Nevil Norway (he wrote under his middle name Shute to keep his writing career and his engineering career apart) was born in 1899 to a senior English civil servant. In a society as unequal as England before World War I, life was nice if you were near the top: his father had 3 servants, a gardener and a gardener's boy, while putting his two sons through private schools. Nevil was interested in flight and engineering from an early age. During World War I, Nevil's older brother was wounded and died of an infection, penicillin not having been invented yet; Nevil failed to get an officer's commission and was drafted as a private; fortunately, the war ended before his unit saw action. After he was discharged from the army, Nevil studied engineering at Oxford (frankly, I did not know that this university has a department of engineering), but was a mediocre student: internships at de Havilland Aircraft Company suited him better. After graduation, Shute spent 5 years doing stress analysis computations for the R100, a Zeppelin-class airship built for travel through the British Empire. At the same time as a private company was building the R100, a government-owned company was building the R101, an airship of the same class with a different design. The two engineering teams were fierce rivals, working in secrecy from each other. Shute says that the R100 was a better design because a private company is accountable to its shareholders, and a government-owned company is not accountable to anybody, but the materials I found on the Internet say that it is unclear, which design was better. The R100 was 720 feet long and had the top speed 81 mph (in contrast, a Boeing 747-400 is 232 feet long and has the top speed 614 mph). In the final acceptance test in 1930, it flew from Cardington, Bedfordshire, to Montreal in a 79-hour flight. The acceptance test for the R101 involved a flight to Karachi; unfortunately, when the airship was over France, it crashed and exploded, killing 48 people. This ended the British airship building program. Afterwards, Shute was a cofounder of a startup aircraft manufacturer, which was not unlike software startups 70 years later: they raised the seed capital by searching for people who have recently sold land and didn't know, what to do with the money; paid highly skilled workers partly in stock; had troubles with creditors. The Great Depression was not the best time to manufacture civil aircraft; what saved the company was the re-militarization of the world in the late 1930s. Both sides of the Spanish Civil War wanted all the aircraft they could get their hands on; the Emperor of Abyssinia wanted something European soldiers of fortune could fly and bomb the Italian fuel depots from; the RAF wanted trainers for its bomber crews. Although the company has grown large, it was still unprofitable; eventually, the board of directors forced Shute out. Writing novels has been Shute's hobby since the airship days, but after one of his novels was filmed in Hollywood, he became a popular writer, so he decided to have a second career as a professional novelist rather than an engineer.
Nevil Shute (1899-1960; full name Nevil Shute Norway) was a popular English novelist in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Slide rule is his memoir of his earlier life, focusing on his adult years when he earned his living as an engineer and a businessman. Shute's father was a high ranking civil servant in the British Post Office. Shute was educated at private schools, and, after a stint in the British army towards the end of the First World War (he saw no action), at Oxford University where he got a third class (I think that means academically unimpressive) degree in engineering. He worked at De Havilands, an aircraft manufactuer, after graduation (I think he had served as unpaid intern to the firm during college vacations earlier) and then went to work on the R100, a British rigid airship. At the time (1920s) one airship in Britain, the R100, was being built as a private venture for government contract, while simultaneously the Air Ministry was building its own airship to comparable specifications, the R101. Shute's duties on the R100 would now be done by a computer; he was in charge of the calculations, a process involving several people, much pencil and paper, and slide rules. While working as an engineer during the day, Shute was writing his first novels in the evenings. Suffice it to say that the R100 flew successfully to Canada while the R101 crashed into a hill in France on its first major trip, which was intended to take it to India. Shute believed that the publicity associated with the government's airship, in conjunction with political considerations, got the builders (a number of the senior engineering staff were on R101 when it went down) in a position that they felt they had to attempt the flight, although by that time they had become aware of certain problems (weighed too much, the construction of the outer cover was unsuitable, etc.) that made it a marginal machine at best. The crash and the Depression (the ships were completed put an end to British government funding of airships, and Shute went on to become one of the founders of an aircraft manufactuering firm, Airspeed. Shute describes the difficulty in raising money (people entrusted with other people's money, like banks and government development programs, won't risk it on a truely entrepeneurial venture), the need to have rich folks with spare cash to fund such risky projects, the need to go greatly into debt to fund such projects, and the need for a small firm that cannot compete with established firms on price to be technically innovative. Despite tribulations, Airspeed was ultimately successful; many of the trainer aircraft used by Britain during the Second World War were based on its designs. By the start of the Second World War Shute had been forced out of the firm, which after he got over the shock was not an unwelcome development as the exciting, pioneering phase was over and his novels (and associated film rights) were starting to pay well. Shute served in a technical capacity in the Royal Navy during the Second World War.
What do You think about Slide Rule (2002)?
This was an interesting book, but a little slow going. It begins with a little about Shute's childhood.He had a stammering problem and had some trouble getting a commission into the service because of it. He finally enlisted near the end of WWI. After the war, he went to Oxford. He wrote a couple of books during college, but published During vacations he helped to sail a yacht and then got into aircraft at Airco and deHavilands, and then learned to fly. He finally go a job working on the R100 which was being built in competition with the R101. The difference was the R101 was built under the auspices of the Air Ministry, while the R100 was by private industry. There was a lot about how much better the R100 was because of private industry, and how inefficient the government was. His first two books were published while working on the R100. After the R101 crashed, Shute decided to start his own company, Airspeed. He discussed his difficulties with financing and how in preparation for WWII, the Air Ministry made it really difficult to make money on aircraft for the government. The book ends with his leaving Airspeed.
—Scilla
A first-class storyteller tells us about his early life, much of which is spent mucking about in airships. Not just any airships, either. Nevil Shute (Nevil S Norway, that is) was on the design team of the HMA R100 and part of the book is is diary of the test flight to Canada. The shenanigans of airship development are not really so different from working in the games or TV industries, a point that was brought home to me when Shute mentions that the Air Ministry officials who are least likely to swep unplatable truths under the carpet are the independently wealthy, as they can afford to take career-risking stands that somebody who needs the job will not do.
—Dave Morris
Reading this book was a peculiar experience. I was aware of Shute only as a writer, especially of "On the Beach", so I had expected to read the story of a writers life. However, it is the story of Shute's initial career as an aeronautical engineer, initially as a key player in the team building Britain's R100 airship, and then as one of the founders of Airspeed, a player in the British aircraft industry during the evolution from the heroic age of aviation into the beginnings of commercial aviation. Quite readable, despite a few discussions of his rather right-wing views on inherited wealth.
—Bfisher
