25 Facts About Barnes Wallis

Barnes Wallis is best known for inventing the bouncing bomb used by the Royal Air Force in Operation Chastise to attack the dams of the Ruhr Valley during World War II.

The raid was the subject of the 1955 film The Dam Busters, in which Wallis was played by Michael Redgrave.

Barnes Wallis was born in Ripley, Derbyshire, to general practitioner Charles George Wallis and his wife Edith Eyre, daughter of Rev John Ashby.

Barnes Wallis was educated at Christ's Hospital in Horsham and Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham Boys' Grammar School in southeast London, leaving school at seventeen to start work in January 1905 at Thames Engineering Works at Blackheath, southeast London.

Barnes Wallis subsequently changed his apprenticeship to J Samuel White's, the shipbuilders based at Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

Barnes Wallis originally trained as a marine engineer and in 1922 he took a degree in engineering via the University of London External Programme.

Barnes Wallis pioneered, along with John Edwin Temple, the use of light alloy and production engineering in the structural design of the R100.

Barnes Wallis's designs were extensively tested in model form, and consequently he became a pioneer in the remote control of aircraft.

Barnes Wallis developed the wing-controlled aerodyne, a concept for a tailless aeroplane controlled entirely by wing movement with no separate control surfaces.

An attempt to gain American funding led Barnes Wallis to initiate a joint NASA-Vickers study.

Barnes Wallis's ideas were ultimately passed over in the UK in favour of the fixed-wing BAC TSR-2 and Concorde.

Barnes Wallis was critical of both, believing that swing-wing designs would have been more appropriate.

In 1955, Barnes Wallis agreed to act as a consultant to the project to build the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia.

Barnes Wallis 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.

Barnes Wallis advocated nuclear-powered cargo submarines as a means of making Britain immune to future embargoes, and to make it a global trading power.

Barnes Wallis complained of the loss of aircraft design to the United States, and suggested that Britain could dominate air travel by developing a small supersonic airliner capable of short take-off and landing.

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

Barnes Wallis was an active member of the Royal Air Forces Association, the charity that supports the RAF community.

Barnes Wallis was 17 and he was 34, and her father forbade them from courting.

However, he allowed Barnes Wallis to assist Molly with her mathematics courses by correspondence, and they wrote some 250 letters, enlivening them with fictional characters such as "Duke Delta X".

The letters gradually became personal, and Barnes Wallis proposed marriage on her 20th birthday.

For 49 years, from 1930 until his death, Barnes Wallis lived with his family in Effingham, Surrey, and he is buried at the local St Lawrence Church together with his wife.

Barnes Wallis was a vegetarian and an advocate of animal rights.

Barnes Wallis appears as a fictionalised character in Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships, the authorised sequel to The Time Machine.

Barnes Wallis is portrayed as a British engineer in an alternate history, where the First World War does not end in 1918, and Wallis concentrates his energies on developing a machine for time travel.