The Reach at Chiswick
Saturday, 9 June 1877 came up hot and almost windless, which on this reach is the difference between a race and a salvage operation. The Grand Aggregate of the Thames Air-Cushion Association was run over two laps of a course laid from the staging opposite Chiswick Eyot, up past Barnes, round a marked bar off Mortlake and back: eight miles and some hundreds of yards, punched into the ebb on the way up and carried home on it. Five machines were entered. Four finished. The one that did not is the one everybody remembers, and we shall come to it.
The pilots stood about on the hard in leather and tweed with their goggles pushed up on their foreheads, and stood there a good deal longer than any of them wanted to, because the scrutineers were behind. Nothing goes on the water until its boiler has been fired, held at its declared pressure for fifteen minutes and sealed at the safety valve with a lead blank on a wire. This is not ceremony. Boiler explosions were the ordinary industrial death of the century, and the commonest cause was not reckless driving but plain rust — between two and five times more often than every other cause put together.
There is a noise these things make before the start that nobody has ever got into print properly. It is not the engine. The engine is a small sharp knocking under a wooden cover. It is the fans: a dozen of them coming up together across two hundred yards of water, each one at a slightly different speed, so that the whole reach beats slowly in and out of phase with itself. The crowd stops talking about a minute before anybody asks it to.
Then the skirts filled, one after another, with a sound like five sails taking the wind together, and every machine on the line rose about six inches and stopped touching England.
The course had been laid by men who understood that a river is not a track, and it punished accordingly: two bends, a bar to be rounded at the top of the reach, and a line of soft traps set across the narrows below Barnes. The turns are the problem. An air-cushion craft does not grip; it has nothing to grip with. Put it into a bend at twenty knots and it will continue, with great dignity, in the direction it was already going, and the only cure is to unload one side of the skirt and let it fall on its shoulder — a manoeuvre the Association’s own handbook describes, with feeling, as leaning on the water.
From the embankment it looks like nerve and brass and nothing else: the fires roaring up, the crowd shouting, five men holding a line they have nothing to hold it with. What is actually happening, if you stand close enough to be soaked by it, is that five boilers are converting Welsh steam coal into a very large quantity of moving air, and about two thirds of every fire is being spent simply holding the boat up.
That ratio is the argument of the entire sport and it is the reason the machines look the way they do. Lift and thrust are two separate bills and both are paid out of the same fire. Spend more on lift and you ride higher, clear the chop, and go slowly. Spend more on thrust and you go beautifully until the first standing wave puts a corner of your skirt into the river. Every craft in the Hawthorne line is a different answer to that one sum, which is why the comparison at the foot of this piece is worth reading twice.
Most of what goes wrong out there goes wrong quietly: a cloud of steam, a gentle descent, and one fewer machine in the race. The gentleness is not decorative. It is the one genuine safety property these machines possess: lose the fire, lose the cushion, and the thing you are riding turns back into a boat underneath you at about the speed of a lift arriving. Colonel Winstanley’s Bellerophon did precisely that off the Barnes shore on the second lap, having dropped a fusible plug, and the plate below was taken from the bank while her crew stood on the after deck with their arms folded, waiting for a gig and declining, audibly, to be rescued in a hurry.
What happened next is the reason anybody outside Chiswick has heard of that afternoon. Hawthorne, who had been leading by something under a length, shut Corinthian down to half fans as he came level with the wreck, lost eleven seconds doing it, and won by four. Ashby-Grange, who was second, spent the rest of the evening telling anybody who would listen that this was the most irritating thing that had ever been done to him.
Four seconds is a narrow margin to argue about and this reach had form. Eleven weeks earlier, on 24 March, the Boat Race had come up the same tideway and been declared a dead heat, the only one in its history — Oxford’s bow having snapped his blade clean off on the top of a wave, and the finishing judge, Honest John Phelps, being past seventy and blind in one eye. The Association had watched that happen, taken the lesson, and posted two timekeepers with a fixed post and a telescope. Both of them made it four.
Hawthorne was carried up the lawn at Sutton Court on the shoulders of the men he had just beaten, which is the one Victorian courtesy that has not dated, and the Association dined at eight. The talk at that table was not about the race. It was about next year’s boiler pressures, and it went on until the fires in the yard were drawn, which is how you tell an engineering sport from a sport.
Set down like that it reads as a golden afternoon, and by every account that survives it was one. It was also, and this is the part the Association never quite said aloud, a sport that could not have existed, for reasons of arithmetic that no amount of tweed could argue with. We shall come to those too.
