By Air Commodore Bill Tyack slide SLIDE 2: The Royal ... · The main reason for this may have been...

Master 21 December 2016

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The Origins & History of the Royal Aeronautical Society By Air Commodore Bill Tyack Title Slide: Delighted to be here etc. Can you hear me? [Local connection, if appropriate, with slide] [Mention IOM commemorative stamps. Vincenzo Lunardi 15 September 1784; James Tytler, Edinburgh, 25 & 27 August 1784.] SLIDE 2: The Royal Aeronautical Society was founded in 1866 some 80 years after humans first took to the air in balloons and nearly 40 years before the Wright Brothers flew. Why was it formed then? There was no obvious event that stimulated its formation. The answer, I suggest, as in most things was the right combination of circumstances and people. SLIDE 3: So this evening I plan to describe the circumstances and people who founded the Society, then talk about the early activities and some of the notable people involved, while bringing the story up to date where appropriate. I will try to show the impact that the Society has had on the progress of flight. I did most of my research in the Society’s archives at the National Aerospace Library and I would like to thank Brian Riddle, the Chief Librarian, and Chris Male, the Publications Manager, for their help in finding material for the presentation. The lecture is nearly an hour long, so I had best get started SLIDE 4: The story starts long before 1866 with Sir George Cayley, who has rightly been called “The Father of Aeronautics”. Sir George, who was born in 1773, was a country squire living near Scarborough, in Yorkshire. He was an amazing man: a Member of Parliament, an educationalist who helped to found what is now Westminster University, and an engineering polymath, who designed, to name but a few: a self-righting lifeboat; a prosthetic arm; a gas-detection system for mines; an automatic signalling system for the railways; and the caterpillar track. However his greatest achievements were as an experimenter in aeronautics. In the 1790s, while still a young man, he was the first person to define the four forces


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that act on any object in flight: lift versus weight and thrust versus drag. In 1823 he designed and built a man-carrying glider that flew for 900 feet. The picture shows a replica flying 150 years later in 1973. SLIDE 5: Many of Cayley’s ideas and experiments are recorded in five small leather-bound notebooks that are held in the Society’s National Aerospace Library at Farnborough. In them he recorded his ideas and designs, his experiments, and his observations from nature, mostly concerning the flight of birds. The drawing on the right records the dimensions and weight of a swan while the lower drawing shows the dimensions of a trout, that Cayley recognised was perfectly streamlined. I had the great privilege in 2012 of showing the notebooks on the BBC Television Antiques Roadshow. The notebooks have been digitised and can be viewed on line via the Society’s website. SLIDE 6: Cayley experimented with a series of model gliders leading up to the full-size man-carrying glider of 1823. He used a whirling arm mechanism to determine the lift and drag of various shapes. (EXPLAIN) SLIDE 7: In 1850 he designed a powered aircraft that has all the essential characteristics that we would recognise today. Do not be misled by the rather crude nature of this general arrangement diagram. Cayley had calculated the masses involved, the surface area and angle of attack required to produce lift and the power required. He built and tested models of the gunpowder engine. He understood the need for separate lift and propulsion. He invented the tension spoke wheel to reduce weight. SLIDE 8: Some form of helicopter toy has been around for at least 600 years. However, Cayley refined and popularised it, and the Wright Brothers recorded that one of these toys, given to them by their father, was the thing that first interested them in flight. SLIDE 9: Cayley wrote extensively and he tried throughout the early 1800s to gain support to form a society that would take a scientific


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approach to flight. Pictured is his 1840 prospectus. However, he died in 1857 without achieving this ambition. But he had sowed the seed. SLIDE 10: I talked about the circumstances being right. So what was happening in 1866? In Britain, Queen Victoria had been on the throne for 29 years and her reign would last for a further 35 years. In London, the Metropolitan Fire Brigade was formed, but a cholera epidemic killed more than 5000 people. The Houses of Parliament were nearly complete. The Liberal Government fell over Parliamentary reform and, in consequence, there were violent demonstrations in Hyde Park. At the Oval, W G Grace scored 224 not out for All England versus Surrey just after his 18th birthday. SLIDE 11: In Europe, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and Prussia attacked Austria during the wars of expansion that would lead to a unified German state under Otto von Bismarck. Further afield, the SS Great Eastern laid the first successful trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. America was coming to terms with peace after the ending of the Civil War – the world’s first industrial war - in 1865. Can you see the Union balloon in the top left corner of this picture of the Battle of Fairoaks? Next year, in 1867, the first ship would sail through the Suez Canal. SLIDE 12: So it was a time of significant technical development. For some time engineers had been forming Institutions to provide a professional framework for their technological development. SLIDE 13: As a measure of the state of aviation at the time, Frenchman Henri Giffard had made a flight in a balloon powered by an steam engine in 1852. He covered 27 km in three hours and executed some manoeuvres, but was unable to return against the wind. Twenty years later Dupuy de Lome had similar success with a larger airship. It would be some 40 years until Count Zeppelin in Germany and the Lebaudy Brothers in France developed practical airships.


