in wrestling and strip poker. At any rate they both wore tightly buttoned overalls when playing the game, which generally ended in their rolling around the floor like a couple of puppies.5

Otherwise they were working around the clock making electrical devices such as an electric doorbell kit, which was a success and paved the way to the building of dynamos, electric motors and cranes. It was about this time that Royce patented improvements to the bayonet light bulb that we still use today. He started to show his particular genius: the ability to take apart previous inventions, work out how to improve them and then build better versions. He himself said: ‘Take the best that exists and make it better.’ This is one of the key characteristics of the Rolls-Royce method: they didn’t waste effort reinventing a wheel; instead they made it perfectly round and unbreakable.

In those days of gaslights any ship, mill, factory or office that wanted electric lighting had to buy a dynamo, and Royce’s were the best. Dynamos with heavily arcing brushes would swiftly burn out, but Royce worked out a way to achieve sparkless commutation and his dynamos just kept going. This was going to become the defining quality of the Rolls-Royce magic: reliability. And one day that was going to be a lifesaver.

Royce was what we could call today a workaholic and a perfectionist: ‘For many years I worked hard to keep the company going through its very difficult days of pioneering, personally keeping our few machine tools working on Saturday afternoons when men did not wish to work.’

Men arriving in the mornings would often find him asleep at the bench with his head cradled in his arms, his machines whirling emptily. Discipline was so strict in the Manchester works that a man seen loitering or joking at his machine was likely to be dismissed without notice. He would allow a man half a day off to get married. He himself admitted that he was a shy man who suffered from excessive sensitivity. He still neglected his health; a boy in the factory would be sent after him with a glass of milk and told not to come back until he had drunk it.

The profits of the company were ploughed back in, and Royce began to make the best electric winches and cranes on the world market, so much so that when the Japanese Imperial Navy bought a crane for their dockyard and copied it, they copied the Royce nameplate, too!

There was a brief period of prosperity, and Claremont and Royce married the sisters Edith and Minnie Punt. Colleagues who marry sisters do not always find happiness for either the women or the men, and the Royces eventually separated in 1912. According to one historian both Edith and Minnie were uncomfortable with the physical aspects of their relationships.6 However, Henry and Minnie built a fine house in Knutsford in the fashionable Arts and Crafts style. It had a Royce electric generator in the back garden, giving them the first electric lights in the town. This is where Royce tinkered with cars and grew roses, his only hobby. Oddly for a Royce creation, his house had quality problems. In 2008 the owner said: ‘Half of the house had to be dismantled due to subsidence and next door’s house was made with a lot of the bricks.’ It would be worth around £1.6 million today, an indication of Royce’s rise from his humble rural beginnings as a scarecrow.

Around the turn of the century Royce had become interested in the new motor cars, and first bought a De Dion-Bouton and then a second-hand 1901 Decauville. The Continent was in the forefront of car manufacturing at that early stage, the French in particular. Perhaps surprisingly, electric cars were thought to be the future: ‘P1’, the first car Ferdinand Porsche made in 1898, had to carry half a ton (500 kg) of lead-acid battery. Performance was brisk but the range was short. So not much has changed in 120 years. It is slightly odd that Henry Royce, a manufacturer of electric motors, did not buy an electric Porsche; a four-motor example was ordered by the Englishman E. W. Hart in 1900. As a consummate engineer he probably realised the advantage of internal combustion engines: petrol has an energy density 60 times that of a lead-acid battery and at least eight times better than the best present-day batteries. A battery equivalent to the Silver Ghost’s fuel capacity of 12 gallons would weigh a couple of tons. When its energy was exhausted it would still weigh a couple of tons, unlike an empty petrol tank. And even a ham and cheese sandwich, weight for weight, is around 30 times more energy-dense than the best lithium battery.

As for Ferdinand Porsche, he served for a while as a chauffeur to Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the crown prince of Austria whose assassination would precipitate the First World War a decade later. (The word chauffeur comes from the French for stoker, or fireman, referring to the stoking of the boiler on early steam vehicles.) In the Thirties a keen motorist named Adolf Hitler admired the 1932 Czechoslovakian Tatra T97, a small, air-cooled, rear-engined economy car, and remarked to Porsche: ‘This is the car for my roads.’ Porsche copied many aspects of the design and produced the Volkswagen Beetle, which was strikingly similar. Tatra launched a lawsuit, but this was simply disposed of when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Dr Porsche then designed tanks and joined the Nazi Party, reaching the rank of SS-Oberführer. After the Second World War Tatra reopened the issue, and in 1965 Volkswagen paid Ringhoffer-Tatra 1,000,000 Deutsche Marks in an out-of-court settlement.

The Frenchman René Panhard was perhaps the most influential motor-car pioneer, as he laid out the shape that the petrol-fuelled car was going to follow for 100 years: it would have four wheels, with a radiator in front followed by an engine, then a clutch and a gearbox which would send power to the rear wheels. ‘C’est brutal,’ Panhard admitted of his sliding-pinion crash gearbox, ‘mais il marche’: ‘It’s brutal, but it works.’

There were few British cars of quality available due to the infamous 1865 ‘red flag’ speed restrictions. These called for motor vehicles to restrict their speed to 4 mph in the country and 2 mph in the town (6 and 3 km/h respectively), and for a man carrying a red flag to walk in front of a vehicle pulling a trailer. The 1896 Locomotive Act removed some restrictions of the 1865 act and raised the speed to 14 mph (23 km/h). This still inhibited the growth of the motor-car industry in Britain. No less an inventor than Thomas Edison wrote in 1901:

The motor car ought to have been British. You first invented it in the 1830s. You have roads only second to those of France. You have hundreds of thousands of skilled mechanics in your midst, but you have lost your trade by the same kind of stupid legislation and prejudice that have put you back in many departments of the electrical field.7

Henry Royce hadn’t given much thought to building his own cars until he drove the Decauville with its two-cylindered engine. This vibrated horribly and offended his perfectionist instincts. He was dissatisfied with other aspects of the Decauville, so in typical Henry Royce fashion he dismantled it, inspected the parts, made improvements and then resolved to build his own motor car. So runs another Rolls-Royce legend.

