Merlin

[KEV67]

This book is about the Rolls Royce Merlin, which powered Spitfires, Huricanes, Mosquitos, Lancasters, P51 Mustangs and numerous other aircraft. Definitely the most important aircraft engine produced in Britain during WW2. I am about half way through. It is a bit different to what I was expecting. I thought it would be about superchargers, carburettors, high octane fuels and compressor ratios, rare metals, coolant temperatures, etc, etc. Instead, it started off with gliders, the development of the internal combustion and the early days of flight. Then it recounts how Henry Royce met Charles Rolls who formed the company, Rolls Royce. Then it proceeds through WW1, the interwar years, and then WW2, which I am getting to now. The book is not so much about the engineering, but the pretty wide characters that got involved along the way. For example, there is a chapter on Lady Lucy Houston, who started off as a chorus dancer in Paris and monkey branched her way into the British aristocracy. She put up the money for Britain's Scheider Cup entry for flying boats after the Labour government pulled its funding in 1931. So far my favourite character is Henry Royce himself. He started off as a humble apprentice. He would look at at a piece of engineering someone else had done and find a way of improving it. These days Rolls Royce cars are about opulence, but back in the early days, Rolls Royce cars gained the reputation for reliability and smoothness. Henry Royce was a perfectionist. He insisted that his engineers get their designs right on the draught board, before going to the next stage and attempting to fix it then. I used to be a computer programmer, and on the software engineering course I attended, we were taught to get the specifications right, before the high level design, and then the high level design before the detailed design, and then the code. It was very difficult to do. Henry Royce reminded me a bit of some of the very clever engineers I met. He could just do things and think of solutions. Apparently Royce said he did not invent things; investors went broke. He just improved things. Stylistically, I find the author's asides jar. For example, he breaks off to say he closed off some apparently redundant exhausts on a Ferrari to find the engine did not sound as musical. On another aside, he says he talked to a survivor of the Guernica bombing. The Nazis were testing their bombers on ordinary citizens. It was nothing directly to do with the Merlin.