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SLIDE 14: And in Britain aeronautics, ballooning, the quest to fly was still not regarded as a serious scientific or technical pursuit as indicated by this quotation from the first Council meeting of the Society. Can you all read this? – if not read from screen.

‘‘The first application of the balloon as a means of ascending into the upper regions of the atmosphere, has been almost within the recollections of men now living; but, with the exception of some early experimenters, it has scarcely occupied the attention of scientific men, nor has the subject of Aeronautics been properly recognised as a distinct branch of science . . . The main reason for this may have been that, from the very commencement, balloons have been, with but few exceptions, employed for exhibition or for the purpose of public entertainment and, the first wonder having ceased, sundry performances have been resorted to in order to pander to the public taste for the grotesque and the hazardous . . . ‘‘ SLIDE 15: But things were changing. In 1862 the British Association for the Advancement of Science (founded in 1831) decided to commission a series of high altitude balloon flights to measure the characteristics of the upper atmosphere. The chosen pilot was Henry Coxwell, a noted professional balloonist, and the scientific observer was James Glaisher, Superintendent of Meteorology and Magnetism at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. Coxwell had a large, new balloon built, called the “Mammoth”, and in late summer of 1862 the pair made a series of flights from the Gas Works in Wolverhampton. (Balloonists at the time routinely used Town Gas, which was a less efficient, but more available and safer, lifting gas than hydrogen.) The final and epic flight of this series was made on 5 September 1862 and this engraving from the Illustrated London News shows the critical moment with Glaisher, who had passed out from lack of oxygen at 8500 metres, slumped in the basket and Coxwell, who had lost the use of his hands because of the extreme cold,


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grasping the gas-venting line with his teeth to let out gas so the balloon would descend. SLIDE 16: Both survived and calculations after the flight estimated that they had reached at least 9500 metres and possibly 11,400 metres – 37,000 feet. All this was without oxygen or protective clothing. Glaisher typically carried some 24 scientific instruments on his flights, including five different barometers, four types of thermometer and two hygrometers to measure humidity. In all, Glaisher made 28 scientific flights into the upper atmosphere over a period of four years and I do not think that it is an exaggeration to compare Coxwell and Glaisher with today’s astronauts. SLIDE 17: The Wolverhampton Gas Works is now the University of Wolverhampton Science Park and there is a plaque to commemorate the record-making flight. So aeronautics was starting to be taken seriously. What was needed now was someone to do the legwork to make the Society happen. Cometh the time cometh the man!

SLIDE 18: And that man was Frederick Brearey, a Yorkshireman living in Blackheath near Greenwich. His father had been a friend of Cayley’s and had witnessed several of Cayley’s aeronautical experiments and demonstrations. Young Frederick apparently knew nothing of Cayley’s work at the time, but later in life became aware of it from his elder sister and eagerly read all that Cayley had written. Brearey became enthused with the idea of flight. He held many patents for aeronautical inventions and was involved in trials with the then Captain Templer of the Royal Engineers at Woolwich into the use of gliders for carrying messages from military observation balloons. Of greatest significance, Brearey took up Cayley’s cause of creating an aeronautical society.

SLIDE 19: He got in touch with Glaisher, who suggested that Brearey should attend the 1865 meeting of the British Association in Birmingham to lobby in the margins for the formation of an aeronautical society. In Brearey’s words “at that meeting the nucleus of the Society


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was formed.” So on 12 January 1866 the first Council meeting of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain was held, followed by the first public meeting in June. The illustration shows the first page of the original Council Minute Book.

SLIDE 20: The objects of the Society were agreed as “for the advancement of aerial navigation and for observations in aerology connected therewith.” Aerology is essentially the study of the atmosphere. Today’s objectives are similar, encompassing anything to do with aerospace and aviation, including spaceflight.

SLIDE 21: These four men are the key founders of the Society. The Eighth Duke of Argyle was the first President. A very rich aristocrat, a politician, and a Fellow of the Royal Society, he gave the new Aeronautical Society political and public credibility. The first, preliminary meeting of Council was held, on 12 January 1866, in the Duke’s London residence. Glaisher by his actions helped to legitimise aeronautics as a respectable branch of science and Brearey, as we have seen, did the work behind the scenes to form the Society. Brearey became the Honorary Secretary and he was driving force in the Society until his death 30 years later. Over this period he gave lectures in more than 50 cities and towns in England and Scotland, during which he launched model aircraft to fly over the heads of the audience. The largest of these had a wingspan of 12 ½ feet and weighed nearly 3 lbs. It is recorded that in Plymouth a bird model with flapping wings flew twice around the room and returned to his hand on the platform. Francis Wenham was the Society’s first honorary treasurer.

