For many years, most motor vehicles in Britain were imports from France or Germany, although a young British engineer began to change that. Frederick Lanchester was another tireless inventor, constantly frustrated by the slow pace at which technical ideas were taken up. In his youth he built a laboratory in his family’s home in Balham, south London. Aged only twenty, having not yet completed his formal education, he so impressed the owner of an engine manufacturing company in Birmingham that he was offered the job of assistant works manager. Here, Lanchester started to register the first of the 426 patents he would take out during his life. In the mid-1890s, he built the first British motor boat and then the first all-British four-wheel petrol-powered motor car. It had a single-cylinder engine and was the first car designed to run on pneumatic tyres. In 1899 he founded the Lanchester Engine Company, helping to advance engine design and develop a native motor industry in the West Midlands.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, motoring was only for the wealthy and the determined. Cars were expensive and difficult to run: even starting the engine required a whole sequence of activities which included opening the bonnet, filling the radiator with coolant, adjusting oil pressures, priming the carburettor, swinging the starter handle and advancing the ignition. And when driving, the motorist was likely to suffer from a variety of mechanical failures and punctures. It was no wonder that most owners needed a trained chauffeur-mechanic to assist. In addition, road surfaces were extremely poor, often rutted, throwing up clouds of dust when it was dry or running with water when wet. Pneumatic tyres and basic suspension provided some relief from the bumps but punctures were frequent and were slow to repair. Finding supplies of petrol could also be difficult. Moreover, intrepid early motorists needed an entire new wardrobe of clothing: goggles, leather helmets, gabardine smocks, tweed driving jackets, and for ladies gauze hoods and veils to protect them from the endless dust.
But, for many, driving was about the thrill of speed, and almost from the beginning, enthusiasts started to race motor cars. The Gordon Bennett races began in France in 1900 and transferred to Ireland three years later. Across Europe further long-distance races like the Paris-Bordeaux-Paris and the Circuit des Ardennes began to draw big crowds. The emphasis on speed and long-distance endurance also had the effect of helping to improve engines and increase performance.
However, the manufacture of motor cars relied upon many processes in addition to the creation of an efficient and reliable engine, and car factories were in the early days (as they remain today) largely assembly plants that relied on many separately produced components. The building of a suitable chassis is an essential element, and so many coach manufacturers were drawn into early automobile production. Gearboxes, steering mechanisms, braking controls and powerful suspension systems all had to be produced. In Britain, development of the motor car was the logical next step from bicycle production and so many of the engineer-mechanics who followed Lanchester into the British automobile industry were concentrated in the West Midlands. Alongside came the need for a new level of precision engineering. For instance, pistons had to be made to an accuracy of one hundredth of a millimetre, an exactness that had never been needed in industry before.
Slowly, motoring spread down from the extremely wealthy to the moderately well-off. In some towns or villages the local doctor was sometimes seen driving to visit his patients in a motor car. Garages began to replace blacksmiths and arrays of new machine tools were produced to repair and maintain automobiles and all the components that kept them moving. In 1913, an electric starter system was first used and electric lights began to replace the original acetylene gas powered lamps mounted by the radiator. In 1914, the introduction of hand pumps, rather than two-gallon cans, to fill fuel tanks ushered in the development of an entirely new energy supply industry. Along with the motor car came the development of the articulated lorry and the motor bus. The motorised lorry began to revolutionise the transportation of goods and materials, while most people’s first encounter with motoring was to travel in one of the motor omnibuses which rapidly transformed transport within towns and cities. By 1914, London alone had more than two thousand motor buses, a good proportion of which were double deckers. With motor cars spreading everywhere and buses clogging up the streets, the face of the city was changing rapidly.
A new generation of enthusiasts were inspired by the advent of the internal combustion engine. Thousands of young men, fascinated by the lure of speed, took on the mechanical challenge of designing, building and maintaining engines. Several small companies, founded by engineer mechanics who had raised some cash and turned entrepreneurs, were established in Britain in the 1900s. Sometimes they consisted of little more than a workshop or an assembly shed. This created an industry with too many small, uneconomic producers manufacturing too many different designs, and before long some of the more successful companies began to take over the smaller operations. Names like Napier, Morris, Triumph, Rolls, Rover, Hillman, Humber, Wolseley, Swift, Singer and others began to dominate the new motor industry. By 1910, Herbert Austin employed one thousand workers at his Longbridge plant to mass produce a 7 hp car. Austin, alongside Lanchester, was the most visionary of the automobile pioneers and the pair saw that by standardising components they could speed up production and keep down costs. Both their companies prospered. In the United States Henry Ford led the way forward when he finessed the concept of mass production at his giant Highland Park factory in Michigan. Ford broke down the manufacturing process into the smallest possible units, so that a worker would carry out only one of these operations as the production line moved along at waist height. The Ford plant was dedicated to manufacturing a single standardised vehicle, the Model T, the ‘Tin Lizzie’. In 1909, just over 12,000 Model Ts came off the factory line; in 1915 more than one million were produced. By introducing the factory production line, Ford unleashed a new era in capitalism and economic growth in which the workers ultimately became the consumers of the new products.