But if the Decauville was so bad, why was there so much of the French car in the genes of the Royce? The radiator looked so similar that when Charles Rolls saw the car for the first time he thought it was a product of the French factory. The rest of it looked much the same. Royce’s approach was always to ‘take the best and make it better’, which later became the central Rolls-Royce mantra. So he set about doing exactly that: copying what worked, improving what didn’t. As he said himself, inventors and pioneers rarely make any money, only those who take their ideas and make them work.

Meanwhile the end of the Boer War had caused an economic downturn, and cheaper foreign-made dynamos appeared on the market using Royce-patented designs without paying him royalties. Royce either had to make his own products more cheaply or diversify by making a new product. The first course would have been anathema to him, and he saw clearly that the motor car was the next big thing. It would be ideal for his business. His partner Ernest Claremont was more conservative and hadn’t been keen on the switch to electric cranes. He became more and more disenchanted with Royce’s diversifications and resisted the move into car manufacturing, especially when Royce kept borrowing men in the workshop for the more interesting business of building his first car.

‘In 1904 he had produced the first Royce car: this was before he met the late Hon. C. S. Rolls,’ wrote his friend Frank Lord:

The car was a 10 hp. two-cylinder, and was a revelation for its date, having properly lubricated joints to the drive shaft [instead of chains]. As he could not buy a satisfactory coil for the ignition, he designed one, fitting very large points of the purest platinum, which, although expensive in the first place, never seemed to want adjusting or cleaning. The coil itself was as nearly perfect as possible, thus from the very first making the car reliable in a part in which, with most cars, there was endless trouble.

The two friends took the Royce car on its very first run through Wales. ‘During the whole three days’ trial we never had a stop of any sort from any fault of the car, a pretty good performance for a car designed by a man who had never designed one before; yet only what you could expect from one designed by Mr. Royce.’8

Royce’s building methods clearly differed from those of other manufacturers, and this helped to achieve a high level of reliability. One example is the use of bolts where other manufacturers used rivets. These are mushroom-shaped pieces of steel used to fasten heavily stressed brackets such as spring hangers to the chassis, which is the long steel frame supporting the body. A hole is drilled in each piece and a red-hot rivet is pushed through the two holes. The ‘stalk’ of the mushroom is then hammered over, fastening the two pieces when the rivet cools. Here is Ernest Wooler, who had served as an apprentice under Royce in 1904:

I remember Royce carefully explaining to me as a child how a hot rivet never filled a hole when it cooled. A cold rivet was punishing the metal too much. So we made taper bolts fitted perfectly in a hand-reamed hole. It is such details that explain the difference between Rolls-Royce and other cars …9

This story contains Royce’s philosophy in a nutshell: take workmanship to the highest possible level. A nut on a tapered bolt could always be tightened if the bracket became loose. This small detail could become of vital importance. However, it would cost much more to make. One of Henry Royce’s remarks that seems to define his work was this: ‘The quality will remain long after the price is forgotten.’

Another example: as the first car neared completion it was noticed that the front axle (a long bar of steel carrying the wheels) was out of alignment by half an inch. One of Royce’s workers bent the axle without first heating it up red-hot, but then received a stinging rebuke from Royce, denouncing his work as ‘foul practice’. It would, he said, weaken the metal. The axle was scrapped.

That first car was for Royce’s own personal use, and a second was built for the more sceptical Claremont. There was a third such prototype, and these three cars were named the Royce 10. They still had only two cylinders, but Royce’s meticulous balancing made it virtually vibration-free. His work on the valve gear quietened what was usually a clattering cacophony, he fitted a large exhaust silencer and eliminated every other source of vibration and rattle. The result was an exceptionally smooth, quiet car that contrasted with the others on the market. This is what so seduced Charles Rolls.

It has been said that the influence of the Honourable Charles Stewart Rolls upon the company that bore his name was negligible. After all, he had clearly lost interest in the partnership just six years after his meeting with Henry Royce, and for half of that time he was keener on flying balloons and aeroplanes than on selling motor cars. Some purists call their cars ‘Royces’, regarding this as a truer indication of their origin.10 However, as we will see he brought a vital quality to Rolls-Royce Ltd, a quality the company has always traded on: prestige.

When – and if – Henry Royce delivered that telegram celebrating the birth of his future business partner, he must have felt the Rolls family was a long way from his own social stratum. Three out of four people living in Britain at the time worked as cash-in-hand tradesmen like the young Henry Royce, many of them employed as factory workers, shopkeepers and mechanics. And most aristocratic families like the Rollses would have a house in the town and one in the country, employing a large domestic staff of butlers, housemaids and cooks to maintain the household. What the Hon. Rolls was going to give Royce was access to a large number of aristocratic and wealthy customers for the Best Car in the World.

The Rolls family’s fortune had been made by a dairy farmer ancestor who had bought up both sides of the Old Kent Road for property development. He married shrewdly in 1767 and thus expanded his land ownership into other parts of London. His wife Sarah also brought estates in Monmouthshire which enabled him to become High Sheriff. His son, however, did what sons often do and gambled a fortune away in the 1790s. The press, with some glee, reported that a ‘dashing Cow-Keeper’s son in the Kent Road has, during the past summer, been pigeoned of near £60,000’. That’s well over £8 million today. The family recovered their fortunes and Charles’s father, John Allan Rolls, was raised to the peerage as Baron Llangattock of the Hendre. His London estates housed 60,000 of the working classes and brought in millions of pounds. The Duke and Duchess of York (later King George V and Queen Mary) stayed with Lord and Lady Llangattock at the Hendre in 1900, and Charles took them on motor-car excursions, probably the first time that the royal couple had been in a car.