SLIDE 22: Wenham was a marine engineer, but he became interested in aviation. He was the first person to experiment, in 1858 – 59, with superposed wings on gliders (ie biplanes, triplanes etc) apparently based on George Cayley’s ideas. He is thought to have coined the term “aeroplane”, although in the first instance he used this term for the lifting surfaces (wings) instead of the whole machine, and he designed the world’s first wind tunnel built for the Society in 1871 at Penn’s


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Engineering Works in Greenwich. Sadly no illustrations of this wind tunnel have survived, but we have a detailed description, as follows. A fan powered by a steam engine drove air through a duct 10 feet long with an 18 inch square cross-section. The test model was mounted on a balance two feet downstream of the duct exit. Lift and drag were measured by spring balances. The maximum speed was 40 mph and it was not very effective at low angles of attack. Nevertheless, people were surprised that it was possible to generate a lift force greater than the drag. At the first full meeting of the Society on 27 June 1866 Wenham delivered a paper titled “On Aerial Locomotion and the Laws by which Heavy Bodies Impelled through the Air are Sustained”. This was a really seminal paper that significantly influenced the future design of aircraft. Wenham’s starting point, based on observation backed up by experiment, was that birds’ wings are cambered with a thicker leading edge. He demonstrated that most of the lift is generated from the front portion of the wing and thus that a long narrow wing – what we would call high aspect ratio – is best for generating lift. He then went on to calculate the dimensions of a high aspect wing necessary to support a man.

SLIDE 23: This is shown in the design in the top two illustrations on the left; a span of 60 feet with a 4 foot chord. (This page of illustrations from the original paper is rather confusing because they are not all to the same scale.)However, Wenham showed that, with the materials then available, the structure necessary to maintain the wing shape would be too heavy. So he proposed an arrangement of multiple high aspect ratio surfaces superposed one on top of the other to provide the necessary lifting surface with a light but strong structure. He trialled a model kite cum glider (shown on the right in elevation) that consisted of five wings stacked on top of one another and held in place by a rigid structure. Each wing was six feet span and three inch chord. In certain wind conditions, used as a kite it could lift his weight.

SLIDE 24: The design of his man-carrying glider is shown in the bottom two illustrations and in the artist’s impression on the right. Again, there are five wings each of 16 feet span and 15 inch chord held in a rigid


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frame and stacked on top of one another. Wenham made some tentative flights in this glider in the late 1850s. Wenham’s major contributions to aeronautics were: first to recognise the importance of high aspect ratio wings; and second to recognise that an arrangement of multiple wings would give the necessary lifting area and rigidity at an acceptable weight. The American engineer, Octave Chanute, picked up Wenham’s basic design and, in turn, Chanute transmitted this design layout to Percy Pilcher in Britain and to the Wright Brothers in America. I will come back to this later. So these were the sort of people involved in founding the Society.

SLIDE 25: The Society has published an Annual Report every year since 1866. In the early years the reports contained the names and locations of every member. So it is possible to glean some information about the nature of the membership in the early years by studying these lists. As shown on this slide, the Society attracted military men as well as scientist and engineers; it has been international from its earliest years and, of course, today we have branches all around the world. One prominent international member was the German gliding pioneer Otto Lilienthal. On the international theme, it is often said that the Society is the world’s oldest aeronautical society. It would be more accurate to say that the RAeS is the world’s oldest existing aeronautical society. In France, the Societe Aerostatique et Meteorologique was formed in 1852 and the Societe d’Encouragement pour le Navigation Arienne au Moyens d’Appareils plus lourds que l’Air was formed in 1863. These two societies merged in 1873 to form the Societe d’Aviation and this kept going until the 1930s when it was wound up. In 1875 the Societe d’Aviation awarded Frederick Brearey its Gold Medal.

SLIDE 26: Two years after its formation the Society organised the first Aeronautical Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London. It attracted 77 exhibits and large crowds. The Annual Report for that year records that Exhibit No 37 by John Stringfellow was “a model impelled by twin screws, worked by steam. This ran upon a wire stretched across the transept. It was seen by several that after a certain velocity had been attained, the


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machine left the support of the wire and rose up.” Stringfellow won a prize of £100 for the engine with the best power-to-weight ratio.

SLIDE 27: Back in 1843 Stringfellow had been a partner with Henson in the Aerial Transit Company that was formed with the revolutionary idea of developing a steam-powered passenger-carrying aircraft. Another partner in the company was a man called Frederick Marriott. He was an American publisher who was responsible for the famous publicity pictures with artist’s impressions of the Aerial Steam Carriage flying over London and the Pyramids. When, unsurprisingly, the company failed because the technology of the day was not capable of meeting the ambitious plans, Marriott returned to the USA where he continued to experiment with gliders and airships. He became the Society’s first American member when he joined in 1871.

SLIDE 28: jet-powered delta wing. This was a very fertile time for innovation and there was no shortage of ideas and designs for flying machines; some were weird and wonderful, but others were quite advanced and predicted ideas that would come to fruition many years later. For example in 1867 Society member James William Butler and Edmund Edwards were awarded a patent for “Improvements in Apparatus for Floating in and Travelling through the Air” This was essentially a delta-winged vehicle that had several variants and was to be powered by either screws (propellors) or jets of steam, as shown in these diagrams.