Edmund Hawthorne of Chiswick
Edmund Josiah Hawthorne was born on 11 March 1843 and was therefore thirty-four on the day he won the Aggregate. The date matters more than it looks. It is the birth year of John Isaac Thornycroft, who set up on Thames-side ground at Chiswick in 1864, built the fastest small steamers in England, and left behind a set of hull models for lifting a boat on a flow of air — the oldest of them dated 1877. Two men of the same age, on the same reach, in the same year, working on the same idea. One of them is in the Dictionary of National Biography. The other is in this newspaper, which should tell you which of them existed.
The Foundry at Smethwick
His father Josiah kept a small brass foundry in Rolfe Street, Smethwick, and made pressure gauges — Bourdon tubes in four sizes, sold by the dozen to boilermakers who wanted to know how close they were to the end of the afternoon. It was a good trade in the wrong decade. The Great Exhibition had been glazed with Chance Brothers glass from half a mile up the road, and Josiah Hawthorne took his son to Hyde Park in the August of 1851, one of very nearly six million visits, and afterwards could not be persuaded that anything he made would ever be looked at by anyone.
His childhood was spent in his father’s workshop, where he learned the intricacies of mechanical design and engineering, which is the polite version. The blunt version is that he was at the treadle lathe from the age of nine and could true a gauge movement before he could reliably spell one. He said later that he had never in his life been frightened of a boiler and had never once trusted one, and that both halves of that came out of the same room.
King’s College, and the Lambeth Shops
He was sent at fourteen to the Ashted Row Proprietary School in Birmingham, where he was taught mathematics by a Wesleyan minister who had been an ironfounder and who gave him, in 1859, a second-hand copy of Cayley’s three-part paper On Aerial Navigation. That paper — published in 1809 and 1810 by George Cayley, who had already set out the whole fixed-wing aeroplane in 1799 — separates the four forces of thrust, lift, drag and weight and insists that they are four different problems. Hawthorne read it, by his own account, eleven times in a year, and it ruined him for any other kind of engineering.
From 1861 to 1864 he took the applied sciences course at King’s College London, which had been teaching civil engineering since 1838 and was the nearest thing England then had to a technical university. He came out with a first-class certificate and went straight across the river to the drawing office of Maudslay, Sons and Field at Lambeth, marine engineers, and spent four years learning what a marine boiler actually does when you ask it a question in a seaway.
He was there while the pressures were climbing. Alfred Holt’s Agamemnon had gone to sea in 1865 carrying 60 psi where 25 psi was the ordinary figure; by 1872 Sir Frederick Bramwell was reporting compound marine engines running at 45 to 60 psi and eating half the coal. Hawthorne’s whole racing career sits inside that climb, and every one of his machines is a bet on where it would be in eighteen months.
Thistledown, and What Went Wrong With It
He left Maudslay in 1868 with two hundred and forty pounds, a wife of nine months and a hired sail-loft at Chiswick, and spent eleven months building a boat that was designed not to touch the water. Thistledown was eighteen feet four inches of clinker-built larch, weighed rather less than two thirds of a ton all up, and carried one vertical boiler at twenty-two pounds driving a single caged fan of four feet in a well amidships. Round the whole hull ran a rail of ash, and laced to the rail, with sailmaker’s twine at four-inch intervals, hung a skirt of oiled sailcloth.
On 5 June 1869 it lifted, at Twickenham, in front of nine people, and stayed up for six minutes and forty seconds. Then the cloth chafed through at the two forward corners — the corners are where the pressure and the motion fight — and Thistledown sat down on the Thames and filled. Hawthorne swam. The boiler was recovered the following Tuesday and stood in the corner of the Chiswick shed, cleaned and never used again, for the next forty-two years.
The failure is worth dwelling on because it is the correct one. A flexible skirt that can take a corner is not a detail of a hovercraft; it is very nearly the whole difficulty, and in the real world it was not solved until the 1960s, years after the first machines flew. Hawthorne spent the next eight years on it and never entirely succeeded either.
The Boiler at Lambeth
On 14 August 1872 the crown plate of the Brass Kestrel opened along a riveted seam at the Lambeth wharf while she was being warmed through, and put forty pounds of steam into a space in which Edmund Hawthorne was standing with a spanner. He was carried up Westminster Bridge Road on a hurdle. He was three months on his back, came off it with two fingers of the left hand that the scarring would not let close again, and never afterwards worked a machine without a glove on that hand.
