Originally Posted by
Cornish Jack
Stirred memories of what was, possibly, an early 'scam'.
I was running Transmitter control at a model aircraft meeting at Abingdon and a chap came up and said he had some interesting information. The meeting was the first 'public' demo of Gerry Jackman's (world's first) model gas turbine, so ,presumably relevant. Anyway, this character said he had a collection of manuscript notes of Whittle's early experiments which he had retrieved from a rubbish bin in Oxford, and could someone advise him as to what best to do with them. From memory, I pointed him to one of the more knowledgeable flyers and heard no more,
Likely authentic documents, or a try-on? Irrelevant at this remove, but I wonder.
I wonder why they were supposed to have come from Oxford? Whittle did a degree at Cambridge.
BTW, I remember, I think from
Not Much of an Engineer, that Hooker was shown the design of Whittle's centrifugal compressor and suggested no improvements. Since Hooker built his reputation on designing the impeller for the Merlin supercharger, I take it that that's evidence that Whittle's design was really, really good.