SLIDE 29: This slide lists the titles of a few of the books, pamphlets and papers received by the Society in 1867 and the following year’s Annual Report records eight patents for “Aerial Locomotion” or Aerial Apparatus” etc. Over the following years, many ideas, patents and publications were sent to the Society from inventors and engineers across the world. So the Society became the clearing house for much of the world’s aviation knowledge. Meetings and lectures enabled members to test one another’s theories, and the Society helped many of the pioneers to keep in contact and exchange ideas. I do not think that it is fanciful to claim that without the Society’s role of helping to create and share aeronautical


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knowledge progress towards manned, powered flight would have been slower.

SLIDE 30: Colonel Frederick Burnaby: Not all the prominent members of the Society were engineers and scientists. Some were simply seeking adventure through flight. This type is best illustrated by Colonel Frederick Burnaby, a colourful Victorian hero, who was a member of Council. Burnaby was a cavalry officer, explorer and best-selling author. He travelled widely in Central Asia, fought in other people’s wars and wrote books about his adventures. He crossed the Channel by balloon in 1882. This was 97 years after the first crossing, but it was probably the first solo crossing. Burnaby wrote a popular book about the flight. Eventually his luck ran out and he was killed in the Battle of Abu Klea (a minor skirmish) in 1885, during General Wolseley’s failed expedition to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum. SLIDE 31: One of the more extravagant designs that was actually built towards the end of the century was Sir Hiram Maxim’s gigantic steam-powered biplane weighing four tons, which made a few “captive flights” on a restraining rail. This is a picture of members of the Society visiting the machine in 1895.

SLIDE 32: And this is the giant in all its glory; note the man standing in front that gives an idea of scale. However, by the 1890s all was not well with the Society. Membership had risen from the initial 65 members to around 100 over the first 10 years, but then had declined to less than 40 in the 1890s, leaving the Society “in a somewhat languishing condition” to quote the contemporary record. In part, I guess that this was due to frustration that heavier-than-air flight did not seem be getting much closer. But it was also because Frederick Brearey remained the driving force behind the Society and old age had taken its toll on his energy. Following Brearey’s death in 1896, at the age of 80, the Council decided to resuscitate the Society and appointed Baden Baden-Powell (a brother of the founder of the Scout Movement) as Hon Secretary.


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SLIDE 33 – Midge: Baden-Powell was an army officer who had pioneered and championed the idea of war kites as military observation platforms. He served as Secretary until 1900 and then was President until 1907. He applied his considerable energy to the task of revitalising the Society and embarked on a recruiting drive. In his words, “numbers of new members flocked to the Standard. The crisis was over” and by 1902 numbers had risen to over 100. Among those who Baden Powell recruited to membership were three men who were actively experimenting with flight on three different continents.

SLIDE 34 –Chanute: In America, Octave Chanute was experimenting with multi-plane gliders. Chanute was a distinguished civil engineer, who had spent his life working for railroad companies and was the President of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1882. He built the Chicago and Kansas City stockyards and many famous bridges. When he retired in 1883 he decided to devote some of his time to furthering the new science of aviation. He corresponded widely and collected information from experimenters around the world. He analysed this information, using his own engineering knowledge, and published a series of articles in The Railroad and Engineering Journal from 1891 to 1893. He then published these articles in 1894 in a book called Progress in Flying Machines that proved highly influential, not least on the Wright Brothers. In 1896, in partnership with Augustus Herring and William Avery, he began experimenting with gliders. Having absorbed Wenham’s ideas set out in the paper to the first meeting of the Society, and drawing on his knowledge of bracing in bridge design, Chanute introduced the strut and wire-braced biplane structure that is so familiar to us from all the First World War biplanes. Later he was in correspondence with the Wright Brothers and this led them to adopt Chanute’s “double-decker” configuration, as they called it.

SLIDE 35: In Australia, Lawrence Hargrave had been experimenting with man-lifting kites before Baden-Powell and Cody in the UK. He invented the box-kite and on 12 November 1894 he was lifted to a height of 16 feet by a group of four box-kites. He experimented with model


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powered aircraft and gliders and he invented, but did not patent, the rotary engine and much else. He wrote regularly in the Society’s Aeronautical Journal and in 1899 he came to London and lectured to the Society. His box-kite design was adopted by Santos Dumont for his “14-bis” aircraft, in which he made the first powered flight in Europe in 1906. It seems likely that Santos Dumont used the box-kite design because the Wright Brothers were highly secretive about the design of their aircraft. The 14-bis made only a couple of flights and Santos Dumont’s future aeroplanes were monoplanes.

SLIDE 36: One of DARPA’s latest X-planes – Aurora Flight Sciences Lightning Strike –is uncannily similar to Santos Dumont’s aircraft.