Lighter-than-air balloons had been built and flown in France since the 1780s and great developments in the science of ballooning had followed over the next hundred years. In a separate development, during the nineteenth century many of the basic principles of aerodynamics had been studied and understood. Sir George Cayley, a Yorkshire engineer, produced a treatise on what he called ‘Aerial Navigation’ and worked out the shape needed for a wing to provide the lift necessary for an aircraft. With a curved top surface and a flat lower surface, air would travel faster over the top of the wing providing the ‘lift’ to sustain flight. The first man-carrying glider flew across Brompton Dale in Yorkshire in 1853 supposedly piloted by Cayley’s footman. Cayley also calculated the power necessary to achieve lift with a given weight of airframe. But no engine at that point had a high enough power output in relation to its weight to make flight possible. It was only with the coming of the petrol-fuelled internal combustion engine that engines both powerful and small enough became available. From that moment on it was inevitable that powered flight would be both possible and practical. But powered flight itself was to be a twentieth-century phenomenon.
There were several key challenges to be solved before an aircraft would be able to fly. Having mastered the correct design of the wing to provide lift, a suitable airframe had to be constructed. This was the relatively easy part, and although many gliders were of a monoplane variety it was soon discovered that extra lift could be guaranteed by constructing biplanes. They had, effectively, double the wingspan, providing double support and lift. Another problem was the provision of controls to manage the craft when it was in the air. This took much experimentation and practice, and was achieved through trial and error rather than by the application of scientific or mathematical principles. The next and far more challenging task was to build an engine with the correct power-to-weight ratio, small and light enough to generate the power needed to get a craft into the air and then enable it to remain airborne. Thanks to the enormous a
dvances taking place with the development of the internal combustion engine for motor vehicles in the early years of the twentieth century, the power-to-weight problem was finally solved with an aluminium engine that produced about 12 hp of energy.
Wilbur and Orville Wright were the first to achieve powered flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. They were bicycle manufacturers from Dayton, Ohio, illustrating how the mechanical technologies had advanced from bicycles, through automobiles and on to aeroplanes. The brothers moved their experimental work to the North Carolina coast where steady and regular winds provided the extra boost needed to create lift. From 1900, for three years, they built a series of gliders to master the techniques of flight. Then, employing their own basic biplane design constructed with a spruce wood frame and muslin wing coverings, along with controls they had devised themselves and a small engine, they finally launched the era of powered flight on 17 December 1903. Barely anyone noticed this historic achievement and it was a couple of days before even the local press reported it.
However, the Wright brothers quickly improved both their aircraft and their understanding of the basics of flight. When Wilbur arrived in France in the summer of 1908 to give a set of public demonstrations of their aircraft, he was celebrated as the first great pioneer of modern aviation. Leading politicians and captains of industry flocked to see him flying. Lord Northcliffe, the newspaper baron, took Arthur Balfour, the leader of the Opposition, to watch the demonstrations. King Edward VII even went to see Wright fly.
It is often claimed that Britain lagged behind the rest of the world in aviation, although this was definitely not the case with military aviation as we shall see in the following chapters. Nevertheless, Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century is usually seen as a technophobe nation and there is certainly some truth to this. Much of it came down to the education system. The public schools that produced the elite of British society were totally focused on providing a classical education, and gave far more importance to Homer and Virgil than to mechanics and physics. A good education was thought to provide not only the ability to read Greek and Latin, but also to compose verse in these two dead languages. Pupils learned to look down on science, while engineering was thought to be beneath the dignity of a gentleman. The Edwardian public schools were most certainly anti-technology.
It has often been said that men with little or no higher education had created the Industrial Revolution that shaped modern Britain, despite the educational system. However, in the early twentieth century the university sector was slowly changing. It is difficult today to imagine a university system as tiny and exclusive as that of Edwardian Britain. The oldest and most prestigious universities were filled by pupils from the public schools and so were still dominated by the classics, or by a combination of classical studies and mathematics. But even Oxford and Cambridge, and definitely the newer redbrick civic universities often sited in the great industrial cities, offered a growing mix of applied scientific studies to the increasing number of middle-class students. Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester Universities were forging ahead in this regard. Osborne Reynolds, Professor of Engineering at Manchester, did important work in fluid mechanics and his successor Joseph Ernest Petavel worked on aeronautics. At Leeds there was a professorship dedicated to the coal and gas industries. And there were signs of a new interest in science even at Edwardian Cambridge. Lord Rayleigh at Trinity College, one of the most famous and respected physicists in the country, and Bertram Hopkinson, Professor of Applied Mechanics, did important work on explosions, on the internal combustion engine and on metal fatigue. The engineering school at Cambridge produced the largest number of graduate engineers in Britain, many of them trained in the sort of complex mathematics that was essential for research in new sciences like aeronautics. However, the emphasis in British universities was predominantly on pure sciences and few graduates were encouraged to dirty their hands by going into industry. The war would transform this.