At Eton Charles showed a precocious interest in engines, earning the sobriquet ‘Dirty Rolls’ (at least we hope it was for the engines). He decided to go in for a life as a professional engineer, and we have already noted how unusual this would be, particularly for the son of a lord. He installed a dynamo and lighting at the Hendre, his parents’ house in Monmouthshire, and he demonstrated a great deal of practical ability. Later on this may have endeared him to Henry Royce. When they met, Rolls was the better qualified by education (a Cambridge BA in Mechanical Sciences) and eight years of practical experience of buying, racing and selling foreign motor cars. Royce himself had no higher-level engineering or scientific education, but nor did other pioneers: Wilhelm Maybach, Ferdinand Porsche and Ettore Bugatti. This may have set them free in the new discipline. A close friend, Moore-Brabazon of Tara, later Lord Brabazon, described Rolls at this time:

Charlie Rolls was the strangest of men and one of the most loveable. He was tall and rather thin, and his eyes stood out of their sockets rather more than is normal. He was rather fond of a Norfolk jacket … and always wore a very high, stiff, white collar … While motoring he would turn his cap back to front … Incidentally, he was a snob, too: the way he used his superb powers of salesmanship to float early Rolls-Royce cars on the aristocracy of England left every other firm an ‘also ran’.11

Rolls was at first fascinated by the speed of cycle racing, but he soon switched to motor cars when they started to appear. He wasn’t particularly academic, and he had to attend a private crammer to get him into Cambridge. However he made sure he was the first undergraduate to go up to Cambridge by car, and indeed he was probably the first owner of a car based in that town. He undertook a pioneer drive, the first from London to Cambridge, which he completed overnight with a companion in 12 hours, an average speed of 4.5 mph (7 km/h). On the way, while walking in front of the car with the obligatory red lantern, he encountered a policeman at two o’clock in the morning. To speed them up a little he invited the officer on board and they continued on their way at 20 miles an hour, the policeman holding on in terror until the engine overheated. Rolls used the Cambridge University Engineering Laboratories to work on his cars: first a 3¾ hp Peugeot Phaeton, then two motorised tricycles; a De Dion and a Bollee. Foreign-made cars were still ahead of anything being made in Britain.

Rolls’s biographer, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, did not seem to like him much, citing monomania, meanness and a ‘banana-skin-type of humour’. He recalled a jibe from a hansom cabby, reins in hand, who yelled ‘Old iron!’ at Rolls’s car as he thundered past. ‘Take it home and eat it,’ retorted Rolls (quite a well-judged reply, in fact). Montagu makes a good case for him as a visionary who contributed hugely to the progress of the motor car and aeroplane in British society. Once the revolution of the motor car was channelled into the evolutionary progress of his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, Rolls switched his attention to aeroplanes.

As for his character, Rolls was clearly courageous and determined. It’s hard to believe as we drive our air-bagged safety machines of today, but early motor cars were extremely dangerous: an accident usually meant serious injury to driver and passengers. And an aircraft accident was usually fatal. Our modern cars evolved at breakneck speed thanks to men like the young Charles Rolls. Between 1894 and 1914 cars developed from motorised horse-drawn carriages to 120 mph (193 km/h) racing machines. We might think our present-day computer industry is developing fast, but consider this: engines grew from single cylinders to 12 cylinders, from sidevalve asthmatic wheezers to double-overhead-camshaft four-valve deep-breathers, from solid axles to air suspension, two-wheel braking to four-wheel braking, and maximum speeds from 12 mph to 120 mph (19 to 193 km/h). Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in a computer doubles about every two years, and car technology during those hectic years raced along at much the same rate of progress.

The Hon. C. S. Rolls was at the forefront, participating in every car trial he could, goggles strapped to his face, cap on backwards, thundering ahead of a column of dust, screwing the maximum out of lethal machines. It’s hardly surprising that he had a taste for Wagner. But he wasn’t just gung-ho; his mechanical sensitivity enabled a rare relationship with his machines. Lord Montagu said of him: ‘everyone who rode with Rolls testifies to the quickness of his reactions, and to the sensation that he was at one with his steed.’ He won the Automobile Club Gold Medal for best amateur performance in the Thousand Mile Reliability Trial and was fastest of three British drivers in the 1905 Gordon Bennett race in the Auvergne, France, the ancestor of the Grand Prix. The engines became more powerful, and the cars faster and faster.

The rest of the technology, the suspension and the brakes, struggled to keep up with the pace and the power. Contemporary roads were nothing more than muddy cart tracks studded with tyre-puncturing horseshoe nails. One racing 1910 Vauxhall with suspension unrestrained by effective dampers encountered a stretch of road surface at such a high speed that the road-bump spacing coincided with the natural frequency of the body bouncing on the springs. The resulting resonance caused the size of the bounces to increase to such an extent that the whole car leapt up in the air, jumped over a hedge and crashed upside down into a field.

In Britain motor cars drove on the left as the Romans had before them. (The evidence for this has been found at a Roman quarry near Swindon. The left-hand set of grooves in the road leading down and away from the quarry were much deeper than the grooves leading up to it, suggesting that the heavily laden carts were leaving on the left.) There’s another good reason for driving on the left, which is that when leading a horse it is done with the left hand, keeping the right hand free for a stick (or a weapon). You would also want to walk along the middle, drier part of the cambered road, and so you would probably choose to walk the horse on the left side of the road. In the year 1300, Pope Boniface VIII directed pilgrims to keep left, and Italian cities had left-hand-driving traffic until Rome made the change on 1 March 1925 and Milan on 3 August 1926.

Brakes were virtually non-existent, and Rolls had trouble with slowing down. He had graduated from Cambridge in that same year of 1898 with a degree in Mechanical and Applied Science, and started on a career in engineering. But he wasn’t a designer, more of a pioneering driver and adventurer. Lord Montagu described one jaunt:

He determined to celebrate Christmas by driving down from South Lodge to the Hendre in the Peugeot. To moderns, to embark on such an adventure in winter with primitive brakes which overheated at the least provocation appears sheer lunacy … such pneumatic tyres as were available were treadless and thus incapable of any degree of grip. Anti-freeze was unknown, and one thawed out one’s cooling system by lighting fires under the car.

On this journey Rolls had to negotiate the steep hill down the Cotswold Edge at Birdlip, which has a gradient of 1 in 6 (16 per cent).

Birdlip all but proved their Waterloo. The side-brake expired on the steepest part of the hill, while the foot-brake linkage bent under the constant pressure, and the pedal went flat to the floor, leaving the Peugeot careering downhill towards a light which appeared to be a vehicle in the road, but was fortunately a lantern in a cottage window. They narrowly missed heaps of stones but reached the foot of the hill in safety.12

(I attempted to emulate Rolls’s brakeless descent of Birdlip Hill just after writing this section. It proved impossible to descend the 1.1-mile-long hill without applying the brakes to remain within the speed limit, and on my second try a wheel hit an Edwardian-sized pothole and burst the tyre. I take my cap off to him.)