SLIDE 37: In Britain, Percy Pilcher, born on 16 January 1866 just 4 days after the Society was formed, was for a few brief years at the end of the 19th century Britain’s leading experimenter in flight. In 1895 he built the Bat glider; then in 1897 after visiting Lilienthal in Germany he built several other designs including the Hawk with which he flew for a distance of 250 metres. He joined the Society in 1897 and was elevated to the Council the same year. By 1899, after correspondence with Chanute, he completed a triplane powered by a 4 hp motor. However, tragically, before he could demonstrate his triplane in flight he was killed when his Hawk glider suffered a structural failure while he was flying it in blustery conditions. Cranfield University built a replica of Pilcher’s triplane in 2003 and achieved a sustained flight of 1 minute 25 seconds. (They did use a modern engine of similar power and added wing-warping for roll control; Pilcher had planned to use weight shift for control.)

SLIDE 38: However, not everyone flocked to the Standard. This rejection letter from Lord Kelvin, the famous physicist, gives an idea of the degree of scepticism that remained about mechanical flight even among men of science.

Dear Baden Powell I am afraid that I am not in the flight for “aerial navigation”. I was greatly interested in your work with kites; but I have not the smallest molecule of


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faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of expecting good results from any of the trials we hear of. So you will understand that I would not care to be a member of the aeronautical society. Yours truly Kelvin

SLIDE 39: As part of the revitalisation of the Society, Baden-Powell founded the Aeronautical Journal in 1897, with the first volume containing the articles shown on this slide.

SLIDE 40: The Journal has been published ever since and exists today as a monthly peer-reviewed Journal and the Society’s flagship publication.

SLIDE 41: AEROSPACE, the Society’s general interest monthly magazine, was first published in 1969. Today it is available in print and on line.

SLIDE 42 - NAL: From the beginning the Annual Reports contained details of publications received by the Society. These books, papers and pamphlets were the beginning of the Society’s library and in 1903 the Library was opened to Members on one day a month and a librarian was engaged at a salary of £6 a year. Today the Society’s National Aerospace Library at Farnborough is one of the finest collections of aeronautical material in the world with some 20,000 books, 40,000 technical reports and many unique historical documents and pictures. As I mentioned before some of the more important historical documents can be viewed on line via the Society’s website.

SLIDE 43: Meanwhile, Chanute and others had been keeping the Society informed about the Wright Brothers’ experiments. Wilbur Wright’s first technical paper on “Angle of Incidence” was published in The Aeronautical Journal Volume 5 of July 1901. In his Presidential address in December 1902 Baden Powell observed “In America, Mr Wilbur Wright and his brother have been making wonderful progress with gliding


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machines.” Indeed, in that year the Wrights made 1000 perfectly controlled flights in Glider No 3. Incidentally, Baden Powell went on to say “What we see then, looming in the future . . . is the introduction of a new invention forming an invaluable and all-powerful weapon of war, an important aid to science and the practical knowledge of the globe, and a speedy, economical and pleasant mode of getting from place to place, such as will probably revolutionise our present methods of travel.” This is a fairly good prediction of what would happen over the next 20 years.

SLIDE 44: The Wright Brothers’ first powered flight was reported in the April 1904 edition of the Aeronautical Journal which starts by saying “fearing lest members of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain may have been misled by some of the statements that have appeared in the late accounts of the flights, Mr Orville Wright has communicated to the Society a true and authentic account of these experiments.” This refers to the scepticism with which America had received news of the Wrights’ flights. The account that follows of the historic first flights on 17 December 1903 is quite prosaic, but it concludes by saying “when these points had been definitely established, we at once packed our goods and returned home, knowing that the age of the flying machine had come at last.” Orville added “we do not feel ready at present to give out any pictures or detailed description of the machine.”

SLIDE 45: When the Wright Brothers came to France to demonstrate their aircraft in 1908, several members of the Society travelled to Le Mans to see the aircraft. Griffith Brewer became the first Briton to take to the air in a powered aeroplane as a passenger flown by Wilbur Wright on 8 October 1908 (eight days before Samuel Cody first flew at Farnborough on 16 October 1908). Other British members of the Society flown by Wilbur that day were Hon C S Rolls, Frank Hedges Butler and Major Baden-Powell. Griffith Brewer, who was a patent agent, became the Wright’s agent in the UK and brokered the first aircraft production contract for six Wright Flyers to be produced by the Short Brothers.


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SLIDE 46: The Society presented its first Gold Medal to Wilbur and Orville Wright in 1909. In this picture Wilbur is standing with Orville seated on his right. The Society also presented its first Silver Medal that year to Samuel Cody, who had made the first flight in Britain in 1908. In 1910 the second Gold Medal was awarded to Octave Chanute.

SLIDE 47 – Turnbull: At that time the Bronze Medal was awarded for the best article each year in the Aeronautical Journal. It was first awarded in 1908 to W R Turnbull for an article on “The Efficiency of Aeroplanes etc”. This dealt with the efficiency of wings, propellors and motors. Today the Society continues to award prizes for written papers.

