Though most famous for his “Bouncing Bomb” that was used during the Dambusters raid (Operation Chastise), Barnes Wallis was behind much more – from airship designs, to bombs, to engine designs – a lot of which he’s isn’t remembered for!
If you add all this up, there’s a pretty strong argument that Barnes Wallis is the most influential aerospace engineer ever, perhaps only rivalled by the Wright Brothers.
Without him, the Allies (and Britain in particular) may have actually lost WWII, or at least been devastated by it even more than they were in our timeline, and Britain’s postwar dominance would’ve almost certainly been even shorter…
Early Life
Barnes Neville Wallis was born on September 26 1887 in the town of Ripley in Derbyshire. The second eldest of four children born to doctor, Charles William George Robinson Wallis, and his wife, Edith Ashby, a young Barnes had a strong relationship with his siblings.
At the age of two, the family moved from Ripley to the Southeast of London so Barnes’ father could continue his medical career.
But tragedy struck Wallis family in 1893, when Charles contracted polio that left him paralyzed for the rest of his life. Though he was still able to continue working, it was in a vastly reduced capacity and Barnes would lament years later that his father was never the same again.
Particularly close with his brother John (who was born the year before him), the pair spent hours in the makeshift workshop they had in their house at 241 New Cross Road, often making toys for their younger siblings to play with.
Though his father was a doctor – then, like now, a well-paid job – the Wallis family wasn’t particularly rich, due to Charles’ disability. Yet this didn’t stop Barnes from excelling at school, eventually catching the attention of Colonel Newcombe.
Nominating the young Barnes and his brother, John, to sit the entrance exam for a scholarship to attend the prestigious public school (a type of British private school) Christ’s Hospital in Horsham, the alma mater of numerous British leaders.
Both John and Barnes Wallis were awarded scholarships, with Barnes coming seventh out of 110, and both subsequently attended the school.
Continuing to excel, Barnes showed a natural aptitude for Mathematics, English and Science but struggled with Latin, which he would need if he wanted to have a medical like his father had before him.
By the time he left school at 17, Barnes had decided to forgo a medical career and instead focus on becoming an engineer, realizing that building things that could improve people’s lives was his calling, not saving lives directly.
In January 1905, a 17 year-old Barnes took a job at Thames Engineering Works, the motor subsidiary of the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company, long one of Britain’s largest engineering conglomerates.
Working on ship engines, Barnes fell in love with ships and three years later, in 1908, became an apprentice at J. Samuel Wright, a British shipbuilder based on the Isle of Man famous for producing a fairly new type of ship called a “Destroyer”.
Airships
In 1913, Barnes Wallis got a job at Vickers thanks a good word from H. B. Pratt, a senior aircraft designer at the company and a close friend of Barnes’ who’d worked with him at J. Samuel Wright.
At the time Vickers was probably the most famous shipbuilding firm in Britain (hence why Barnes Wallis tried to get a job with them), but the company was beginning to diversify into other engineering-related areas: namely aviation.
Though Barnes hadn’t worked on any of J. Samuel Wright’s early aircraft, nor did he have any aviation experience to speak of, his experience at the firm convinced Vickers higher-ups to make him an aircraft designer.
Picking it up quickly, Barnes worked under Pratt to help design the HMA No.9r rigid airship. Ordered in 1913, the onset of WWI delayed the No.9r’s entrance, as the Admiralty initially canceled the project and both Barnes and Pratt enlisted in the Navy and Army respectively.
Eventually the Admiralty reordered the No.9r and Vickers used its close bond with the military to get its designers back, including Barnes and Pratt. Finishing off the design, the No.9r first flew on November 27 1916, where it was used mostly for experimental purposes.
It was later dismantled in June 1918 after only 165 flight hours.
In November 1917, Barnes Wallis began work on his first solo design, which he called the R80. Beyond being the first streamlined airship built in Britain, Barnes had the genius idea to use color-coded wiring of the aircraft, which allowed problems to be diagnosed quicker.
This system is still used today – over 100 years later!
R100
Using what he’d learned designing and building the R80, Barnes set about building an even larger airship for the British government, one capable of flying intercontinental routes connecting the British Empire’s major cities other than by sea.
Wanting to increase the safety of the airship, which he called the R100, Barnes pioneered the development of what he called geodesic airframes, a space frame formed from a spirally crossed basket-weave of load-bearing members.
