Barnes Neville Wallis was born on 26 September 1887 in Ripley, Derbyshire, the son of Charles William George Robinson Wallis and his wife Edith Eyre Wallis (née Ashby). When Barnes was two they moved to New Cross Road in London where Charles Wallis was a doctor, but in 1893 Charles contracted poliomyelitis which left him crippled. He still continued with his career on a solid-wheeled tricycle but it was deeply affected by it.

Wallis was educated at Christ’s Hospital in Horsham, a public school founded in 1552. He and his brother John were nominated by Colonel Newcombe to take a competitive entrance exam for a scholarship as the Wallis family were too poor to pay themselves. Barnes came seventh out of 110 boys and received a place at the school. However, although Barnes was a natural at Mathematics, English and Science, he was completely incompetent at Latin! This was followed by Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham Boys' Grammar School in southeast London.

Wallis left school at seventeen to start work in January 1905 at Thames Engineering Works at Blackheath, southeast London. The company made engines for ships being built by the Thames Shipbuilding Company at Deptford. The company made several efforts to shed its dependence on shipbuilding, and Wallis worked on the first racing car built in England and on the prototype London taxi cab.

Determined to become a marine engineer, in 1908 Wallis changed his apprenticeship to J. Samuel White, the shipbuilders based at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. Completing his apprenticeship in 1911, he began working for his engineering qualification with the Institute of Civil Engineers and joined the firm's ocean going trials staff.

On 1 September 1913 Wallis left J. Samuel White when H.B. Pratt, Chief Draughtsman (Airships) at Vickers, who had worked with Wallis at White's, offered him the post of Chief Assistant. Wallis was to work for them until his retirement in 1971. He joined the airship works at Walney Island, west of Barrow, and there worked on the Admiralty's first rigid airship, HMA No. 9, helping to nurse it though its political stop-go career and protracted development.

With the outbreak of WWI, Wallis immediately enlisted in the Royal Navy as an Engine Room Artificer. Incensed, Pratt used his connections and Wallis was out of the Navy within 24 hours!

On 12 March 1915, HMA No. 9 was cancelled and the team unemployed. Wallis attempted to enlist in the Royal Engineers, but was informed there was no vacancy, so eventually enlisted, like H.B. Pratt before him, in the Artists Rifles. He was promoted to the rank of Pioneer Corporal and was tasked with designing a sanitation system for the training centre at High Beach in Epping Forest.

With a change in government, and consequently policy, HMA No. 9 was resurrected. Pratt and Wallis were both commissioned as Sub-Lieutenants in the RNVR on 7 September 1915, with Wallis posted back to Walney Island. This was not to last long, as on 8 December their resignations were accepted and both returned to the employ of Vickers.

HMA No. 9, which first flew on 16 November 1916, was not a success, but Wallis followed on with the more successful '23' Series of airships. The first airship of his own design, the R80, incorporated many technical innovations and flew in 1920.

In 1921 Vickers closed its Airship Department. Rather than fire Wallis, he was given a retainer of £250 a year to continue private development of airship design, on the condition he did not work for any other aircraft firm. However in December 1921, Vickers conceded it saw little future in airships and ceased paying his retainer. Meanwhile, he had taken advantage of this time and in 1922 he took a degree in engineering via the University of London External Programme.

Following his qualification, but out of work, Wallis now took a teaching position at Chillon College in Switzerland. Back in the UK, Government support for exploring an airship service across the Empire was eventually secured in 1924 with the Imperial Airship Scheme. Two airships were to be built and trialled against each other, the best elements from both being used to develop a second generation of airships. Charles Dennistoun Burney, by now a consultant at Vickers, persuaded the company once more on the commercial viability of airships, and in 1924 the Airship Guarantee Company, a specially created subsidiary of Vickers, was formed, led by Commander Dennis Burney. In anticipation of this, Wallis was invited to return to Vickers in early 1923, at first as part of the Contracts Department then in July 1924 Chief Designer of the Airship Guarantee Company.