He came back in the February and did two things. He wrote to the Association proposing the lead-seal scrutineering that opens this article, and had it carried at the first attempt, which for a committee of that period is close to a miracle. And he began keeping the boiler book — a ruled ledger, one page per machine per month, in which every examination was entered with the name of the man who made it. He kept it for thirty-eight years, to within a fortnight of his death. The entry for the Kestrel in the July of 1872 reads, in his own hand and added afterwards in a different ink, seen quickly, by the same man as June, and by me not at all.
Rivals, and the Man Who Was Not Allowed to Be One
Hawthorne entered the racing circuit as an underdog, and the two men who made him one were Cornelius Ashby-Grange of Deptford and Colonel Piers Winstanley of the Kew Aerostatic Club. Ashby-Grange had money, a shipwright’s yard and no patience, and built the Ostrich and then Ostrich II, both of them fast, both of them appalling in a bend. Winstanley had been a Royal Engineer, understood boilers better than anyone else on the card, and insisted for six years on a single enormous lift fan on the grounds that it was simpler, which it is. It also made Bellerophon uncontrollable in a crosswind, which he denied for the same six years.
The third man is Ned Cusk, and he never raced at all. Cusk was a Thames waterman out of Wapping who had rebuilt two of these machines and could tell by ear that a fan was out of true. He was refused an entry every year he applied, under the rule that a man who works with his hands may not compete against gentlemen. This was not eccentricity. It is the letter of the amateur definition that Henley wrote down in 1879, which barred anyone who had competed for money or who worked as a mechanic, artisan or labourer, and which was not softened until 1937 and not abolished until 1998. Hawthorne signed the refusals. He also said, in print, exactly what he thought of them, which is more than most.
Margaret Fenner, and the Broadwood
He had married Margaret Fenner of Chard in Somerset in September 1867, a schoolmistress, the daughter of a lace-machine fitter, and it was her family who took him to see the disused lace factory in which John Stringfellow had in 1848 flown a ten-foot steam-driven monoplane about thirty yards, unmanned and perfectly level. Stringfellow was still alive, still in Chard, and still cross about the whole business. What Hawthorne took away from the visit was not a wing. It was Stringfellow’s boiler, or rather the principle of it: that if the thing is to fly, every ounce in the fire-tubes is an ounce you are lifting, and the design begins there and nowhere else.
He read what everybody in that decade read and rather more of it — Verne in translation, and the adventure serials, which he defended at his own table on the ground that a man who cannot imagine a thing will not trouble to build one. He also played, daily and not very well, and after Lambeth the playing became a discipline in the harder sense, because a left hand that will not close cannot take a tenth. He had the Broadwood in the drawing room at Sutton Court re-regulated with a lighter touch, gave up the Chopin he had been middling at, and played Bach for the rest of his life on the grounds that Bach at least had the decency to write for two hands of equal work.
The Hawthorne Exhibition
He was called a patron of scientific education in his lifetime, in print and to his face, and he disliked the phrase enough to say so: patronage, he wrote, is what a man does with the part of his money he has stopped thinking about. The instrument he actually founded, in November 1877 with the whole of the Aggregate purse — twenty-five guineas, which under the Association’s own amateur rule he was not entitled to keep — and eleven hundred pounds of his own, was narrower and better aimed than that: the Hawthorne Exhibition took two apprentices a year, out of a working shop rather than a university, and made up their wages so that a boy was not fined for the hours he spent learning. It was open to precisely the class of men the Association would not let onto the water. The first two were fitters out of Thornycroft’s yard, four hundred yards upstream.
After the Racing
He stopped racing in 1879, at thirty-six, in the middle of a winning season and to general annoyance. He had come to the view that a machine which carries nothing but its own crew and a cup is a demonstration rather than a vehicle, and he wanted the thing to carry something. What that came to, in the event, was a flat pontoon on four fans for moving heavy plant across soft ground — fen, saltings, the tidal mud where a wharf could not be built — which he sold to drainage contractors in Lincolnshire and to nobody else, because there is no glamour whatever in shifting a boiler across a marsh. He was right about the application and eighty years early to it, which is the family curse.
He died at Sutton Court on 3 February 1911, aged sixty-seven, having outlived his own sport by thirty-two years and seen no successor to it. The Exhibition ran until 1948. The boiler book is in the same box as the Exhibition minutes and has never been printed.
The Winner, Interviewed
Our correspondent was given twenty minutes in the drawing room at Sutton Court on the evening of the race and kept for rather more than an hour, during which Corinthian stood in the yard below the window on light fires, ticking, and was mentioned by her owner nine times.
