However, Lindemann soon demonstrated his loyalty and became a central member of the extraordinary group of young civilian scientists O’Gorman had recruited to Farnborough, called the ‘H Department’ or ‘Physics Department’. The team lived together in a house outside the town in an atmosphere like that of an Oxbridge college, arguing late into the night about key questions of science. Soon nicknamed the ‘Chudleigh Mess’, the group included three future Nobel Prize winners, three future peers, five knights and several professors and Fellows of the Royal Society.4 The purpose of their work was to further improve the scientific understanding of aeronautics, and they provided a model for many such groups that would exist in the next war. Lindemann himself worked on a variety of tasks that included detecting aircraft by sound, designing and making rate-of-climb meters, turn indicators and range finders, and the use of infra-red rays to detect the approach of enemy aircraft at a distance. Elements of this research would be picked up and continued in the next war.5
By 1916, it was clear to many of the young scientists that their work would be improved if they understood the practicalities and not just the theories of aviation, and so they put in a request to learn how to fly. The War Office approved and Lindemann, along with a few others, went through a flight training programme, eventually qualifying to fly for the RFC in October 1916. Maintaining the eccentricity that was his trademark, Lindemann would turn up at an RFC airfield wearing his bowler hat and long black overcoat, a stiff wing collar, and carrying his umbrella. Before boarding his plane he changed into a flying suit, rolled up his civilian clothes and packed them under his seat. Having taken off, piloted his aircraft and carried out his mission, he would change again on landing and walk away from the aircraft wearing his overcoat, bowler hat and wing collar and carrying his umbrella, while the RFC ground crews looked on in amazement.
It was as a scientific test pilot that Lindemann carried out, in the summer of 1917, the research that would make him famous. Many pilots in this period of the war were being lost when their engine stalled and the aircraft went into a spin. Since no one understood how to pull out of a spin, such incidents almost invariably proved fatal. If a pilot miraculously survived he would usually say he had no idea what he had done to save himself. Having observed a few fatal spins, Lindemann noticed that the plane’s rate of turn did not increase as it spun to the ground. He concluded that the lift on both wings must therefore be equal, as the outer wing which was beating against the air turned to become the inner wing which was not. He realised that in order to escape from a spin the pilot should avoid doing the obvious thing, to pull the joystick towards himself to try to make the aircraft climb, and instead counter-intuitively push the joystick forwards to try to make the aircraft dive more steeply towards the earth, picking up speed so both wings would generate lift. His theory would however remain no more than a mathematical formula if somebody were not willing to try it out. Lindemann decided he must do so himself.
With remarkable courage he flew to 14,000 feet in a BE2 biplane, stalled the engine and put it into a spin. His colleagues watched in horror as the aircraft went spinning earthwards at about forty feet per second. In the cockpit Lindemann remained calm and used his remarkable memory for numbers to store in his mind the readings of the air speed indicator, the angle of incidence of the two wings (measured by tapes attached to the struts), the height at the beginning and end of the spin, the time taken and the number of turns. Furthermore, his method of getting out of the spin worked. In his experiments he gathered enough data to prove the mathematics of his theory. Once new instructions based on his findings had been issued to all pilots, the number of fatalities from spins began rapidly to diminish. Lindemann’s bravery, his good memory and his mathematical theorising were to save hundreds and possibly thousands of lives.6
Lindemann went on to do other important experimental work, including research on stabilising bomb-sights for high altitude bombing in tests at Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast, in which he again acted as pilot and bomb aimer. He had overall what could be described as a ‘good war’, helping to demonstrate that the application of science could have immensely valuable practical results and displaying great bravery in his flight testing, even though he did not have to endure the horrors of the trenches.
After the war, Oxford University appointed Lindemann Professor of Experimental Philosophy, their term for physics. Science at Oxford was very much the poor relation to the humanities, a state of affairs Lindemann was determined to change. In order to fulfil his vision of a new start to Oxford science, he slowly turned the Clarendon Laboratory into a powerhouse of scientific research to rival the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge and the laboratories at Imperial College, London. He devoted himself to administration, recruited a new generation of young scientists and raised funds from government and industry. But despite his outward success he was a prickly personality to deal with. He remained a very private person who took offence easily and, although quick to bear a grudge himself, seemed to have no hesitation about offending others. Though supremely confident, he was abrasive, short tempered and distant to many of those around him. He was keen to become a public figure and stood for Parliament as Member for Oxford University, but failed to win the seat. He did better by cultivating his relationship with Winston Churchill; the two men became close, Lindemann providing the politician with an insight into many of the scientific developments taking place at the time.