When he came to design the R.100, the airship for which he is best known, he pioneered, along with John Edwin Temple, the use of light alloy and production engineering in the structural design of the R100. The production engineering techniques which Wallis had pioneered on R.80 were further developed - most of R.100's structure was built from just 11 components (which could thus be mass-produced in their millions) and the entire structure was built from just 41 different components. Duralumin tubes of the length Wallis required were not available, so he designed a machine which would take flat Duralumin strip (which was available in long lengths), form it into a helix, and rivet the edges together to form a tube, the forunner of his revolutionary geodetic construction. Nevil Shute Norway was the chief calculator for the project, responsible for calculating the stresses on the frame.

Despite a better-than-expected performance and a successful return flight to Canada in 1930, the R100 was broken up following the crash near Beauvais in northern France of its competitor ship, the R101 (which was designed and built by a team from the Government's Air Ministry). The later destruction of the Hindenburg led to the abandonment of airships as a mode of mass transport.

By the time of the R.101 crash, Wallis had moved to the Vickers aircraft factory at the Brooklands motor circuit and aerodrome between Byfleet and Weybridge in Surrey. His first effort at total aircraft design was the M.1/30 biplane torpedo bomber, which used light alloy wing spars inspired by the girder structure of R.100. Around this time, Wallis hit upon a revolutionary structural idea – rather than building an aircraft structure on the principle of a beam, which supports an external aerodynamic skin, he developed a new type of structure which had the structural members formed within the aerodynamic shape itself. This required the structural members to follow the curved outer shape of the fuselage and wings. These members followed geodesic curves in the surface, the shortest distance between two points in the curved surface - this gave the new structure its name, geodetics. By having the curves form two helices at right angles to one another, the geodetic members became mutually supporting, and the overall framework became immensely strong. In addition to being comparatively light and strong, the fact that the geodetic structure was all in the outer part of the airframe meant that the centre was a large empty space, ready to take payload or fuel. The pre-war aircraft designs of Rex Pierson, the Wellesley, the Wellington and the later Warwick and Windsor all employed Wallis' geodetic design in the fuselage and wing structures.

The Wellington had one of the most robust airframes ever developed, and pictures of its skeleton largely shot away, but still sound enough to bring its crew home safely, are still impressive. The geodetic construction offered a light and strong airframe (compared to conventional designs), with clearly defined space within for fuel tanks, payload and so on. However the technique was not easily transferred to other aircraft manufacturers, nor was Vickers able to build other designs in factories tooled for geodetic work.

After the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe in 1939, Wallis saw a need for strategic bombing to destroy the enemy's ability to wage war and he wrote a paper entitled "A Note on a Method of Attacking the Axis Powers". Referring to the enemy's power supplies, he wrote (as Axiom 3): "If their destruction or paralysis can be accomplished they offer a means of rendering the enemy utterly incapable of continuing to prosecute the war". As a means to do this, he proposed huge bombs that could concentrate their force and destroy targets which were otherwise unlikely to be affected. Wallis's first super-large bomb design came out at some ten tonnes, far more than any current bomber could carry. In response to the absence of a suitable aircraft, Wallis revived an earlier concept for a large six-engine bomber, known initially as the 'High Altitude Stratosphere Bomber' and later simply as the 'Victory Bomber'.

In May 1941, the Air Staff rejected both the Victory Bomber and the bomb, observing that the aircraft was unlikely to be completed before the war ended.The thinly-stretched resources for bombers were being mostly allocated to the already-ambitious introduction of multiple four-engine bomber projects. However, Wallis's concepts had drawn attention within the establishment and his concepts continued to be explored, in particular the value of attacking infrastructure such as dams was being recognised, and the concept for the weapon did not meet its demise in the May 1941 decision.

Early in 1942, Wallis began experimenting with skipping marbles over water tanks in his garden, leading to his April 1942 paper "Spherical Bomb — Surface Torpedo". The idea was that a bomb could skip over the water surface, avoiding torpedo nets, and sink directly next to a battleship or dam wall as a depth charge, with the surrounding water concentrating the force of the explosion on the target.

A crucial innovation was the addition of backspin, which caused the bomb to trail behind the dropping aircraft (decreasing the chance of that aircraft being damaged by the force of the explosion below), increased the range of the bomb, and also prevented it from moving away from the target wall as it sank. After some initial scepticism, the Air Force accepted Wallis's bouncing bomb (codenamed Upkeep) for attacks on the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams in the Ruhr area.