This decreased the chances of airframe fatigue, which had downed so many airships previously. Geodesic (also called geodetic) airframes would later become a mainstay of the aircraft Barnes Wallis designed for Vickers.
Along with John E. Temple, Barnes Wallis pioneered the development of a light, yet durable alloy for the R100’s airframe, which beyond being stronger than alternatives like steel, were also lighter, thus improving economics.
Completed by late 1929, the R100 had its first flight on December 16 that year, revealing better than expected performance. On July 29 1930, the R100 departed Britain for Canada, hoping to prove that it could do what Barnes Wallis said it could.
78 hours later, the R100 arrived in Montreal before proceeding to make a tour of Canada’s major cities, including Ottawa and Toronto (where it famously flew over the Canadian Bank of Commerce Building), as well as Niagara Falls.
Sadly, the R100’s demise would come in 1930. Not because of the R100 itself or because of anything Barnes Wallis or Vickers did, but because of what the government did.
When they ordered the R100 from Vickers, they also ordered another airship, a sister ship if you will, called the R101.
Though not designed by Vickers or Wallis, the two airships shared many design features. So when the R101 crashed in France en route to India on October 5 1930, the government grounded the R100 out of safety concerns.
After a year of debating what should come of the R100, it was decided that it should be deflated, cut into pieces and sold for scrap, bringing in only £600 (roughly £42,000 adjusted for inflation). For reference, the R100 had cost the government £427,113 (roughly £29.8 million in today’s pounds).
This, combined with the later crash of the Hindenburg, effectively ended the use of airships as means of mass transportation and Barnes Wallis’s involvement with their design.
WWII
Transferred to Vickers’ Brooklands factory in Surrey, Barnes rose to the rank of assistant chief designer at Vickers and worked on the Wellesley, Wellington, Warrick and Windsor bombers under Vickers chief designer, Rex Pierson.
When war broke out in September 1939, Barnes saw that the only way to beat the Axis was to bomb them into submission, and wrote an academic paper on the matter, entitled: Note on a Method of Attacking the Axis Powers.
Focusing particularly on how Britain should aim to destroy Nazi Germany’s power supplies (as this would leave them unable to produce electricity they needed for their war machine), Barnes made the assertion that Britain needed to develop a bigger bomb for this.
Not long after he published his paper, Barnes had his first design. Weighing in at ten tons (9,072 kg), his design was the largest bomb ever designed in the history of mankind.
Though it was more than powerful enough to completely destroy Germany’s hydroelectric power stations, there was only one (slight) issue: there was not a bomber big enough to carry it.
Undeterred, Barnes set about designing a bomber that could, which he called the “Victory Bomber”.
To that end, Barnes spent the next year and a half designing an aircraft 96 feet long (29 m), with a wingspan of 172 feet (52 m), powered by six Rolls Royce Merlin or Bristol Hercules engines, that could drop these large bombs on German targets.
Though he even went as far to produce a wooden mockup to impress the Air Ministry, the Air Staff ultimately rejected his design in May 1941, as it they didn’t believe it would help win the war.
Bouncing Bomb
Yet Barnes didn’t give up on his idea of bombing German electricity production. He just realized he needed to go about it a different way.
In early 1942, Barnes was skimming stones in a water tank in his garden when he had an epiphany: Why not design a depth charge-like bomb that could skim across the water like the stones he was throwing could?
Publishing yet another paper in April 1942 (entitled: Spherical Bomb – Surface Torpedo), Barnes highlighted how his theoretical bomb would avoid torpedo nets, skimming across the water before sinking next to the dam wall and detonating.
Exploding in the water actually increased the bomb’s effectiveness, as the water would contain the explosion and direct all its energy towards the dam or in some cases, the ship, it was designed to destroy.
Whilst the Air Staff were initially skeptical, they eventually gave him the greenlight for a project they called Upkeep. This eventually led to the bouncing bomb he’s so famous for.
Aside from actually designing the bouncing bomb, Barnes also developed the method of dropping the bomb to make it both more accurate and prevent the Avro Lancasters that were dropping the bombs, from being caught in the blast radius.
This involved developing a backspin on the bomb, and trailing the Lancaster, both making sure it reached its target and giving the Lancaster enough time to get out of the blast radius safely.
With the bombs fully designed and built by May 1943, Air Chief Marshall Charles Portal assigned 30 Lancasters to the newly formed 617 Squadron based at RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, under the command of 24 year-old Wing Commander Guy Gibson, a veteran of 170 bombing missions.
