Originally Posted by
Oldlae
When one of the "talking heads" mentioned fitting a blower to the back of the engine was he talking about the 1st stage supercharger or the 2nd stage?
I haven't yet watched the film however this may help with your question-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Hooker
"In late 1937, while working at the
Admiralty he applied for a job at
Rolls-Royce, and after being interviewed by
Ernest Hives, started there in January 1938. He was permitted to study anything that caught his fancy, and soon moved into the
supercharger design department. He started researching the superchargers used on the
Merlin engine, and calculated that big improvements could be made to their efficiency. His recommendations were put into the production line for newer versions, notably the Merlin 45, improving its power by approximately 30%, and then the Merlin 61.
The Merlin 45 was fitted into the
Spitfire Mk V in October 1940, which was produced in the greatest number of any Spitfire variant. The same year the
Air Ministry made a request for a
turbocharged Merlin for use in the planned high altitude
Wellington VI bomber. Declining the suggestion to use turbocharging,
[6] Hooker instead designed a two-stage supercharger for the engine, with the resulting two-stage-supercharged Merlin 61 being fitted into the Spitfire Mk IX, the second most-produced Spitfire variant, which entered service in July 1942. The Merlin 61 arrived in time to give the Spitfire a desperately needed advantage in rate of climb and service ceiling over the
Focke-Wulf Fw 190.
One major outcome of his work introduced a generalised method of predicting and comparing aircraft engine performance under flight conditions."
Also re hooker on Pprune-
Stanley Hooker "Not Much of an Engineer"
I have just read all of the available Google Books preview of this book and it is amazing. The preview offered to me covers from the start as far as a big chunk of Chapter 2 (The Merlin).
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...page&q&f=false