From: muratlanne@gmail.com   
      
   "Richard Smith"  wrote in message news:m1frd00zyw.fsf@void.com...   
      
   "Jim Wilkins"  writes:   
      
   > ...   
   > only one who could weld what he had designed and thus get what he   
   > wanted, many nuclear bomb designers couldn't light a campfire. The   
   > brilliant fluid dynamicist Sir Stanley Hooker fumbled a test of making   
   > something which gave him his book title, "Not Much of an Engineer".   
      
   I've read "Not Much of an Engineer".   
   He "came of age" in the 1960's?   
      
   Great book.   
      
   He was one of the "professional descendents" significantly of Beatrice   
   Shilling.  Who is famous for solving the carburation glitch on the   
   R.R. Merlin engine (the engine in the "Spitfire" aircraft) in 1940.  She   
   was going around airfields during the "Battle of Britain" on her   
   motorcycle (she was an expert - she used to race at Brooklands during   
   the 1930's) fitting that flow-rate-control device which reduced the   
   matter to an ignorable "pop".  Which Stanley Hooker dubbed "Miss   
   Schilling's orifice".  He was from a part of the country where that is   
   the nature of discourse...   
      
   ----------------------------------   
      
   I also read and liked Nevil Schute's "Slide Rule" which goes into how   
   government funding brings opinionated political interference with   
   engineering. Mitre was supposed to isolate the two but that's not possible.   
   The Greenies here want to switch from petroleum to electricity without   
   considering or understanding the consequences; they push for distributed   
   alternate electricity sources but block expanding the transmission lines. A   
   hostile foreign power could hardly imagine a better way to cripple American   
   industry.   
   https://energytransition.org/2025/03/why-the-british-are-still-h   
   at-pump-sceptics/   
      
   R.V.Jones "Most Secret War" (Wizard War), and books on Ultra/Enigma, which   
   related to what I did, are good if you have interest in electronics, radio   
   and codes. They are light on the tech but they don't explain what they do   
   mention, it's pretty obvious to someone in the field.   
      
   I assume you know about Bletchley's work, this is a US example of leading   
   edge WW2 electronic tech:   
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY   
      
   The advances that led to computers were comparable between the UK and USA.   
   The general purpose computer was delayed because the developers knew that if   
   they used wartime government funding to create a computer others could use   
   instead of a specialized machine good for only their task such as your   
   Colossus or SIGSALY they would likely lose control of it, which in fact did   
   happen.   
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC   
   "ENIAC was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert to calculate   
   artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research   
   Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory).   
   However, its first program was a study of the feasibility of the   
   thermonuclear weapon."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)