Today, we meet the oldest airplane designer. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
The airplane that finally
brought down von Richtofen -- the Red Baron -- was
an English biplane called the Sopwith
Camel. The Camel was a
maneuverable little airplane, and my father -- who
flew them in France -- told me they were tricky to
fly. But with a good pilot, they were deadly in
combat. In 1916, the Germans controlled the air
over the Western front. The Sopwith
Camel changed all that in 1917.
It was called the Camel because
someone thought the pilot's windscreen and headrest
looked like a camel's hump on the fuselage. And
Thomas Sopwith manufactured them.
Sopwith was 15 when the Wright brothers flew. He
learned to fly in 1910 when he was 22. By then he'd
raced automobiles and speedboats; and he'd done
daredevil ballooning. In no time he won flying
prizes, and he used the prize money to start making
airplanes. He was now 24, and WW-I was brewing. His
first planes were used early in the war, and when
the Sopwith Camel gave the air back to
the allies in July, 1917, Sopwith was still under
thirty.
He stayed with airplane manufacturing after the
war. In 1935 he was made chairman of the
Hawker-Siddley group, and there he did a most
remarkable thing. In 1936 he decided to produce a
thousand Hawker Hurricanes on his own -- without a
government contract. War was brewing again, and if
the British government wasn't ready, he at least
was. Without his Hawker Hurricanes, England would
have been laid bare against Nazi bombers during the
Battle of Britain.
But that was far from the last of Sopwith. After
WW-II, he was involved in developing the Hawker
Harrier -- the first jet airplane that could take
off and land vertically. You heard a lot about it
during the recent Falklands war.
Sopwith finally celebrated his hundredth birthday
on January 18th, 1988. The RAF sent flights of his
own airplanes past his home near London. What a
history lesson that was -- from early flying
machines to modern jets! -- a parade that spelled
out the whole history of powered flight in the life
of this remarkable man with his uncanny ability to
read the future.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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