Selecting the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams in the Ruhr Valley – Germany’s industrial heartland – Barnes Wallis personally briefed the squadron on how the bouncing bomb worked and what they needed to do to destroy the dams.
In the late hours of May 16 1943, 617 Squadron took off from RAF Scampton in what’s officially known as Operation Chastise and headed for Germany, flying at incredibly low levels to avoid German radar and relying on the moon to get them where they wanted to go.
Reaching their targets by the early morning of May 17, all three dams were destroyed and Gibson returned home.
A high-profile success just when Britain needed it, newspapers across the world reported on the incident, making both Guy Gibson and Barnes Wallis national heroes seemingly overnight!
Earthquake Bomb
Although the bouncing had helped cripple Nazi Germany’s energy production and was on its way to helping the Allies win the war, there wasn’t really any need for more bouncing bombs. They’d served their purpose.
This allowed Barnes to return to his work on large bombs, which he’d abandoned to design the Bouncing Bomb.
Realizing his ten ton design was too heavy, he set about designing a 5,200 kg bomb he called “Tallboy”. For maximum damage, the Tallboy wasn’t designed to detonate on impact as most other bombs do, but rather, bury itself deep in the ground and then explode.
Much like the water did to the bouncing bomb, the ground would contain the explosion and force it up and outwards, making the bomb far more lethal per gram of Torpex (a type of WWII-era explosive) than other bombs of the time.
Entered into service in June 1944, the Tallboy was one of the deadliest bombs deployed by the British during the war, helping to destroy V-2 sites, V-3 bunkers and submarine pens, as well as being used to sink the Tirpitz, the sister ship to the famed Bismarck, in November 1944.
A second earthquake bomb, known as the Grand Slam, entered service in 1945 and became famous for its destruction of key German bridges and U-Boat pens in the waning days of the war.
Back home, earthquake bombs were nicknamed “blockbusters” by British newspapers (especially Max Aitken’s) due to its propensity to destroy an entire city block.
Postwar
In the wake of the Allied victory, Vickers promoted Barnes to the Head of Vickers-Armstrong Research and Development Department and worked out of the company’s Brooklands factory. Here, Barnes led a team that was researching supersonic flight and developing swing-wing technology to make this a reality.
From his research, Barnes Wallis and his team developed the Wild Goose UAV. A tailless variable-sweep aircraft, the Wild Goose was nothing short of an engineering masterpiece, with the wing doing the job of both the wing and tail on a conventional aircraft.
After rigorous testing the Wild Goose was developed into the Swallow, a supersonic aircraft that had both civilian and military applications. Though initially promising, the project was later cancelled due to spending cuts.
Aside proving that swing wing technology was indeed viable, the Wild Goose/Swallow project led to the invention of remote control aircraft for testing purposes.
Though the Dambusters raid was a resounding success and made Barnes Wallis a national hero, he himself was rather distressed at the number of Lancaster crews lost on the raid due to faulty designs, and vowed to never let it happen again.
And he came through on that promise.
Before he even considered building prototypes of the Wild Goose/Swallow (thus endangering the lives of test pilots), Barnes and his team built scale models and tested them, adjusting their design according to how well they performed in tests.
Despite the project being cancelled, Barnes was not willing to quit just yet. In an attempt to keep the project alive, Barnes reached out to the Americans to start a joint NASA-Vickers study that eventually led to Barnes/Vickers helping on the Bell X-5.
Later Life
Though he was well into his seventies and eighties, Barnes Wallis continued to work for Vickers well into the 1950’s and 1960’s, continuing to push the adoption of swing wing designs on both commercial and military aircraft alike.
It was at this point where Wallis began to move away from designing aircraft and onto other projects for Vickers, though he still remained a pivotal force behind Vickers and later BAC’s 1950’s and 1960’s aircraft.
During the 1950’s, Barnes developed a rocket-propelled torpedo, known as HEYDAY, for the Royal Navy, though it was ultimately never used, and the remaining example was placed on display.
In 1955, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) approached Barnes to act as a consultant for the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales, Australia.
More specifically, they wanted his help designing a geodesic structure that could support the satellite dish’s incredible weight.
Despite offering to pay him £1,000 (£27,000 adjusted for inflation) for his services, Barnes became incredibly frustrated at the Australians as they didn’t seem to actually want his help, causing Barnes to leave the project midway through and refuse his fee.
