Slide Rule
Nevil Shute
224 pages
published in 1954
Autobiographies are tricky. There are the glossy vacant autobiographies only published because the "Writer" is a celebrity, only bought because "amazing revelations" are promised (then usually given away in the Daily Mirror), about which the less said the better. Apart from those, there are also quite a lot of autobiographies written by people who aren't that interesting or cannot write, or both. And even if somebody can write and has led an interesting life, not everything during their life may be equally interesting. I've found (auto)biographies which deal with the subjects entire life tend to lack focus and degenerate in "and then that happened and then I did this and World War II broke out and then I did this".
Fortunately, Slide Rule is the autobiography of Nevil Shute, who has led an interesting life, who can write well and who wisely focussed on one particular aspect of his life, his work in Britain's nascent aeroplane industry in the 1920ties and 1930ties.
Slide Rule starts with an introductionary chapter about Nevil Shute's childhood and upbringing, his school years and service during the Great War. It then continues with his study at Oxford, when he started to work for the DeHavilland aircraft company, during the vacaction periods. At that time, your vacation time as a student was intended for you to leisurely digest the lessons learned and start your own projects. Shute's project was working on planes. He also learned to fly then.
We now come to the meat of the book, which consists of two parts. In the first, the story of the R100 and R101 airships is told, the second tells of his time as a directory of the Airspeed airplane company he cofounded.
The R100 and R101 projects were both started around 1924, the first by Vickers, the other by the Air Ministry, in response to a proposal by Vickers to built six airships and operate them on the Empire routes (from England to India e.g.). The Air Ministry was not best pleased with this, arguing that they were the only ones with the expertise to built airships. Hence, both Vickersa and the Air ministry got an order for one airship, with the one adhering the best to the government's specifications being granted more orders. If you are familiar with aerospace history, you probably know what happened to the R101: it crashed down in France, on her maiden flight to India, with only six people out of fifty four surviving the crash. The R100 was luckier, as well as being the better design, surviving her earlier maiden flight to Canada, but never flew afterwards.
Shute himself worked on the R100 project, as the head calculator, the person responsible for overseeing all the calculations needed to design and built the space ship, which in those benighted days before the invention of computer, was quite a difficult task. No easy computer modelling here: everything had to be calculated by hand, worked through to see if it made sense and then tested, after which more often than not things had to be recalculated again. Fortunately for the reader, Shute doesn't just talk about his own work, but describes the entire project, comparing and contrasting it to their unfortunate competitor's project as well. As far as I can judge, he does this fairly and without malice. It is all quite interesting and easy to follow.
The same also goes for his time at Airspeed, the company he helped found and at which he was a director from 1930 till 1938. In this section, the focus shifts from the actual design and building of airplanes to the difficulties in setting up and running a small airplane builder. Airspeed was chronically undefunded, always in debt and never turned a profit until the year Shute left the company --not because it was badly led or built bad airplanes, just because this was in the middle of the great depression and because the British airplane market was really competitive and difficult to break into. Shutes' observations about it make a good deal of sense, e.g. he recognised that those who create companies are not perse the best people to lead them when they become succesful...
I finished Slide Rule in less than two days, and was absolutely engrossed by it. Very much worth checking out for those interested in Shute or airplanes and still interesting to others as well.