After the success of the "bouncing bomb", Wallis was able to return to his huge bombs, producing first the Tallboy (6 tonnes) and then the Grand Slam (10 tonnes) deep-penetration earthquake bombs. These were not the same as the 5-tonne "blockbuster" bomb, which was a conventional blast bomb.

Although there was still no aircraft capable of lifting these two bombs to their optimal release altitude, they could still be dropped from a lower height, entering the earth at supersonic speed and penetrating to a depth of 20 metres before exploding. They were used on strategic German targets such as V-2 rocket launch sites, the V-3 supergun bunker, submarine pens, and other reinforced structures, large civil constructions such as viaducts and bridges, as well as the German battleship Tirpitz. They were the forerunners of modern bunker-busting bombs.

Having been dispersed with the Design Office from Brooklands to the nearby Burhill Golf Club in Hersham, after the Vickers factory was badly bombed in September 1940, Wallis returned to Brooklands in November 1945 as Head of the Vickers-Armstrongs Research and Development Department and was based in the former motor circuit's 1907 Clubhouse. Here he and his staff worked on many futuristic aerospace projects including supersonic flight and "swing-wing" technology. Following the terrible death toll of the aircrews involved in the Dambusters raid, he made a conscious effort never again to endanger the lives of his test pilots. His designs were extensively tested in model form, and consequently he became a pioneer in the remote control of aircraft.

A massive 19,533 square ft Stratosphere Chamber (which was the world's largest facility of its type), was designed and built beside the Clubhouse by 1948 and became the focus for much R&D work under Wallis's direction in the 1950s and 1960s, including research into supersonic aerodynamics that contributed to the design of Concorde, before finally closing by 1980.

Wallis was awarded £10,000 for his war work from the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors. His grief at the loss of so many airmen in the dams raid was such that Wallis donated the entire sum to his alma mater Christ's Hospital School in 1951 to allow them to set up the RAF Foundationers' Trust, allowing the children of RAF personnel killed or injured in action to attend the school. Around this time he also became an Almoner of Christ's Hospital. When he retired from aeronautical work in 1957, he was appointed Treasurer and Chairman of the Council of Almoners of Christ's Hospital, holding the post of Treasurer for nearly 13 years. During this time he oversaw its major reconstruction.

Although he did not invent the concept, Wallis did much pioneering engineering work to make the swing-wing functional. He developed the wing-controlled aerodyne, a concept for a tailless aeroplane controlled entirely by wing movement with no separate control surfaces. His "Wild Goose", designed in the late 1940s, was intended to use laminar flow, and alongside it he also worked on the Green Lizard cruise missile and the Heston JC.9 manned experimental aeroplane. The "Swallow" was a supersonic development of Wild Goose, designed in the mid-1950s, which could have been developed for either military or civil applications. Both Wild Goose and Swallow were flight tested as large (30 ft span) flying scale models, based at Predannack in Cornwall. However, despite very promising wind tunnel and model work, his designs were not adopted. Government funding for "Swallow" was cancelled in the round of cuts following the Sandys Defence White Paper in 1957, although Vickers continued model trials with some support from the RAE.

An attempt to gain American funding led Wallis to initiate a joint NASA-Vickers study. NASA found aerodynamic problems with the Swallow and, informed also by their work on the Bell X-5, settled for a conventional tail which would eventually lead in turn to the TFX programme and the General Dynamics F-111. In the UK Vickers submitted a wing-controlled aerodyne for OR.346 for a reconnaissance/strike-fighter-bomber, effectively the TSR-2 specification with added fighter capability. When Maurice Brennan left Vickers for Folland he worked on the FO.147, a variable-sweep development of the Gnat lightweight fighter-trainer, offering both tailed and tailless options. Wallis's ideas were ultimately passed over in the UK in favour of the fixed-wing BAC TSR-2 (on which one of his sons worked) and Concorde. He was critical of both, believing that swing-wings design would have been more appropriate. In the mid-1960s, TSR-2 was ignominiously scrapped in favour of the American F-111, which had swing wings influenced by Wallis's work at NASA, although this order was also subsequently cancelled.