SLIDE 48: The Society’s Medals and Awards are now seen as the global aerospace community’s most prestigious and long-standing awards honouring achievement, innovation and excellence. Medals are not awarded each year automatically. Including the Wright Brothers, the Society has awarded only 70 Gold Medals since 1909. The most recent was awarded in December 2015 to Professor Ric Parker, the Director of Research and Technology of the Rolls-Royce Group. Team medals were initiated in 2004 and in 2015 a Team Gold Medal was awarded to the European Space Agency’s Rosetta Mission Team that accomplished the remarkable feat of landing the Philae craft on the Comet 67P after a ten-year mission.

SLIDE 49: In 1910 the Society exhibited at the Olympia Aero & Motor Boat Exhibition. Other exhibitors included: A V Roe; the Short Brothers; Handley Page; and the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company, the forerunner of Bristol Aircraft. By 1910 membership of the Society had increased to 290. No doubt this was due in large measure to the growth in interest in aviation following the Wrights’ demonstrations in Europe.

SLIDE 50: That year the Society published a list of members. This showed each member’s name, the year they had first joined the Society, their location and any aircraft that they owned. It makes interesting reading and I have extracted some statistics in the table on the left. The military members were mostly British Army officers, but included 11 Royal


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Navy officers and one US Army officer. The booklet also contains a very interesting list of committees. This list and the high proportion of aircraft-owning members suggest to me that in 1910 the Society was very much a hands-on organisation. Note the committee for Revision of the Rules, to which I shall return. Women had been able to join the Society from the beginning and by 1910 there were 11, including Mrs George Bernard Shaw, wife of the playwright. However, the earliest lady member that I can find is Mrs Ballard of Malvern, who joined in 1891. Sadly, I can find out no more about her, but an F M Ballard obtained a pilot certificate in 1911; so possibly they were related.

Slide 51: There is more information on Miss Gertrude Bacon, who joined in 1905. She claimed to have been the first Englishwoman to have flown (as a passenger) in a balloon, airship, aeroplane and seaplane. I accept the airship and the seaplane claims. However, there is an account of Mrs Letitia Ann Sage, an actress, undertaking a balloon flight from St George’s Fields in London to Harrow on 29 June 1785 and Gertrude was beaten to the aeroplane title by two weeks by Lela Cody, the “wife” of Samuel Cody. The picture shows Gertrude Bacon with Herbert Stanley Adams in the Avro Waterbird seaplane on Lake Windermere in early 1912. Adams had made the first flight from water and safely back again, in Britain, on 25 November the previous year; he went on to win a Distinguished Service Cross as a naval aviator in the First World War. Gertrude’s main contribution was as the author of several books that stimulated popular interest in flying. Her application form to join the Society is shown on the right. The Library contains the original membership application forms of several famous people such as:

SLIDE 52 : Robert Falcon Scott who used a balloon on his 1902 Antarctic expedition. Ernest Shackleton, who had been on the expedition, lectured to the Society in 1904 about the use of the balloon.

SLIDE 53: Charles Rolls, one of the founders of Rolls-Royce, who sadly became the first Briton to die in a powered aircraft accident when his


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Wright aircraft suffered a structural failure at Bournemouth on 12 July 1910.

SLIDE 54: Only the previous month Rolls had been the first person to fly the Channel both ways, from Dover to Sangatte and back to Dover in 90 minutes.

SLIDE 55: Samuel Cody, who in 1903 described himself as a dramatist. Over the next decade or so, most of the early pioneers with household names like A V Roe, Cobham, De Havilland, Handley Page and Sopwith joined the Society and rose to prominence within it.

SLIDE 56: I mentioned earlier that one of the Society’s committees in 1910 was concerned with revising the rules. This bore fruit in 1911 when there were major revisions to make the Society both more democratic and more focussed on professional and technical matters. The Council now had to be elected by the members and half of the Council had to be technical people. Fellow and Associate Fellow grades were introduced, with an examination for the latter. However, because of the First World War the examinations for Associate Fellow were not actually introduced until the 1920s. Since then the Society has strongly promoted professionalism in both individuals and companies. In 1911 the Society signed agreements with (to use the modern names) the Royal Aero Club and the Air League, and later in 1917 with the recently formed Society of British Aircraft Constructors. These agreements defined the separate roles of each organisation. The Aeronautical Society of Great Britain was recognised as the “paramount and representative body of the scientific and technological aspects of aeronautics, including aircraft engines.”

SLIDE 57: In 1912 Wilbur Wright died and the Society introduced the Wilbur Wright Memorial Lecture in 1913. The first lecture was given by Horace Darwin, the founder of Cambridge Scientific Instruments and the son of Charles Darwin the naturalist. His title, unsurprisingly, was “Scientific Instruments, their Design and Use in Aeronautics.” Despite two world wars the lecture has been given every year since. Following


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Orville’s death in 1948, the lecture was renamed the Wilbur and Orville Wright Lecture (in 1965) and traditionally it is given in alternate years by a European and an American. (In 2014 Patrick Dewar, EVP of Lockheed Martin International, gave the lecture on “Global Growth in Aviation’s Second Century” and in 2015 Nigel Whitehead, Group MD of Programmes & Support, BAE Systems, gave a strategic perspective of the UK Military Air Sector.)