Britain’s industrial supremacy was looking decidedly shaky in the first decade of the twentieth century. Its key industrial rivals possessed a great advantage in the provision of vocational training in science and engineering. In Germany, alongside the old universities which, as in Britain, looked down on industry, there was a new generation of technical schools, the excellent Technische Hochschulen. Here the professors maintained close links with industry so the schools could carry out vital research needed for industrial progress. As a consequence, the major engineering and manufacturing companies had a ready supply of trained graduates. In the United States of America, where many universities were also close to industry, the establishment during the nineteenth century of such important centres as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Stevens Institute of Technology brought together the highest academic standards with the needs of rapidly developing technology.
There were technical schools in Britain, although they did not fare well in the educational reforms of the Edwardian era and suffered from chronic under-funding. Nevertheless, these colleges were to play an important role in the development of the new sciences. For instance, the technical colleges at Finsbury and at Crystal Palace in London provided a suitable education for young men who were enthusiastic about the new mechanical technologies. They also offered courses in electrical engineering and motor sciences. Many of the pioneers of aviation went to these schools. Sylvanus Thompson at Finsbury was tutor to both Frederick Handley Page and Richard Fairey. Geoffrey de Havilland went to Crystal Palace. Some colleges also offered evening classes for students who were in employment but keen to improve the academic basis of their work. Their graduates were to drive forward many of the ‘new’ mechanical-based industries of the twentieth century. But they were still few in number by comparison to the graduates of similar schools in Germany and the United States: in 1913, there were 40,000 students of science and technology in the United States, 17,000 in Germany and 5500 in Britain.7 It is not surprising to find that Germany and the USA were soon to surpass Britain in industrial output.
Many men of science were aware of these issues. At a conference in May 1916, several leading British scientists gathered to lament the bias of the educational system against science. They expressed horror at the fact that so many educated politicians and civil servants were fluent in Greek and Latin but knew nothing of scientific method or of new developments in physics, chemistry and engineering. It was pointed out that the headmasters of thirty-four of the top thirty-five public schools were classicists; that only four Cambridge colleges were presided over by men with scientific training and that there were none at Oxford. Lord Rayleigh described this as ‘truly deplorable’. The division within the class that ruled the country between those with a classical education and those with a scientific background was to exercise many people for decades to come.8
The great technological changes that transformed the Edwardian era were closely linked. Behind everything was electricity. New electric powered technologies were transforming streets and homes. The building of the electric underground railway in London was one of the great achievements of the age, even if much of the network was not completed until the 1920s. The spread of the motor car (there were 132,000 private cars and 51,000 buses, taxis and coaches in Britain in 1914) enabled cities to develop vast suburbs and to grow into huge conurbations in which much of the change was concentrated. By 1914, four out of five people in England and Wales lived in cities and Greater London had a population of seven and a quarter million. In Manchester, there was one cinema seat for every eight inhabitants. Rising prosperity, particularly among the lower middle classes if not the working classes, helped fuel the growth of new retail chains, the spread of a mass market and the development of national brands of food and drink. The explosion of the tabloid press selling at low, accessible prices relied on advertising which helped the spread of these new brands. Everyone agreed that technology was changing the patterns of life in an extraordinary way. All of this was bound to have an effect upon the mili
tary and upon thinking of how to fight the next war, if and when it came.
The Edwardian Army and the Royal Navy, run by two great departments of state at the War Office and the Admiralty at the north end of Whitehall, were largely conservative-minded operations whose senior figures shared the attitudes and values of the rest of the British elite. In Britain’s forces as in most armies and navies around the world, military work involved the repetition of the same processes over and over again. Tradition was given much greater credibility than innovation. At the Royal Academy at Sandhurst there was no science on the curriculum. New ideas and new approaches were not welcome. Senior army and naval officers, almost exclusively the products of the public schools, had a suspicion of industry and science just like the rest of their class. They were professionals who believed they knew what they were doing, had been doing it for some time and saw no reason to change the way they were doing it. Socially, the army was deeply conservative, and the life of the officer class revolved around fixed rituals that were based on loyalty to a regiment or battalion. H.G. Wells, the great science fiction writer and one of the reformers of the era, saw the army as ‘a thing aloof, an institution that ‘had developed all the characteristics of a caste’ and was ‘inadaptable and conservative’.9
The biggest division within every army and navy in the world in the early twentieth century was that between officers and ‘other ranks’. This again closely mirrored and sustained the fundamental division in society between owners and managers on the one part, and labourers or workers on the other – a division even extended to many sports of the day, like Edwardian cricket, where it was expressed as the difference between ‘gentlemen’ (who took part for the love of the sport) and ‘players’ (who played for money). The world of the late Victorian or Edwardian officer was one of luxury rarely seen today. Even the most junior officers had their own servants who would unpack their bags, lay out their clothes and probably clean their boots. Life in the officers’ mess involved much ritual but was, like life in a country house or a wealthy city dweller’s home, entirely reliant upon a division between upstairs and downstairs and the existence of a vast army of servants and domestic workers. With some infamous exceptions, there was very little familiarity across this divide, and while an officer would have responsibility for the care and welfare of his men, there were few occasions when an officer would mix or socialise with the men in his battalion. The activities of the two groups were kept rigidly separate. To many in Edwardian Britain, especially to those in the army or the navy, it probably looked as though these divisions would continue for ever.
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