By 1960, Wallis realised that Mach 2.5 (the speed limit on the slender delta) was too slow (the Americans had a Mach 3 SST in prospect), and he produced a new design for an “all-speed” aircraft this time with a top speed of Mach 4-5. The best shape for a hypersonic wing was of low span (i.e. short) and of high chord (i.e. long from leading to trailing edge); however, such a shape is very poor for low-speed flight. Wallis thus proposed to break the wing into a series of winglet pairs, each pair pivoted on a common axis running across the fuselage. When “closed”, the winglets would form a single high-chord wing, but when pivoted (leading edge upwards), they formed in effect a series of flaps, giving large amounts of lift - rather in the fashion of a venetian blind. Wallis developed designs for several forms of this “Cascade” aircraft, ranging from a one-man reconnaissance aircraft to a 100-seat passenger aircraft that could have taken off from a 300-yard runway and flown 10,000 miles at speeds in excess of Mach 4.

Contemporary designers exploring speeds in this range were being challenged by the materials problems associated with the heat generated by the air friction. Solutions to these used materials like stainless steel and titanium for the airframe. However, Wallis was keen to continue to use light alloys, but devised an “isothermal flight” profile which balanced increasing speed with increasing height (and hence thinner air), allowing the airframe temperature to remain within safe limits.

Wallis’s experimentation with new forms continued, and he realised that he could get a similar effect to the Cascade aircraft by using one single wing (still pivoted on a horizontal shaft) with large leading- and trailing-edge flaps. This (and in some versions, a bending fuselage to give a partially downward exhaust from the engines) allowed the configuration of the aircraft to be continually altered for the wide range of different flight regimes encountered between take-off and a cruise at above 100,000ft and Mach 4. As the aircraft was in the most efficient configuration at all times, range could be maximised, and a non-stop London-Sydney flight was believed to be achievable with this "universal" aircraft.

In the 1950s, Wallis developed an experimental rocket-propelled torpedo codenamed HEYDAY. It was powered by compressed air and hydrogen peroxide, and had an unusual streamlined shape designed to maintain laminar flow over much of its length. Tests were conducted from Portland Breakwater in Dorset.

In 1955 Wallis agreed to act as a consultant to the project to build the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia. Some of the ideas he suggested are the same as or closely related to the final design, including the idea of supporting the dish at its centre, the geodetic structure of the dish and the master equatorial control system. Unhappy with the direction it had taken, Wallis left the project halfway into the design study and refused to accept his £1,000 consultant's fee.

In the 1960s, Wallis also proposed using large cargo submarines to transport oil and other goods, thus avoiding surface weather conditions. Moreover, Wallis's calculations indicated, the power requirements for an underwater vessel were lower than for a comparable conventional ship and they could be made to travel at a much higher speed. He also proposed a novel hull structure which would have allowed greater depths to be reached and the use of gas turbine engines in a submarine, using liquid oxygen. In the end, nothing came of Wallis's submarine ideas.

During the 1960s and into his retirement, he developed ideas for an "all-speed" aircraft, capable of efficient flight at all speed ranges from subsonic to hypersonic. In particular, his ideas and understanding of supersonic aerodynamics led to research that underwrote the design of the air intakes for Concorde's Olympus 593 engines. Using variable geometry air intakes, the Olympus engines were able to perform efficiently at all speeds from sub-sonic take-off and climb through to supercruise at over Mach 2.

In the late 1950s, Wallis gave a lecture entitled "The strength of England" at Eton College, and continued to deliver versions of the talk into the early 1970s, presenting technology and automation as a way to restore Britain's dominance. He advocated nuclear-powered cargo submarines as a means of making Britain immune to future embargoes, and to make it a global trading power. He complained of the loss of aircraft design to the US, and suggested that Britain could dominate air travel by developing a small supersonic airliner capable of short take-off and landing.

Wallis became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1945 and was knighted in 1968. Wallis also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1969.

Sir Barnes Neville Wallis CBE FRS RDI FRAeS died on 30 October 1979 in Effingham, Surrey,

Biography References

1. Barnes Wallis, A Biography, J.E. Morpurgo (Longman, 1972)
2. http://www.sirbarneswallis.com/index.php
3. Wikipedia