Rolls’s troubles weren’t over. The next morning as he bent down to wind the starting handle ‘the clutch pedal jammed down, and he had the humiliation of being run over by his own car. He was unhurt, but his companion was so thunderstruck that he made no attempt to arrest the Peugeot’s wild career, and it rammed a dog-cart, which Rolls had to repair before going on his way’!13

The death toll of animals killed by the new motor cars on quiet country roads was startling: Charles Rolls’s tally on just one day was two dogs, a suckling pig and four chickens. On another occasion he reported that he came around a corner with his constant-speed engine and negligible brakes only to meet a butcher’s cart. The frantic horse bolted and overturned the cart, ‘scattering various spare parts of animals about the road’.

One can imagine that the attitude of the wealthy owners did not endear them to the rustic owners of slaughtered livestock, if indeed they bothered to stop at all. Cathcart Wason, MP decried motor cars as ‘those slaughtering, stinking engines of iniquity’ and in return Lord Montagu, writing in 1966, refers to the ‘thick-headed drivers of horsed vehicles and stubborn cyclists’. His description of his rural fellow countrymen as ‘the peasantry’ is surely one of the last uses of the word in non-ironic form.

It is hard to imagine the heady excitement of motor-car driving in those pioneer days, but Kenneth Grahame captures it for us in The Wind in the Willows. Toad, Ratty and Mole are strolling down a country lane when:

… far behind them they heard a faint warning hum; like the drone of a distant bee. Glancing back, they saw a small cloud of dust, with a dark centre of energy, advancing on them at incredible speed, while from out the dust a faint ‘Poop-poop!’ wailed like an uneasy animal in pain. Hardly regarding it, they turned to resume their conversation, when in an instant (as it seemed) the peaceful scene was changed, and with a blast of wind and a whirl of sound that made them jump for the nearest ditch, it was on them! The ‘Poop-poop’ rang with a brazen shout in their ears, they had a moment’s glimpse of an interior of glittering plate-glass and rich morocco, and the magnificent motor-car, immense, breath-snatching, passionate, with its pilot tense and hugging his wheel, possessed all earth and air for the fraction of a second, flung an enveloping cloud of dust that blinded and enwrapped them utterly, and then dwindled to a speck in the far distance, changed back into a droning bee once more.

Ratty and Mole are stunned and outraged, but Toad decides at once to buy one of these machines:

They reached the carriage-drive of Toad Hall to find, as Badger had anticipated, a shiny new motor-car, of great size, painted a bright red (Toad’s favourite colour), standing in front of the house. As they neared the door it was flung open, and Mr. Toad, arrayed in goggles, cap, gaiters, and enormous overcoat, came swaggering down the steps, drawing on his gauntleted gloves.14

To Kenneth Grahame the typical motor-car owner of the time was like Toad of Toad Hall, a vulgar, spoilt, loud and boastful creature who has inherited riches from his father. Motor cars changed rural England for ever, and not for the better.

After his passion for motor cars, Rolls fell in love with ballooning, a particularly Edwardian sport involving coal gas and not hot air as a lifting medium. Rolls had his usual set of aristocratic friends with him on these jaunts. Lord Montagu said of this sport: ‘Even at its zenith, ballooning had some insurmountable limitations. A balloon could only start its voyage from the vicinity of the gas works, and thus participants in “balloon house-parties” had to desert the drawing room for the less salubrious atmosphere of the local gas company’s premises …’15

One can only begin to imagine their discomfort.

‘… One of the advantages of a feudal society was, of course, the ease with which gas companies acceded to the use of their facilities.’ Some of the toffs landed in insalubrious surroundings, too, such as Princess Vittoria de Teano, who landed next to a gypsy encampment but was kindly invited to partake of their gin. The Princess Teano was not used to slumming it:

… imagine her horror when on going to a reception given by the Duchess of Sutherland she was told that the honoured guest of the evening was Lina Cavalieri, the singer. Now all Rome knows that ‘La Cavalieri’ began her career by selling flowers at the doors of the theatres and concert halls in Rome. Donna Vittoria described how embarrassed she was; but she soon recovered her presence of mind and immediately left the house, remarking that she was not accustomed to meeting such persons. She afterward understood that King Edward, having heard of the incident, had said that she was perfectly right.16

This is the milieu the Hon. C. S. Rolls inhabited, and he milked it for all it was worth. On another balloon outing the press was transported in no less a vehicle than AX 201, the original Silver Ghost, which thus received the accolade of ‘a splendid racing motor car’ from the Times newspaper. Dirty Rolls always had an eye for a sale.

Charles Rolls said to Edmunds on their train journey to Manchester that he would like his name to be synonymous with excellence, like Broadwood pianos or Chubb safes. In that he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. When the cars are spoken of today most of the public (other than the Royce purists) refer to ‘the Rolls’. In 1902 he had started a car-sales company with Claude Johnson (later to be known as ‘the hyphen in Rolls-Royce’). The company of C. S. Rolls & Co. would be selling only the best-quality cars to the wealthy motorist. Because of the inhibiting effects of the Locomotion Acts there were few British cars of quality – perhaps only Daimler and Napier might be recognised today. Rolls therefore sold mostly French cars to his wealthy and aristocratic friends, but they weren’t particularly reliable.

One day the previous year of 1901 he was driving a French car that developed mechanical trouble. He pulled up outside a bicycle repair shop in Reading just before closing time and asked for advice and tools. The owner said he was closing up for the night and couldn’t help. However, a 16-year-old young lad who worked at the shop, one Ernest Hives, approached Rolls and asked if he could help. He got to work and soon fixed the problem. Rolls was impressed and asked the lad if he would like to come to London to be his personal mechanic. Ernest ran home to ask his mother, got permission, jumped into the car and accompanied Rolls back to his home in London. This was a fortunate meeting for the whole country, because Hives was thus serving as Rolls’s mechanic when Rolls met Royce two years later. He became Royce’s right-hand man at Derby, and as works manager he pushed through the production of the Merlin engine during the war. In 1941 he decided ‘to go all out for the gas turbine’, ensuring Rolls-Royce’s leading role in developing jet engines for civil and military aviation. He then became Chairman of Rolls-Royce Ltd and ultimately Lord Hives. Such was the curiously stratified yet meritocratic nature of English society at the time. What an extraordinary life, all contingent upon a fault in a car and a mother’s quick decision.