SLIDE 58: In 1917 the Society introduced the award of Honorary Fellowship as its highest award. The first three recipients in 1916 were:

Patrick Young Alexander (1867 – 1943) a balloonist and aeronautical pioneer and benefactor, whose main achievement was the collection and dissemination of ideas. His father, Andrew Alexander had been a founder member of the Society. William Henry Dines FRS (1855 – 1927) a leading meteorologist, who had been President of the Royal Meteorological Society in 1901. He was a member of the Aeronautical Society’s Council and a member of the International Commission for Scientific Aeronautics. Lieutenant General Sir David Henderson (1862 – 1921) was described by Lord Trenchard as the true “Father of the Royal Air Force”. At the turn of the 19th Century Henderson was the Army’s leading expert on reconnaissance and tactical intelligence. Seeing the value of aircraft for reconnaissance, he learned to fly in 1911 at the age of 49, making him the world’s oldest pilot at the time. He was a member of the technical sub-committee of the Air Committee that decided the organisation of the Royal Flying Corps and he became the first Director of Military Aeronautics. On the outbreak of the First World War he took command of the Royal Flying Corps in the field. Returning to London in 1915 as the Director-General of Military Aeronautics he helped to write the Smuts Report that led to the founding of the Royal Air Force on 1 April 1918.

[Cobham Slide]


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SLIDE 59: Today Honorary Fellowship is the world’s highest distinction for aerospace achievement awarded only for the most outstanding contributions to the aerospace profession. Less than two a year have been awarded since its inception. In 2015 we awarded three Honorary Fellowships to:

Professor Sir Martin Sweeting FRS, the founder and executive chairman of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd, (for his exceptional contribution in pioneering the use of commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) technology in space and in particular the use of small low-cost satellites for practical applications.) Monsieur Jean-Jacques Dordain who was an exceptional Director General of the European Space Agency from 2003 to 2015 (for demonstrating a unique mix of exceptional technical, managerial, political, diplomatic and commercial skills that elevates him above his contemporaries.) Professor Ramesh K Agarawal, the William Palm Professor of Engineering at Washington University in St Louis, USA, in recognition of his outstanding leadership in aerospace education and research and for advancing the improvement and development of a wide range of flying aerospace vehicles through ingenious application of computational fluid dynamics.

SLIDE 60: Also in 1917 the Society held the first lecture intended for children and the Society’s mission to educate and inspire children to follow careers in engineering and aerospace has continued ever since. Today this is exemplified by the Cool Aeronautics days for primary school children (and we have a target to run 150 Cool Aeronautics days this year to mark the 150th Anniversary). For older students, the Schools Build A Plane Challenge, in partnership with Boeing and the Light Aircraft Association. The group photograph shows some of the students who built the planes with two of their aircraft that took part in the Flying Display at Farnborough International in 2014.


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SLIDE 61: In 1918 King George V awarded the “Royal” prefix to the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, which became the Royal Aeronautical Society. In 1920 Prince Albert, the Duke of York who later became King George VI, became the Society’s Patron and he presided at the Wilbur Wright Lecture. He had served in the RNAS and the RAF in the First World War, including as a staff officer at the Independent Air Force HQ. This slide shows him at a reunion dinner in 1919 with Trenchard and Christopher Courtney. Her Majesty the Queen assumed the role from her father and remains the Society’s patron. In 1966 HRH the Duke of Edinburgh was the Society’s Honorary President for our Centenary Year and this year Prince Charles has taken on that role. SLIDE 62: A Scottish Branch of the Society was founded in 1919 and in 1925 formal rules for branches were issued. That year the Coventry Branch was the first branch to be founded under these rules and it is still going strong. Following the Second World War the branch network expanded greatly and today there are 37 branches in the UK and 31 around the world in 15 countries. In 1948 Divisions were created in Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Rhodesia and South Africa. The Rhodesian Division is no more, but the other Divisions are still going strong. The other development shortly after the First World War was the creation in 1921 of a Students Section, subsequently re-named the Students & Graduates Section. Today this part of the membership is represented by our very active Young Persons Committee and network. SLIDE 63: In 1928 the Society held a dinner to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight. Diners were seated in the Science Museum in London under the original Wright Flyer. The Smithsonian Museum in Washington had been very slow to recognise the Wright Brothers’ achievement; so Orville Wright refused to allow the original Wright Flyer to be exhibited in the Smithsonian. Instead he refurbished it and in January 1928 he shipped it to the Science Museum in London. It remained there until after Orville’s death in 1948 when it was returned to the USA where it can now be seen in the Smithsonian


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Museum. The Wright Flyer hanging in the London Science Museum today is a replica made by De Havilland apprentices at Hatfield.