It was in the Second World War that Lindemann achieved the peak of his public success. From May 1940, when Churchill asked him to become his chief scientific adviser, he sent Churchill about 2000 memos (or minutes), often two or three per day but averaging about one per day for six years. They covered every conceivable scientific subject – from an explanation of what it meant to split the atom, to the workings of the Mills grenade; from how the Germans used beams to help their bombers navigate at night, to the principles of a gas turbine jet engine. There were also memos relating to economic matters – anything where a quantitative or analytical approach could make a fresh contribution. Lindemann had a knack of expressing complex scientific ideas simply and clearly. Churchill demanded brevity and he would often forward to Lindemann a long, complex civil service paper with a note, ‘Prof – summarise in 10 lines pis’, So the papers Lindemann prepared were rarely more than two pages in length, in large type and double spaced, bite-sized digests of science for a man who was too busy to absorb long and detailed papers and probably would not have understood them anyway.7 Churchill created Lindemann Viscount Cherwell in 1942, and his official biographer described him as having ‘power greater than that exercised by any scientist in history’.8
Lindemann was to gain notoriety in the Second World War from his dubious use of research into the effects of bombing to ‘prove’ that a full-scale bombing campaign against German towns and cities would eventually undermine the German war machine. Although the bombing offensive would entail the ruthless destruction of civilian centres in the country where he had spent his youth, Lindemann became one of the greatest exponents of area bombing within the senior echelons of government. And he was among the first senior government scientists to acknowledge the possibility of an atom bomb.
One of those with whom Lindemann fell out badly was another of the three most famous scientists of the Second World War, Sir Henry Tizard, regarded as one of the greatest defence scientists in Britain. Born in Gillingham, Kent, the son of a Royal Navy captain and a mother from an engineering family, Tizard went in 1899 to Westminster School, where he excelled as a Scholar. In 1905 he went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating three years later with a First in mathematics and chemistry. In 1908 he moved to Berlin to study with Walther Nernst in the year in which Lindemann went to study with the same scientist.. Lindemann and Tizard got to know each other well, although Tizard carried out no research of any distinction and left Berlin after just a year. He then spent a year working in the Faraday Laboratory of the Royal Institution, where he carried
out original research into the colour changes of indicators such as litmus and began to acquire a reputation as a research scientist. In 1911, he was offered a fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford along with a lectureship in Natural Sciences. Tizard settled into a new, comfortable life as an Oxford don and might have continued happily there for many years had not his career been transformed by the coming of war.
In August 1914, Tizard was attending the British Association’s annual meeting in Australia, but on his return he immediately joined up and was commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery in Portsmouth. The following year he transferred to the RFC as a scientific experimental officer based at the Central Flying School at Upavon on the edge of Salisbury Plain. This was the era in which many pilots still regarded flying as an empirical activity reliant upon trial and error, and were suspicious of those who wanted to investigate, measure and analyse the actions they took by sheer instinct. During the early months of 1916, Tizard learned to fly. He found the experience exhilarating but was told by the flight commander, in a perfect demonstration of the prevailing prejudice against science, that he ‘would never make a pilot’ if he had to rely on instruments when flying.9
Tizard carried out important work on the development of bomb-sights. Until now a bomb had simply been thrown over the side of the fuselage or released from under the wing at the moment the pilot or bombardier thought was about right. Tizard set up a system for photographing a test aircraft on a camera obscura, monitoring the angle at which a bomb dropped from different heights and speeds and gradually calculating the mathematics on which an effective aiming system could be based. He also experimented with new radio equipment, new weapons and new cameras, taking one of the first aerial pictures of Stonehenge – which clearly showed the existence of the outer ring of the ancient stone circle. In autumn 1916 the Aircraft Testing Flight needed to find a new site. Tizard and Bertram Hopkinson, the Professor of Applied Mechanics at Cambridge, who was carrying out war work with the Royal Engineers, prospected a location for an airfield on heathland at Martlesham, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, convenient for flying over the test area at Orf ord Ness on the coast nearby. A new landing ground was constructed here, and for forty years Martlesham Heath was to be at the centre of experimentation first for the RFC and then for the RAF.