In the 1960’s, Barnes returned to maritime engineering, where his engineering career had started five decades earlier. Rather than focusing on ship, Barnes had developed a fascination for both cargo ships and submarines.
Deciding to combine the two, Barnes worked on designing a fast cargo submarine. Developing a gas turbine engine and brand new hull design, Barnes claimed that his submarine could travel faster than comparable cargo ships at a lower cost per piece of cargo.
Though it showed considerable promise, Barnes was unable to find someone willing to fund his project and ultimately nothing came of it.
Returning to aircraft design, Barnes was instrumental in using his knowledge of supersonic aerodynamics to help design the air intakes for the Concorde’s Olympus 593 engines, more specifically encouraging them to use variable geometry air intakes to achieve cruising speeds of Mach 2.
Retirement & Death
By all accounts, Barnes Wallis was not only a loyal employee, but a great one too.
And whilst it saddened everyone at BAC to let him go, in 1971, Barnes was 84 years old – well past the usual retirement age of 60 – and the government (who owned BAC at the time) pressured BAC to force him into retirement.
Yet, Barnes wasn’t satisfied with just playing shuffleboard.
In the late 1950’s, Barnes had been invited to Eton College to deliver a speech to the students, hoping to inspire the next generation of British leaders to make sure Britain became a world power once again.
He called his speech “The strength of England” and advocated for Britain to invest heavily in technology, such as nuclear-powered cargo submarines and short take-off and landing (STOL) supersonic airliners.
Though he first delivered the speech in a decade where Britain still had considerable international power, he continued to give this speech well into the 1970’s – where sadly Britain had lost much of its international influence to the US and USSR.
In 1960, at the age of 73, Barnes Wallis became a vegetarian and animal rights advocate after witnessing poor conditions of animals intended to be killed for food.
Eight years later, in 1968, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and the following year, Sir Barnes Wallis received an honorary doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
Sir Barnes Wallis passed away on October 30 1979, at the age of 92, in Leatherhead, Surry. His death was announced in a series of obituaries in major British newspapers, and his death made national news, with the country mourning the loss of its greatest aerospace engineer ever.
He was survived by Molly, his wife of 54 years, their four biological children (Barnes, Mary, Elisabeth and Christopher) and two adopted children/nephews (John and Robert McCormick) and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
His funeral was held four days later, on November 3, at St Lawrence Church in Effingham, Surrey, where he was buried. One year after his death, a memorial service was held in his honor and was attended by several honorary guests, including Prince Charles.
Legacy
Although he sadly passed away over 40 years ago, the legacy of Barnes Wallis is still ever-present. You just need to know where to look…
Britain
Today, Barnes Wallis is often hailed as a British hero.
When British schoolchildren are taught about WWII, the Dambusters raid (Operation Chastise) is heavily featured as a sort of turning point in the war, with a large emphasis being placed on the role Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb played in it.
Not only that, but the 1951 novel The Dam Busters by Australian fighter pilot-turned author, Paul Brickhill (and the 1955 movie adaptation) are cult classics in the UK, especially among WWII fanatics and Baby Boomers especially.
To show their appreciation of him, literally hundreds of placing and things are named in his honor in the UK, from streets to schools to buildings and private homes. Not to mention the dozens of statues of him dotted across the country.
Interestingly, not long after the Dambusters raid (and subsequent film), British golfers started calling any shot that bounces on the surface of a water hazard a “Barnes Wallis” in reference to his bouncing bomb.
This later became the official name of the phenomenon and is used by golfers all over the world, not just in the UK.
This Site
So you’re probably wondering what Barnes Wallis – someone who’s been dead for over four decades – has to do with this site, which was founded only a couple of years ago? The answer: Everything.
As a distant relative of Barnes Wallis (via my maternal great-grandmother), I spent a large portion of my childhood being taken to museums about WWII where I would see the Lancaster (the bombers used on the Dambusters raid) or the Bouncing Bomb itself.
Here, my parents and grandparents made sure I paid special attention to the parts about Barnes Wallis. Though I didn’t know it then, visiting these museums put me on a long path that eventually got me interested in aviation.
This, in turn, led to me creating this site to share my passion for aviation and hopefully, help others to get interested in aviation too! Both the civil and military sides of it.
What do you think of Sir Barnes Wallis? Tell me in the comments!