When Rolls met Royce he had been looking for a British-built replacement for the French-built Panhards and Peugeots he had been selling to his acquaintances. He deplored the lack of British manufacturers and was on the lookout for a suitable car. What he found at Royce’s was a revelation. Although he disliked two-cylindered engines, and had been looking for a three- or four-cylindered car, the smooth running of the two-cylindered Royce convinced him that here was a car he could sell under his own name.

The first Royce was not large by modern standards, with four solid-spoked wheels, a radiator in front with a flat top (not the later pent-roof Rolls-Royce design), a small engine, a dashboard, a round steering wheel (tiller steering had fallen out of favour) and leather bucket seats for driver and passenger.

Rolls was so enthusiastic about the Royce car that when he returned to London he is said to have hauled his business partner Claude Johnson out of bed, telling him: ‘I have found the best engineer in the world!’

Arrangements were quickly made for C. S. Rolls & Company to sell the entire output of cars from Royce Ltd. Several new models were produced, a 15 hp three-cylinder, a 20 hp four-cylinder and a 30 hp six-cylinder. This last engine proved problematic, and the solution to that problem led indirectly to the reliability and long life of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine.

Rolls had been insistent that a six-cylinder model was included in the Rolls-Royce range, as their rivals, especially Napier, were adding them to their ranges. D. Napier was a well-established precision-engineering company, but in the numerous uncritical hagiographies of Rolls-Royce the authors give Napier rather a raw deal. The Acton-based company had made cars before Rolls-Royce, and Charles Rolls had acted as riding mechanic on a racing Napier on the Paris–Toulouse–Paris race of 1900, buying a 50 hp model the following year. Napier seemed always to be the talented poorer cousins of Rolls-Royce, and it could be argued that they made the best British aero engines of their day in the shape of the Lion and the Sabre, but they never prospered in the long shadow of the Derby company. Napier had announced a six-cylinder engine in 1903, becoming the first manufacturer to make a commercially successful six. It was described as a ‘remarkably smooth and flexible’ car, and Napier were the first to use the expression ‘The Best Car in the World’ before Rolls-Royce used the slogan. Presumably the thought had crossed Charles Rolls’s mind that he might like to buy the Napier company, too. Or might he have wondered if he could start a company, which like Napier, could build six-cylindered cars?

And so, at Rolls’s request Henry Royce built a six-cylindered engine. It was made up of three separately cast two-cylinder units in a line above the crankshaft, which therefore had to be long. It was rather like three of Royce’s two-cylinder 10 hp engines in a row, but unlike them it kept breaking its crankshaft at a particular rate of revolutions. To his consternation three of the six-cylinder engines broke their crankshafts in early 1906.

Broken crankshafts would prove to be a problem for many makers of six-cylinder engines, including Mercedes, for whom this problem would persist for some time. Other manufacturers even had to give up making their ‘sixes’. But Henry Royce realised that the problem lay in treating the engine as three two-cylindered engines. As we saw with the Wright brothers’ six-cylindered engine, as each cylinder fired it imparted a slight twist to the crankshaft, rather like winding a spring. Like any other spring it would resent this treatment and respond by rapidly unwinding in the other direction. Unfortunately, at certain crankshaft rotational speeds this winding and unwinding could overlap with the crankshaft’s natural resonant frequency, and increase (rather like the bouncing Vauxhall we met earlier). In a six-cylindered engine these frequencies were close to the long crankshaft’s natural frequency, and at certain engine speeds these torsional vibrations set up in the long, spindly crankshaft grew worse and worse until the poor thing snapped like a carrot and the engine clanked to a stop. This would be inconvenient if fitted in a car, potentially fatal in an aeroplane.

Henry Royce in his typical fashion puzzled over this matter until he realised that if he treated the engine as two of his three-cylindered engines in mirror image he could solve the problem and achieve smooth running. Royce arranged matters so that the piston no. 1 mirrored no. 6 – both reached the top or bottom of their stroke at the same time. In the same way no. 2 mirrored no. 5, and no. 3 mirrored no. 4. The firing order was such that there was a bang every 120° of rotation. It is worth pointing out that this was nothing new: Napier had already figured out how to make a successful six-cylindered engine. But Royce’s pièce de résistance was a completely new invention, contrary to the usual view of him. It was the harmonic or vibration damper, which was a sort of flexibly mounted small flywheel attached to the front end of the crankshaft and which damped out vibrations at the critical speeds. Everything smoothed out. Royce made this crankshaft slipper (friction) vibration damper for his 1906 30 hp model; however, he didn’t patent it.17 Interestingly, the Wrights eventually offered a ‘flexible flywheel drive’ on their six, which did much the same job and suggests that the bush telegraph was working well.

When the decision was made shortly afterwards to produce just one model, the six-cylinder 40/50, Royce used the same mirror-image layout for the cylinders and made the crankshaft much beefier, with a large centre main bearing to suppress any carrot-snapping tendencies. The crankshaft had seven main bearings in total and full-pressure lubrication to all bearing surfaces. The result of all this was the world-famous smoothness and silence of the Rolls-Royce engine, which was largely due to Henry Royce’s mastery of the six-cylinder engine. It was this engine that formed the basis of the Rolls-Royce Eagle aircraft engine, doubled up to a V12 layout and enlarged to over 20 litres. In his typical style he had taken the best engine of the best car in the world and made it better, in fact good enough to be an aircraft engine.

Rolls emphasised his own name in the initial advertising. The 1905 catalogue mentioned Royce Ltd as the manufacturer of the car only on page 3: ‘Works, Manchester’, and while there were biographies and photographs of Rolls and his partner Johnson there was no mention of Henry Royce. However, Rolls did work hard, and took Royce chassis and engines to the Paris salon in December 1904. Incidentally it may surprise modern readers to learn that car manufacturers only supplied the chassis, wheels, brakes, suspension, engine and transmission. The bodies were built by traditional horse-drawn carriage builders such as Barkers, Rolls-Royce’s preferred builder. Rolls-Royce did not provide their own bodywork until early 1946.