SLIDE 64: So the Society continued to expand and develop up to the Second World War, and in 1939 it moved into new headquarters at 4 Hamilton Place that it still occupies and now owns.

SLIDE 65: The War inevitably curtailed many normal activities. However, the Society did contribute to the war effort, most notably by forming the Advisory Committee to the Ministry of Aircraft Production, chaired by Sir Roy Fedden, the chief designer of the Bristol Engine Company. This group photograph of the Committee shows the Minister of Supply and the RAF’s Controller Research and Development with Fedden and the other members of the Committee: the chief designers of De Havilland, Hawkers, Shorts and Vickers.

SLIDE 66: The Committee submitted 40 Secret memoranda about technical innovation and wartime production, and this contribution was acknowledged by the Government.

SLIDE 67: As things got back to normal after the War, the Society resumed its regular summer Garden Parties. (Radlett)

SLIDE 68: and White Waltham. However, this picture of Miss Scofield is not what it seems. Perhaps I might elaborate in the question period.

SLIDE 69: To round off the history, this slide lists some of the more significant milestones after the Second World War. In 1949 the Royal Charter, the supreme governing document was granted by King George VI on the advice of the Privy Council. In 1957 the rules for Sections and in 1959 the rules for Groups were published. Today there are 23 Specialist Groups covering a wide range of aeronautical disciplines and activities. In 1959 the Lecture Theatre was built on to the back of the 4 Hamilton Place. In 1960 the Helicopter Association of Great Britain merged with the Society and today we have a very strong Rotorcraft Group. Although the Society was founded in the days of balloons it has always been quick to embrace new technology, such as aeroplanes, rotorcraft, rockets and


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the whole area of Space. The Space specialist group was founded in the 1950s and Space is a very important part of the Society’s area of interest. Last year’s Honorary Fellowships awarded to Sir Martin Sweeting and Monsieur Jean-Jacques Dordain attest to that. In 1965 the Society was one of the founding members of the Council of Engineering Institutions, now the Engineering Council, and the Society remains one of the Council’s most active supporters. Then in 1987 the Society of Licensed Aircraft Engineers and Technologists (SLAET) merged with the RAeS. As an example of significant initiatives, in 1999 the Society founded the Greener by Design Group, with experts from every part of the aviation industry, government bodies and research institutes. The Group is sponsored by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills and it provides advice on options for limiting aviation’s environmental impact. I can equally well cite the work that the Society is doing with ICAO and a host of organisations and experts across the world to develop improved methods of training airline pilots and to improve the impact of simulators and other training devices.

SLIDE 70: I have got just one slide that attempts to summarise the Society today. It is a learned society, dedicated to advancing and spreading aeronautical knowledge. It is not a trade association, and it is completely independent. The Society is not beholden to anyone and it offers independent authoritative advice. It also provides neutral territory where, for example, rivals such as Boeing and Airbus will share the same platform. Each year the Society organises some 70 conferences and lectures at Hamilton Place and the Branches organise some 400 more events around the world. It is a professional engineering institution awarding CEng, IEng and EngTech qualifications. It is a Registered Charity. The Society has some 22,000 members and 230 Corporate Partners and has branches around the world. Membership is open to everyone, not just scientists and engineers. There are members from every profession and trade involved in aviation and aerospace, and the Specialist Groups reflect this wide range of interests. I mentioned before our work with schools and young people to encourage them to follow


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careers in science, engineering and aerospace. Since 2003 our Centennial Scholarship Fund has provided more than £600,000 of scholarships to students studying for degrees in aviation and aerospace related subjects. (Travelling grant awarded in 2015 to one of original Build-A-Plane students, now doing MSc.) All this involves a great deal of outreach to government, industry and academia, and to other organisations such as the International Civil Aviation Organisation and the International Air Transport Association.

SLIDE 71: I hope that I have shown you that, over the last 150 years the RAeS has done a great deal to advance aeronautical art, science and engineering. If I have left out your favourite bit of history, I apologise, but there just was not enough time to cover everything. The Society has developed and adapted over the years to reflect changes in technology and in society at large; but it has always remained true to its founders’ vision and it has always striven to encourage innovation and to bring together in discussion and in co-operation people from throughout the entire aviation and aerospace community. And, in view of the many challenges that aviation faces today – such as environmental pressures, airspace congestion, cost pressures, skills shortages, security and so on – I believe that the Society remains as relevant today as it has at any time in its history. Thank you. Mention Tim Peake and stamps

Bill Tyack, RAeS Past President, April 2016

• Ascent of Vincenzo Lunardi 1784 • Sir George Cayley and his 1853 design • Wright at Reims 1909 • Yuri Gagarin • Hawker P1127 • British Airways Concorde • Rolls-Royce Trent 900 • International Space station

The Aeronautical Journal Volume II, 1, page 9 article by Oscar Chanute. On page 11: “The apparatus is designed upon the principle of superimposing (sic) the surfaces proposed in 1866 by Mr Wenham and the frame consists in a bridge truss with vertical posts of spruce wood and diagonal wire ties.”

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