5.8 KiB
| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Barnes Wallis | 3/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes_Wallis | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T17:40:17.031766+00:00 | kb-cron |
In the 1950s, Wallis developed an experimental rocket-propelled torpedo codenamed HEYDAY. It was powered by compressed air and hydrogen peroxide, and had an unusual streamlined shape designed to maintain laminar flow over much of its length. Tests were conducted from Portland Breakwater in Dorset. The only surviving example is on display in the Explosion Museum of Naval Firepower at Gosport. In 1955, Wallis agreed to act as a consultant to the project to build the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia. Some of the ideas he suggested are the same as or closely related to the final design, including the idea of supporting the dish at its centre, the geodetic structure of the dish and the master equatorial control system. Unhappy with the direction it had taken, Wallis left the project halfway into the design study and refused to accept his £1,000 consultant's fee. In the 1960s, Wallis also proposed using large cargo submarines to transport oil and other goods, thus avoiding surface weather conditions. Wallis's calculations indicated that the power requirements for an underwater vessel were lower than for a comparable conventional ship and they could be made to travel at a much higher speed. He also proposed a novel hull structure which would have allowed greater depths to be reached, and the use of gas turbine engines in a submarine, using liquid oxygen. In the end, nothing came of Wallis's submarine ideas. During the 1960s and into his retirement, he developed ideas for an "all-speed" aircraft, capable of efficient flight at all speed ranges from subsonic to hypersonic. In the late 1950s, Wallis gave a lecture titled "The strength of England" at Eton College, and continued to deliver versions of the talk into the early 1970s, presenting technology and automation as a way to restore Britain's dominance. He advocated nuclear-powered cargo submarines as a means of making Britain immune to future embargoes, and to make it a global trading power. He complained of the loss of aircraft design to the United States, and suggested that Britain could dominate air travel by developing a small supersonic airliner capable of short take-off and landing.
== Honours and awards == Wallis became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1945, was knighted in 1968, and received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1969.
== Charity work == Wallis was awarded £10,000 for his war work from the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors. His grief at the loss of so many airmen in the dams raid was such that Wallis donated the entire sum to his alma mater Christ's Hospital School in 1951 to allow them to set up the RAF Foundationers' Trust, assisting the children of RAF personnel killed or injured in action to attend the school. Around this time he also became an almoner of Christ's Hospital. When he retired from aeronautical work in 1957, he was appointed Treasurer and Chairman of the Council of Almoners of Christ's Hospital, holding the post of Treasurer for nearly 13 years. During this time he oversaw its major reconstruction. Wallis was an active member of the Royal Air Forces Association, the charity that supports the RAF community.
== Personal life ==
In April 1922, Wallis met his cousin-in-law, Molly Bloxam, at a family tea party. She was 17 and he was 34, and her father forbade them from courting. He allowed Wallis to assist Molly with her mathematics courses by correspondence, and they wrote some 250 letters, enlivening them with fictional characters such as "Duke Delta X". The letters gradually became personal, and Wallis proposed marriage on her 20th birthday. They were married on 23 April 1925, and remained so for 54 years until his death in 1979. For 49 years, from 1930 until his death, Wallis lived with his family in Effingham, Surrey, and he is now buried at the local St. Lawrence Church together with his wife. His epitaph in Latin reads "Spernit Humum Fugiente Penna" (Severed from the earth with fleeting wing), a quotation from Horace Ode III.2. They had four children – Barnes (1926–2008), Mary (1927–2019), Elisabeth (b. 1933) and Christopher (1935–2006) – and also adopted Molly's sister's children John and Robert McCormick when their parents were killed in an air raid. His daughter Mary Eyre Wallis later married Harry Stopes-Roe, a son of Marie Stopes. His son Christopher Loudon Wallis was instrumental in the restoration of the watermill and its building on the Stanway Estate near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Wallis was a vegetarian and an advocate of animal rights. He became a vegetarian at age 73.
== In film and fiction == In the 1955 film The Dam Busters, Wallis was played by Michael Redgrave. Wallis's daughter Elisabeth played the camera technician in the water tank sequence. Wallis and his development of the bouncing bomb are mentioned by Charles Gray in the 1969 film Mosquito Squadron. Wallis appears as a fictionalised character in Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships (though its birth date is not the same, 1883 instead of 1887, since he says he was eight when the Time Traveller first used his machine), the authorised sequel to The Time Machine. He is portrayed as a British engineer in an alternate history, where the First World War does not end in 1918, and Wallis concentrates his energies on developing a machine for time travel. As a consequence, it is the Germans who develop the bouncing bomb. His character and the Second World War research lab are featured in the mystery British television series Foyle's War (Series four, part 2). In Scarlet Traces: The Great Game by Ian Edginton, he is responsible for the development of the Cavorite weapon used to win the war on Mars after the departure of Cavor.
== Memorials ==
Plaques and sculptures