The reviews of the 10 hp car were glowing, and the one thing they all commented on was the silent running:

… never before have I been in a car which made so little noise, vibrated so little, ran so smoothly … indeed, the conclusion I reached then and there was that the car was too silent and too ghost-like to be safe. That the engine could be set running while the car was at rest without any noise or vibration perceptible to the occupants of the car was good; that the car in motion should overtake numerous wayfarers without their giving any indication of their having heard it, so that the horn had frequently to be called into use, was almost carrying excellence too far.18

(Note that the car was described as ‘ghost-like’. This could have been the inspiration for the later Silver Ghost label.)

A gold medal was awarded at the Paris salon. The cars were a success! Royce was delighted to hear that the prospective buyers were impressed by the silent running, and worked even harder: ‘… it is only fair to add that he drove no one harder than himself. In order to solve one particularly knotty problem he did not leave the works for three days and nights, his only rest being a few hours’ sleep on a bench.’

Rolls worked at promoting the cars, too. When the headmaster of Eton retired, Rolls suggested to fellow old Etonians that a Rolls-Royce would be an appropriate leaving present. He was one of the founders of the Motor Volunteer Corps of the Army and proved the value of the newfangled motor cars to the British Army by taking the Duke of Connaught for a trial drive along the south coast. The Duke was one of Queen Victoria’s sons and Commander-in-Chief of the British land forces: once again Rolls was using his connections. This jaunt would eventually lead to the Rolls-Royce Armoured Car, as used by Lawrence of Arabia. In March 1906 Rolls-Royce was set up as a company, and Rolls travelled to the United States to promote the cars.

However, he had an ulterior motive: to meet the Wright brothers. Rolls was by then hooked on a new craze: aeroplane flying. In 1909 he bought a Wright Flyer Model A aircraft, made more than 200 flights, and by 1910 he was the best-known aviator in the country. He made arrangements with Royce to cease his day-to-day commitments to their company. Rolls then became the first man to make a non-stop double crossing of the English Channel by plane, taking 95 minutes. He became a national hero. But he crashed his Wright Flyer at Southbourne on 12 July 1910, during the first International Aviation Meeting in Great Britain, and was killed outright – the first Briton to die in a powered aircraft accident. Henry Royce was devastated.

Charles Rolls had been a visionary. He correctly forecast the universal acceptance of the car, constantly advocating a small cheap runabout for the average family. He instinctively knew how to build the prestige brand of Rolls-Royce, encouraging Royce to go upmarket with six-cylinders and the 40/50. Once the revolution of the motor car was channelled into the evolutionary progress of his Silver Ghost, he switched his attention to aeroplanes, and he planned to build an aero engine. His prophecies for the future of the aeroplane were accurate, including the techniques of aerial bombing, which was the eventual reason for the Merlin engine. His reservations on the subject of airships were proved right, and even his biographer failed to acknowledge his influence on recreational ballooning. Sceptics might scoff at his title and his privileges, but the new cult of the internal combustion engine needed a pacesetter in Britain, and Rolls was the golden boy of both motoring and aviation. Without him Royce might never have found someone to promote his little two-cylinder cars and he would probably have returned to making electric cranes. Without Rolls the Rolls-Royce Merlin probably would never have been built, and maybe the Battle of Britain never won.

Let’s give the last word on the Hon. C. S. Rolls to Lord Montagu:

In 1870, he would have been dismissed as an aristocratic dabbler, a by-product of the eccentric squirearchy; lack of funds would have frustrated him in 1930: while in our present times his birth and education alone would involve cries of ‘privilege’ from ‘the dotty left’. The age of the internal-combustion engine needed a central figure, and in Britain this central figure was Rolls.

Chapter Six

The Best Car in the World

The Rolls-Royce 40/50 ‘Silver Ghost’. Possibly the most valuable car in the world. (Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images)

The Rolls-Royce 40/50 ‘Silver Ghost’ was described as the ‘Best Car in the World’, an epithet bestowed on it by the magazine Autocar in 1907:

The running of this car at slow speeds is the smoothest thing we have experienced while for the silence the engine beneath the bonnet might be a silent sewing machine … at whatever speed this car is being driven on its direct third, there is no engine as far as sensation goes, nor are one’s auditory nerves troubled driving or standing by a fuller sound than emanates from an eight day clock. There is no realisation of driving propulsion; the feeling as the passenger sits either at the front or the back of the vehicle is one of being wafted through the landscape.

The chassis was originally called the 40/50 and the power output was a rather relaxed 48 hp from just over 7 litres of capacity (the current Rolls-Royce Phantom V12 car develops 563 hp from 6.75 litres).

We have seen that the term ‘horsepower’ requires caution: it depends on the size of the horse. Early cars in Britain were taxed on a formula called RAC horsepower. It did not reflect the actual measured horsepower but was calculated by a formula including cylinder-bore size, number of cylinders and notional efficiency. Cars were commonly named for their taxable horsepower, such as the Austin Seven and the Riley Nine. The name ‘Rolls-Royce 40/50’ referred firstly to the taxable horsepower, 40, and the measured horsepower, 50. The unintended consequence of this foolish law was that manufacturers were obliged to design engines with pinchingly narrow bores and ludicrously long strokes. They were then stuck with inefficient sidevalves instead of overhead valves, which needed larger bores, setting back the design of British cars by 40 years. Exported British cars with asthmatic long-stroke engines blew up on the freeways of the USA, while short-stroke VW Beetles from Germany (which had a more intelligent fiscal law) rattled along for ever. And at one point the British led the world in diesel-engine technology, but this advantage was lost as a result of the heavy tax imposed on diesel fuel in the budget of 1938. Such was, and is, the scientific grasp of British politicians.

The gentle state of tune of the Rolls-Royce 40/50 made the engine delightfully flexible, and the ability to drive almost everywhere in top gear was of great importance to Edwardian motorists, many of whom could not manage the ‘crash’ gearboxes of the day and were unable to change gear on the move.