Edmund Hawthorne
Engineer · Chiswick · Winner of the Grand Aggregate, 1877
Sutton Court, the evening of Saturday 9 June 1877. Corinthian on light fires in the yard; the boiler book open on the table between us.
The Bureau
Congratulations, Mr Hawthorne. Four seconds is a very narrow thing. How does it sit with you this evening?
Hawthorne
Relief first, and the rest of it about an hour later. Four seconds is not a victory, it is a coincidence with a flag on it. Ashby-Grange drove the better race for a lap and a half and will tell you so at length, and on that stretch he will be right.
The Bureau
Corinthian is in the yard below this window. Tell our readers what she is.
Hawthorne
The fifth boat I have built and the first that is not an apology for the last. Two fans instead of four, and large ones, turning fast in deep wells. Ninety pounds in a small boiler, which is a figure I would not have written down five years ago and which is the reason a man from the committee walked round her with a lead seal this morning. And nothing else aboard her at all. Lift and thrust come out of the same fire, sir, and every boat a man builds is an argument about how to divide it. This one argues for handiness and takes the speed as a consequence.
The Bureau
There was a moment on the second lap when the crowd stopped making any noise whatever. What were you doing?
Hawthorne
Coming off the fans. That was Bellerophon, down on the water with her skirt collapsed and a great deal of steam about her, and I could not see from where I stood whether her crew were in the boat or in the river. So I throttled to half and went past her at a walking pace until I could count two men standing. It cost eleven seconds and I won by four. I am told this was sporting. It was arithmetic done badly and got away with, and I would do it again on Monday.
The Bureau
You wear a glove on the left hand and not on the right. Our readers will have noticed.
Hawthorne
Then they may as well have the whole of it. In August of 1872 the Brass Kestrel parted a seam in her crown plate at the Lambeth wharf and put forty pounds of steam into a space I happened to be standing in. Three months on my back, and two fingers that have not closed since. It taught me the only thing I know that is worth teaching a young man. A boiler does not fail because it is old. It fails because nobody looked at it on the Tuesday.
The Bureau
The Association makes a great deal of sportsmanship. What is it actually worth?
Hawthorne
A good deal, and I would rather you printed this part carefully. We are civil to one another on the water because the machines are dangerous and civility costs nothing; a man who will not shut down for a wreck should not be given a boiler. That much is real, and I have been on the receiving end of it myself. But the word gentleman is doing two separate jobs in this sport, and only one of them is about conduct. You had better ask me your next question.
The Bureau
A gentleman's sport. Ned Cusk is a waterman, and was refused an entry this morning.
Hawthorne
He was, and it was my name on the paper that refused him, and I should like that printed exactly so. Cusk has more hours on this reach than the whole committee laid end to end, and he can hear a fan running out of true from the bank. The rule says a man who works with his hands may not enter, and the reason given is that his hands would be an unfair advantage — which is a sentence I have never once been able to say out loud without hearing what it is. I mean to have it out in November. I expect to lose.
The Bureau
And the Exhibition you are said to be founding. What is it for?
Hawthorne
Two apprentices a year, out of a working shop, with their wages made up so that a boy is not fined for the hours he spends learning. Not out of a university. There is no shortage of gentlemen in this sport and there is a very great shortage of men who can tell you what is wrong with a machine by standing next to it. If the committee will not have them on the water, I shall at least have them at the bench.
The Bureau
And what comes after this season?
Hawthorne
Two more summers, I should think, and then something a great deal duller. There is a limit to how much of a fire you can spend on holding a boat up, and we are nearer to it than the committee has been told. The next machine of mine that matters will not be a racing boat at all. It will be flat, it will be slow, it will carry a great weight across ground no man can put a road on, and it will be extremely ugly. I should like to be alive to see somebody buy one.
The Bureau
You gave us twenty minutes and we have had rather more than an hour. Thank you, Mr Hawthorne.
Hawthorne
Print the part about Cusk.
He was asked, on the way out, whether he thought the sport would outlast him. He said that it would not, that no sport survives a rule it is ashamed of, and that in any case somebody would shortly invent an engine light enough to make all of it look ridiculous. He was wrong about the timing by rather a lot.
Edmund Hawthorne hovercrafts
Five machines were built at Chiswick between 1869 and 1877, and they are not five versions of one idea. They are five different answers to the same sum: how much of the fire goes on holding the boat up, and how much is left over to make it go. Read in order they are an argument Hawthorne had with himself for eight years and only won at the end. Each is given below three times over: as she was photographed, as she was first worked out in the notebook, and as she went to the Patent Office. The middle one is always the most honest.
