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Barnes Wallis is best known as the 'boffin' behind the ingenious bouncing bomb used by 617 Squadron in the famous Dambusters raid, but his work covers a far wider canvas. It ranges from airships, through novel aircraft structures and special weapons to long-range supersonic aircraft, and an extensive collection of patents.
So how did Wallis's engineering genius take ideas from airships and push them forward to create aircraft faster than Concorde? In Bouncing-Bomb Man Iain Murray describes the huge breadth of Wallis's work, showing why his genius brought totally new ideas into these fields, and reveals the science and engineering expertise that he deployed to make them work.
Bouncing-Bomb Man is the first book to describe the entire life's work of Wallis in detail, viewed through his technical achievements. Murray describes how the designs performed and the results of their use - including Wallis's airships, geodetic aircraft, the 'bouncing bombs', the 'earthquake bombs', supersonic aircraft designs, telescopes, cargo carriers and bridges, as well as his sports and medical projects. Because many of Wallis's later designs were never built, Murray has used his experience in 3-D computer imaging to construct them for the first time - as computer generated models. The result is a compelling glimpse inside the design portfolio of one of Britain's greatest engineering geniuses of all time.
There are many places associated with Wallis's work. He did most of his work for Vickers at Weybridge in Surrey, having earlier built the R.100 airship at Howden in Yorkshire; his previous airship work was done at Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. The "bouncing bombs" were tested in Sutherland, Argyll & Bute, Ayrshire, Norfolk and the New Forest. His supersonic aircraft were tested at St Eval and Predannack in Cornwall.
Dr Iain Murray is a lecturer in the School of Computing at the University of Dundee. He is Chair of the Tayside & Fife Branch of the British Science Association, and a member of the Association's Council. Iain acted as a consultant for an episode of the ITV drama series Foyle's War, which featured a group working on the 'bouncing bomb'.
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