The chassis was built at first at Royce’s Manchester works, then production moved to a new factory at Derby, attracted by low rates offered by the town council.

The chassis of the 40/50 retailed at £985, and a suitable body could cost a further £110 14s, a staggering total which could have bought a house. The first customer was William Arkwright of Sutton Scarsdale Hall, Derbyshire, a descendant of Richard Arkwright, one of the founders of the Industrial Revolution. Initial sales were slow due to the high asking price. Claude Johnson realised that excellent though the new model was, it needed to be brought to public attention if the newly floated Rolls-Royce Ltd was to succeed. Johnson had an unerring eye for publicity. He used to balance a glass of water on the bonnet of the new 40/50 while the engine was taken up to 1,600 revolutions per minute, and not a drop would be spilt. He would also balance a penny on the end of the chassis and the penny would remain where it was. He then had an even better idea. He persuaded the factory to build a special ‘demonstrator’. This was chassis no. 60551, the twelfth 40/50 to be made. An open-topped Roi-des-Belges (King of the Belgians) body by Barker was fitted, which was specially finished in aluminium paint with silver-plated fittings. On the dashboard was a plaque with the name that Claude Johnson had chosen: ‘Silver Ghost’. This actual car, registration number AX 201, features largely in Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines. It is now considered the world’s most valuable car, and is insured for around $35 million.

Silver Ghost was a name that would resound down the years in the Rolls-Royce hall of fame, a name that at first referred to that particular car but eventually became applied to all 40/50s. What’s in a name? In the 1960s a new model of Rolls-Royce was about to be launched, called ‘Silver Mist’ to commemorate its illustrious ancestor, when the marketing department realised to their horror that ‘Mist’ meant ‘dung’ in German. The name was speedily changed to Silver Shadow. In this the car nearly joined the glorious pantheon of unfortunate car names such as the Studebaker Dictator (built in 1933), the Chevrolet Nova (‘it doesn’t go’ in Spanish), and the Buick LaCrosse, which in Québécois slang means ‘masturbator’. Not to mention the Mazda Titan Dump and the enigmatic Tarpan Honker. But ‘What’s in a name?’ asked Juliet. ‘That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.’

Going so far upmarket meant that the only individuals who could afford a 40/50 Silver Ghost were royalty, dictators and the very wealthy. And ‘behind every great fortune lies a great crime’, as Balzac tells us.1 The Roi-des-Belges, or tulip phaeton, body might have appealed to the royal market, as the style began with a 1901 Panhard commissioned by Queen Victoria’s cousin Leopold II of Belgium: the Roi des Belges himself. The style of tulip-shaped seats was suggested by Leopold’s mistress, Cléo de Mérode, a dancer who was aged 22 when she met the king, then aged 61. (Leopold obviously lacked the scruples of Princess Teano, who wouldn’t remain in the same room as a dancer.)

Leopold founded and exploited the Congo Free State as his own personal business venture. Forced labour, punishment amputations, torture and murder were perpetrated upon the 20 million Africans under his rule, 10 million of whom died, according to Mark Twain. Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) describes the apocalypse that descended on the Congo under Leopold, and Roi-des-Belges also happened to be the name of the Belgian riverboat that Conrad commanded on the upper Congo in 1889. As the Roi-des-Belges body had no roof, the blood-soaked Leopold and his mistress du jour could be admired by the populace as he was chauffeured around the boulevards of Brussels.

Bolshevik royalty also enjoyed luxury cars. Vladimir Lenin’s Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost was purchased on 11 July 1922. Because of Moscow’s deep winter snows the car was fitted with caterpillar tracks at the rear and skis on the front wheels, so that the dictator could be driven from his Gorki mansion to the Kremlin. His chauffeur was Adolphe Kégresse, formerly Tsar Nicholas II’s personal driver (the Tsar had two Silver Ghosts). Lenin’s crimes were many; when famine swept his native Volga region in 1891, killing 400,000 peasants, he propagandised against charitable relief efforts from America because the spectacle of death might prove a ‘progressive factor’ in weakening the Romanovs. Stalin and Brezhnev also owned Rolls-Royces. Wherever history was being made there seemed to be a Rolls-Royce parked around the corner.

In India, the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, then the richest man in the world, ordered a Silver Ghost state limousine with a raised throne on gold mounts with four collapsible seats for attendants.* He died at the age of 45 before it was delivered.

Claude Johnson, the marketing genius of Rolls-Royce, had asked for a new radiator to be designed to be more in keeping with the company’s new upmarket image, and it proved to be another success, surviving up to the present day as the face of the company. At first sight it looks like a chrome-plated Greek temple, but there is more to it than that. Like the facets of the portico of the Parthenon it imitates, the flat faces of the Rolls-Royce radiator are slightly curved to give the illusion of straightness. There are no straight lines on the Parthenon, and even the columns are not straight along their vertical axes but swell in the middle. This ‘entasis’ is intended to counteract the optical effect in which columns with straight sides appear to the eye to be more slender in their middle – to have a waist. The ancient Greeks were masters of perspective. Without entasis the Rolls-Royce radiator would have the appearance of a chromium grin.

The Rolls-Royce radiator is also a triumph of iconography. ‘The composition of the radiator’, observed Professor Erwin Panofsky, ‘sums up, as it were, twelve centuries of Anglo-Saxon preoccupations and aptitudes: it conceals an admirable piece of engineering behind a majestic Palladian front; but this Palladian front is surmounted by the wind-blown “Silver Lady” in whom art nouveau is infused with the spirit of unmitigated Romanticism.’2 Panofsky traces Inigo Jones’s introduction of Palladian Classicism to the facades of stately homes such as Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House. The aristocrat being driven by his servant in a Rolls-Royce would feel as though he was being preceded by his own front door.