Thistledown, 1869
Larch on oak, clinker-built, eighteen feet four inches, and light enough that two men could carry her up a slip. One vertical boiler at twenty-two pounds, one caged fan of four feet in a single well amidships, no separate propulsion at all: she was steered and driven by tilting the whole hull, which works exactly as badly as it sounds. Crew of one, because there was nowhere for a second man to stand.
Her quirk was that she was almost silent. A single slow fan of that diameter makes a soft deep note rather than the beating hiss of the later machines, and the nine people at Twickenham reported afterwards that the frightening part was how little noise a boat makes when it stops being in the water.
She won nothing. She lifted, held for six minutes and forty seconds, chafed her skirt through at both forward corners and swamped. Hawthorne kept the boiler and, characteristically, the piece of failed sailcloth, which was still pinned above his bench in 1911.
The Brass Kestrel, 1871
Twenty-one feet nine, mahogany on rock elm, and the first machine that could be said to be driven rather than merely balanced. Two fans of three feet six in wells fore and aft, so that the cushion could be trimmed from end to end by throttling one of them — the innovation that made a bend survivable and the one Hawthorne was proudest of. A locomotive-type boiler amidships at forty pounds, a ducted screw at the stern for thrust, and a crew of two: pilot at a spoked wheel, stoker bent double at the firedoor, neither able to hear the other.
Her vice was the noise. Two fans of that size, geared off one shaft and never quite in step, beat against each other at about four cycles a second, and the beat came up through the deck into the soles of the feet. Hawthorne raced her for two seasons and complained of it in every letter; the stoker, who was a foot nearer the gearing, did not complain at all, having gone deaf in the first month and told nobody.
She won the Kew Reach cup in 1871 and 1872 and she is the machine that nearly killed him. After the crown plate opened in the August of 1872 she was rebuilt round the old shell, sold in 1874 to a buyer in Bergen who wanted her for a fjord ferry, and lost with all her gear in 1876 in circumstances nobody in Chiswick ever established.
The Verdigris Comet, 1873
The beautiful one, and the one that broke. Twenty-four feet six of tapered pine on steamed oak, sheathed on deck in copper that went verdigris within a season and gave her the name. Three fans of three feet in a row, which spread the cushion the length of the hull and let her run flat and very fast; fifty-five pounds in a locomotive boiler; and the first segmented skirt, hung in separate overlapping panels from a rail, so that one damaged panel no longer emptied the whole cushion.
She was seventeen knots over water, which nobody had seen, and she was structurally too light for what she was doing to the river.
In September 1874 she came off the top of a wake at the Mortlake bar and broke her back between the second and third fan wells. Nobody was hurt. Hawthorne had the wreck in the shed within the day, cut the good third out of her and built it into Lady Perpetua, which is why the two machines share a builder’s number and confuse people to this day.
Lady Perpetua, 1875
Named for his wife’s mother, over her written objection. Twenty-six feet two, a little over four thousand pounds all up, four fans of three feet, a tall vertical water-tube boiler at seventy pounds, and a crew of three because trimming four fans by hand is a full-time occupation for a man who is not also steering. She is the high-water mark of the lift-heavy school: she rode nine inches clear where the others rode six, she went over the osier traps rather than through them, and she was almost impossible to upset.
She was also nineteen knots, and the Comet had done seventeen at three quarters of her weight, and Hawthorne knew before her first season was out that he had built the wrong argument beautifully.
She won the Chiswick cup in 1875 and 1876 by never once failing to finish. She was laid up in 1879 when he stopped, stood in the shed for twenty-five years with her fans turned by hand once a month, and was broken up in 1904 for the timber.
Corinthian, 1877
The answer, arrived at by subtraction. Twenty-three feet eleven, a ton and a quarter all up — nearly a third lighter than Lady Perpetua — and stripped of every fitting that did not earn its weight. Two fans, but large, five feet across, running fast in deep wells and doing the work of Perpetua’s four; a compact high-pressure boiler carrying ninety pounds, which was an alarming figure for 1877 and which is why the lead seal mattered; a fine segmented skirt with the panels cut on the bias so that a corner deforms rather than trips; and a crew of two.
Her name is a joke he never explained. The Corinthian ideal — the gentleman amateur who competes for the love of the thing and takes no money for it — was the Association’s whole creed and the exact instrument by which Ned Cusk was kept off the water. Hawthorne painted the word on a boat built by paid men in a hired shed and entered it against gentlemen.