Here, Tizard set up procedures for checking and double checking the specifications of every new mark of aircraft that came off the factory lines, including the confirmation of maximum speeds and rates of climb. He brought a level of academic accuracy to the process which was essential to build a complete understanding of the science of aircraft performance. He checked the rate of climb in different atmospheric conditions; he recorded speeds not just once but at least five times over several days in different winds in order to calculate an average maximum over time. He experimented with flying in and out of clouds and thunderstorms and carried out tests designed to improve fuel efficiency collaborating on some of this research with his old friend Lindemann. Tizard’s career closely paralleled Lindemann’s, with the difference that Tizard was a commissioned officer operating within the RFC and Lindemann a civilian scientist working out of Farnborough. Tizard also had his moment of heroic daring. He was trying out a new Sopwith Camel in July 1917 when a squadron of twenty giant Gotha bombers passed by heading home after a bombing raid on London. Heavily outnumbered, Tizard climbed to 17,000 feet and attacked the rearmost aircraft, but his brand new and untested guns soon jammed. Instead of giving up and returning to base, Tizard continued to fly alongside the German bombers and made detailed observations of their speed and performance, information that was unknown at the time. He later wrote, ‘The German crews were all looking up at me, wondering I suppose what I was doing. I then waved goodbye to them, they waved back, and I went home to lunch.’10
In 1918, Tizard joined Hopkinson in the new Air Ministry as administrator in the department of Research and Experiments with the rank of major. Looking back later on his Great War experience, he wrote, ‘The war did me a great deal of good. It pulled me out of the ruck at Oxford … It brought me into close and friendly contact with all sorts and conditions of men, and it made me realise that a purely scientific education was of value for men who had to deal with the practical affairs of life.’11 After the war, Tizard briefly returned to Oxford, but it was clear to him that his future lay not in academic research but in the practical application of science, which despite the war he still felt to be ‘a neglected field in England’.12 He worked part time as consultant to an oil company and helped devise the system for allocating octane numbers to different types of fuel. Then in 1920 he decided to leave Oxford to join the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, the body set up by Sir Frank Heath at the Board of Education in 1916 to mobilise scientific support for the war effort, alongside the committees of the Royal Society. Dedicated to advising the armed forces on different aspects of scientific research, the department was in effect a sort of meeting point for defence officials and academic scientists. With his service and academic backgrounds, Tizard was well suited for the job, and in 1927 he became secretary of the department. Two years later he was appointed rector of Imperial College, London, while in 1933 he added to this the role of chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee (the latest name for Haldane’s Advisory Committee, originally formed in 1909). Throughout the post-war years he continued to cultivate a series of relationships with scientifically minded civil servants and leading academic scientists.
During 1918, by one of those serendipitous twists of fate, both Lindemann and Tizard were to meet at Farnborough the third boffin who would achieve fame and even some fortune in the Second World War. Robert Watson-Watt had been born in Brechin in northeast Scotland. Both the Watsons and the Watts were from Aberdeenshire, and his most famous if distant ancestor was James Watt, the inventor of the condensing steam engine. Watson-Watt’s father was a carpenter and Robert grew up as part of a strict Scottish Presbyterian family. He went to the local grammar school and won a bursary to University College, Dundee, then part of the University of St Andrews, where he was a star student and graduated in engineering in 1912. His professor, William Peddie, not only offered him an assistant lectureship on graduation but also personally tutored him in a course on radio waves. He was the only postgraduate on the course and the one-to-one tuition changed the direction of his career. In the summer of 1914 Watson-Watt offered his services to the War Office but heard nothing. Then, in the autumn of 1915, he was offered a job as a meteorologist at the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough. His daily task was to take records of weather conditions by measuring in great detail the progress of a balloon as it ascended skywards, and from this to produce a daily forecast. In addition, in his spare time Watson-Watt applied his own knowledge of radio waves to try to predict the approach of thunderstorms from the ‘atmospherics’ they generated. Thunderstorms were then a real menace for aviators, and any ability to forecast their approach and their strength would be a great aid to flying. Watson-Watt identified at this early stage that the cathode ray oscilloscope could be used to display the information reflected back by radio signals, but such a device did not become widely available for another decade and much of his research remained of theoretical rather than practical use during the war. Watson-Watt’s meteorological station was located on the roof of the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough where Lindemann and the galaxy of talents from the Chudleigh Mess were based. This enabled Watson-Watt to write later, ‘I was fortunate to sit on the roof which covered such distinguished heads.’13
During the 1920s, Watson-Watt continued his pioneering work on the use of radio waves to predict the weather, and began using radio to explore the ionosphere, the ionised upper layer of the earth’s atmosphere. He became Superintendent of a Radio Research Station at Slough, initially reporting to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, where he got to know Tizard well. In a restructuring in the 1930s, the station came under the auspices of the National Physica
l Laboratory.
Watson-Watt was short, chubby, hugely enthusiastic and endlessly verbose. It was written of him that ‘He never said in one word what could be said in a thousand.’14 Partly because of this and partly thanks to his humble Scottish background, Watson-Watt remained something of an outsider in the world of English science in the postwar years. But all that would change in 1935.
The careers of these three Second World War boffins who had started their pioneering scientific research during the previous war became intertwined in the second half of the 1930s. They were all involved in one of the most famous twentieth-century examples of science coming to the aid of the military. Inside the Scientific Section of the Air Ministry a committee of prominent scientists was formed to explore how to provide effective early warning of the approach of enemy bombers towards the British coast. Tizard was asked to chair the committee, which began investigating possibilities that ranged from the use of huge audio detectors to the employment of infra-red rays. Quite separately, Lindemann denounced in a letter to The Times the fatalism of the prevailing view that ‘the bomber will always get through’ and suggested that scientists should be called upon to find a way of detecting the approach of bombers at long distance. Lindemann took great personal offence when he discovered that Tizard rather than he had already been asked to chair a secret committee to pursue the matter. This led to a dramatic falling out with his old friend that was to last for the next decade.
Secret Warriors Page 37