In 1910 there was a brief craze for bonnet mascots, and Johnson decided to have one designed for his classic radiator. He asked the sculptor Charles Robinson Sykes to design an ornament conveying ‘the spirit of the Rolls-Royce, namely, speed with silence, absence of vibration, the mysterious harnessing of great energy and a beautiful living organism of superb grace’. The grimly pragmatic Henry Royce objected that the mascot interfered with the driver’s view. Sykes had already sculpted a mascot for Lord Montagu’s 1909 Silver Ghost. His model was allegedly Eleanor (Nellie) Thornton, Montagu’s secretary and secret mistress, and the figurine held one finger to her lips to symbolise their secret love affair. It was dubbed The Whisperer, and when Sykes received his commission for The Spirit of Ecstasy the model was once again Thornton. Nellie had a daughter by Montagu (whom she gave up for adoption), but she was drowned with hundreds of fellow passengers in 1915 when the SS Persia was torpedoed by U-boat U38. Lord Montagu survived the sinking.

Claude Johnson’s ‘Silver Ghost’ demonstrator was prepared for a crack at a world record: the non-stop reliability run. A team of drivers, including Johnson and Rolls, drove the car with the press aboard on the course of the Scottish Reliability Trials, and they broke record after record.

What was it like to drive? As you climb aboard you notice a large, cranked windscreen with a view over the bonnet which makes it look surprisingly short. The Grecian radiator constantly reminds you that you are driving a Rolls-Royce. On top of the unsupported upright steering column is a big four-spoke wheel with a polished wooden rim. On that is a control cluster with two levers, labelled Fast/Slow and Early/Late, and the Governor. The plain-speaking Henry Royce thought that ‘early/late’, referring to the spark timing, was more understandable than the more usual ‘advance/retard’. A plate on the scuttle reads: ‘Rolls-Royce Ltd., London & Manchester’ and gives the car number as 551. The driver has a snake-like bulb-horn and the front passenger is also provided with a Desmo bulb-hooter, mounted outside below the left elbow. Outboard of the driver’s door, and between it and the spare tyre, are the silver-plated gear and brake levers. The gear gate is unusual, as 1st is forward and left but 2nd and 3rd positions are both down and back, then with a short movement forward into the overdrive top; reverse is between bottom and top. The handbrake operates the cable-applied rear-wheel brakes, which are fairly quiet. The footbrake is little used; it works on the transmission and is likely to bind in hot weather and lock the back wheels in a skid. The accelerator pedal is to the right of the brake, unusually for those days – it was often between the clutch and brake pedals. Beside the spare wheel there is a Cowley speedometer reading from 10 to 80 mph, with a little clock above it. The engine is idling silently.

When you drive off the Ghost will perhaps feel rather lorry-like, with a heavy clutch and the odd crunch of gears, but the flexible engine soon gets you up to 30 mph, which is a comfortable cruising speed even on main roads. The ride is surprisingly good. The passenger sits high in a comfortable leather armchair and has to maintain 1 lb fuel pressure with a vertical floor-mounted bicycle-like plated air pump, watching the gauge that reads to 4 lb/square inch. This needs constant attention, or else the engine will stop. Otherwise you glide along in silence. This is the best of Edwardian motoring.

Johnson collected a Gold Medal on his non-stop reliability run. Then the Silver Ghost continued on a journey between London and Glasgow 27 more times without stopping the engine except for Sundays, when the car was locked in a garage. After 15,000 miles had passed Johnson invited the RAC scrutineers to strip the engine and chassis down and advise on what parts had to be replaced to return the car to ‘as new’ condition. The engine was passed as perfect, but one or two parts of the steering had slight wear, and so did the joints in the magneto drive; altogether costing £2 2s 7d (about £250 in today’s terms). A private owner would not have needed to replace anything. This was a standard of reliability that far exceeded anything Rolls-Royce’s competition could manage, and Johnson made sure he broadcast their success everywhere. For a while the ‘Silver Ghost’ was the most famous car in the world. Not everyone was an admirer, though. Laurence Pomeroy of Vauxhall described the Rolls-Royce as a triumph of workmanship over design, by which he suggested they placed too much reliance on correcting errors that other manufacturers would have avoided in the first place. This was a criticism that could also be levelled at the Rolls-Royce Merlin.

The 40/50s were also used as rally cars. The Austrian Alpine Trial was an eight-day reliability run, known as the toughest rally in Europe and involving steep mountain passes. In 1912 a Silver Ghost was privately entered by James Radley, the pilot who had first reached Charles Rolls after his fatal crash at Bournemouth. Embarrassingly, its three-speed gearbox proved inadequate for the ascent of the Katschberg Pass, as Radley’s car ground to a halt and would only continue when two passengers got out and walked. The factory took this failure seriously and only one solution was possible if the car was to maintain its reputation. The Rolls-Royce perfectionism was brought into play and cars were sent out to the Alps to reconnoitre the passes. A factory team of four cars was prepared for the 1913 event with lower-ratio four-speed gearboxes with the engine power increased to 75 bhp. This time the passes were conquered:

The Rolls-Royces came past in great style, and I am bound to say that I have never seen anything as beautiful in the way of locomotion than the way in which they flew up the pass; we all know what a fast car is like on the level; but the sight of a group of cars running up a mountain road at high speed, with a superbly easy motion to which each little variation in the surface gave the semblance of a greyhound in its stride, was inspiring to a degree.3

This time Radley finished first in all the stages, and the team gained six awards including the Archduke Leopold Cup. Replicas of the victorious cars were put into production and sold officially as Continental models, but they were called Alpine Eagles by chief test driver (and later Rolls-Royce Managing Director) Ernest Hives. The whole experience also made Henry Royce wary of entering into competition.

There was competition in the marketplace, though. A new sleeve-valve engine was announced by the Daimler company which was said to be even quieter than the Silver Ghost’s engine. Johnson wrote: ‘It is quite difficult to know how far the new Daimler valveless engine is going to affect us. The engine is wonderfully silent.’ As we have seen, poppet valves look like pennies on a stick and are pushed down by the camshaft lobes to open the inlet and exhaust ports. In contrast to poppet valves the sleeve valve is an extra liner between the piston and the cylinder, like a tin can with no ends and with cut-out holes in the sides. These uncover bigger ports by quietly sliding up and down and side to side: the action you might employ to dry the inside of a beer glass with a dish towel. The sleeve valve required less maintenance and allowed a better-shaped combustion chamber, but higher initial cost and greater oil consumption limited the sleeve valve’s appeal to car manufacturers. It had a future, though, in Bristol and Napier Sabre aero engines.

* This was chassis number 2117, and the car’s total lifetime mileage was only 356.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.