He won the Grand Aggregate on 9 June 1877 at an average of twenty-one and a half knots, touched twenty-four on the second lap coming down past Barnes, and gave away eleven seconds of it stopping for a rival. She is still in the Chiswick shed, sealed, dry, and shown to schoolchildren twice a year.
The Hawthorne Line, 1869 to 1877
Eight years, five machines, and one continuous argument about how much of the fire should be spent holding the boat up.
| Thistledown, 1869 | The Brass Kestrel, 1871 | The Verdigris Comet, 1873 | Lady Perpetua, 1875 | Corinthian, 1877 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Length | 18 ft 4 in | 21 ft 9 in | 24 ft 6 in | 26 ft 2 in | 23 ft 11 in |
| All-up weight | 1,340 lb | 2,180 lb | 2,940 lb | 4,060 lb | 2,760 lb |
| Boiler pressure | 22 psi | 40 psi | 55 psi | 70 psi | 90 psi |
| Lift fans | One, 4 ft | Two, 3 ft 6 in | Three, 3 ft | Four, 3 ft | Two, 5 ft |
| Top speed over water | 6 knots | 11 knots | 17 knots | 19 knots | 24 knots |
| Crew | One | Two | Two | Three | Two |
| First race | Twickenham, June 1869 | Kew Reach, June 1871 | Henley, Whitsun 1873 | Chiswick, June 1875 | Chiswick, 9 June 1877 |
| Fate | Swamped at Twickenham, 1869 | Sold to Bergen 1874; lost 1876 | Broke her back at Mortlake, 1874 | Laid up 1879; broken up 1904 | In the Chiswick shed, sealed and dry |
The line reads in one direction until 1875 and then turns round. Four machines get bigger, heavier and steadier; the fifth gets smaller, lighter and quicker, and wins. What changed is not the hull and not the fans. It is the ninety pounds in the boiler, which bought enough power in a small enough package that Hawthorne could stop paying for lift with size and start paying for it with pressure. That is the entire history of the air-cushion vehicle in one column of a table, and it is also the reason the sport was impossible.
Eighty-Two Years
Here is the arithmetic the tweed could not argue with. To hold a craft of any useful size on a cushion of air you need a great deal of power in a very small weight, and a Victorian boiler is the wrong shape of object entirely: the fire-tubes, the water, the shell and the coal are all being lifted by the fans they are feeding. Every extra pound of pressure costs you plate, and every pound of plate has to be held up. The sum does not close. Thornycroft tested hull models for exactly this in the 1870s and put the idea away, and the encyclopaedias record why in one sentence: the design was patented, and suitable, powerful engines were not available until the twentieth century.
The century has form for this. Isambard Kingdom Brunel laid the Great Western to a seven-foot gauge that was demonstrably better and was torn up anyway, and in 1847 he ran the South Devon line on atmospheric power, moving trains by pumping air out of a pipe between the rails. It worked, expensively, for about a year, and then the leather sealing flap perished and the whole scheme was abandoned. The Victorians were not wrong about air. They were early, and they were early in a way that cost them money, which is the only kind of early anybody remembers.
The engine arrived in the middle of the next century. Christopher Cockerell, a radio engineer running a boatyard on the Norfolk Broads, blew air into the gap between two concentric tin cans with a vacuum cleaner and found that the ring of moving air trapped a pocket of high pressure underneath — the momentum curtain, which is the thing Hawthorne’s laced sailcloth had been trying and failing to be. He had a prototype and his first patent, GB 854211, by 1955. He sold possessions to keep the work going, and the British government eventually gave him five thousand pounds for it.
On 11 June 1959 the SR.N1 hovered for the first time in front of the press, lifted by a single fan driven by a 450-horsepower Alvis Leonides radial — an engine of a kind Josiah Hawthorne’s Smethwick foundry could not have imagined and his son would have understood in about four minutes. On 25 July 1959 it crossed from Calais to Dover in a little over two hours, with Peter Lamb at the controls, John Chaplin navigating and Cockerell aboard, fifty years to the day after Blériot flew the same water.
Eighty-two years, then, between the last sheet Hawthorne filed and the first machine that could actually do it. The Victorians had the principle, the ambition, the patent office — the Commissioners for Patents had been open since 1 October 1852 — and a public that would stand four deep on an embankment to watch an engineer try something. What they did not have was an engine. Everything else in this article is invented. That part is not, and it is the only part that ever mattered.
