Barnes Wallis

Sir Barnes Neville Wallis CBE FRS RDI FRAeS (26 September 1887 – 30 October 1979) was an English engineer and inventor. He is best known for inventing the bouncing bomb used by the Royal Air Force in Operation Chastise (the "Dambusters" raid) to attack the dams of the Ruhr Valley during World War II.

The raid was the subject of the 1955 film The Dam Busters, in which Wallis was played by Michael Redgrave. Among his other inventions were his version of the geodetic airframe and the earthquake bomb, including designs such as the Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs.

Barnes Wallis was born in Ripley, Derbyshire, to general practitioner Charles George Wallis (1859–1945) and his wife Edith Eyre (1859–1911), daughter of Rev. John Ashby. The Wallis family subsequently moved to New Cross, south London, living in "straitened, genteel circumstances" after Charles Wallis was crippled by polio in 1893. He was educated at Christ's Hospital in Horsham and Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham Boys' Grammar School^{[clarification needed]} in southeast London, leaving school at seventeen to start work in January 1905 at Thames Engineering Works at Blackheath, southeast London. He subsequently changed his apprenticeship to J. Samuel White's, the shipbuilders based at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. He originally trained as a marine engineer and in 1922 he took a degree in engineering via the University of London External Programme.

Wallis left J. Samuel White's in 1913 when an opportunity arose for him as an aircraft designer, at first working on airships and later aeroplanes. He joined Vickers – later part of Vickers-Armstrongs and then part of the British Aircraft Corporation – and worked for them until his retirement in 1971. There he worked on the Admiralty's first rigid airship HMA No. 9r under H. B. Pratt, helping to nurse it though its political stop-go career and protracted development. The first airship of his own design, the R80, incorporated many technical innovations and flew in 1920.

By the time he came to design the R100, the airship for which he is best known, in 1930 he had developed his revolutionary geodetic construction (also known as geodesic), which he applied to the gasbag framing. He also pioneered, along with John Edwin Temple, the use of light alloy and production engineering in the structural design of the R100. Nevil Shute Norway, later to become a writer under the name of Nevil Shute, was the chief calculator for the project, responsible for calculating the stresses on the frame.

Despite a better-than-expected performance and a successful return flight to Canada in 1930, the R100 was broken up following the crash near Beauvais in northern France of its "sister" ship, the R101 (which was designed and built by a team from the Air Ministry). The later destruction of the Hindenburg led to the abandonment of airships as a mode of mass transport.

By the time of the R101 crash, Wallis had moved to the Vickers aircraft factory at the Brooklands motor circuit and aerodrome between Byfleet and Weybridge in Surrey. The pre-war aircraft designs of Rex Pierson, the Wellesley, the Wellington and the later Warwick and Windsor all employed Wallis's geodetic design in the fuselage and wing structures.

The Wellington had one of the most robust airframes ever developed, and pictures of its skeleton largely shot away, but still sound enough to bring its crew home, are still impressive. The geodetic construction offered a light and strong airframe (compared to conventional designs), with clearly defined space within for fuel tanks, payload and so on. The technique was not easily transferred to other aircraft manufacturers, nor was Vickers able to build other designs in factories tooled for geodetic work.