Christopher Cockerell

English engineer

• Born: June 4, 1910
• Birthplace: Cambridge, England
• Died: June 1, 1999
• Place of death: Sutton Scotney, Hampshire, England

Cockerell became world famous for his invention of the hovercraft, but he had earlier made a highly significant contribution to the British war effort in World War II, developing radio communication and navigation devices for use in the Royal Air Force and the Fleet Air Arm. He also made some notable early contributions to the development of prewar television technology.

Primary fields: Aeronautics and aerospace technology; mechanical engineering; navigation

Primary invention: Hovercraft

Early Life

Christopher Sydney Cockerell was the only son among the three children of Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (1867-1962), the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, and his wife, Florence Kate (1872-1949). Christopher never got on with his father, who had once been William Morris’s secretary and to whom his son’s interest in the practicalities of engineering always seemed vulgar. Christopher had a much better relationship with his mother, a talented artist and illuminator. His father’s literary interests were reflected in the visitors to the family home, who included George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, Siegfried Sassoon and T. E. Lawrence, but the only conspicuous interest that Christopher showed in these worthies was in Lawrence’s motorcycle. A succession of governesses hired to teach him at home despaired of diverting his interests into more “acceptable” channels; he became passionately interested in radio, building his own TV set, and built a steam engine to power his mother’s sewing machine—which she refused to use.

After attending Lydgate House Preparatory School in Hunstanton for three years (1921-1924)—where he built a radio set for the school—he went on to Gresham’s School in Holt, where he met W. H. Auden and built another radio. Cockerell went on to study engineering at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, spending much of his spare time working on motorbikes, winning several prizes for racing. He often stayed during vacations with Captain Edward George Spencer-Churchill, from whom he picked up a fascination with antiques and shooting. His father was disgusted when the young man spent the œ20 he was given for his twenty-first birthday on a Mauser rifle with a telescopic sight and silencer.

Life’s Work

After graduating from Cambridge, Cockerell initially went to work for W. H. Allen and Sons of Bedford as a pupil engineer, but he soon returned to Cambridge to do research on radio and electronics. In 1935, he joined the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, working at the company’s Writtle site near Chelmsford. He worked on the first outside broadcast vehicle used by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and he helped develop the shortwave aerials that began transmitting TV signals from Alexandra Palace. In 1937, however, his career took a crucial turn when he was promoted to head of Aircraft Research and Development. On September 4 of that year, he married Margaret Elinor Belsham.

Cockerell’s last prewar commission for Marconi was to develop a radio direction-finder for the Cunard liner Mauretania. When war broke out, he was immediately approached to develop similar equipment for use in aircraft. Great Britain’s bombers were in dire need of better communication and navigation equipment, and Cockerell immediately came up with a prototype system that was rushed into production in a matter of weeks. The system proved invaluable in helping bombers make their way home after raids, and it made a vital contribution to the conflict between the Royal Air Force (RAF) and Germany’s Luftwaffe, in which the RAF’s initial disadvantage was eventually reversed.

With the assistance of the firm of E. K. Cole, Marconi manufactured some 120,000 R1155 receiver units and some 55,000 T1554 transmitters during the war; Cockerell always regarded this as the most important achievement of his career. He also helped produce a universal display unit for the Royal Navy that integrated radar information with other instrumentation, and he developed a beacon that allowed Fleet Air Arm pilots to return safely to their carriers. In the run-up to D Day, he developed an apparatus, code-named “Bagful,” that allowed the RAF to locate and map all the German radar stations in northern France.

When the war was over, Cockerell continued to work on equipment for both military and civil aircraft, developing improved navigation systems and apparatuses for positioning aircraft during their final approach to landing. He refused further promotions because he wanted to maintain the level of his practical involvement. In 1948, he moved to the Marconi research laboratories at Great Baddow, near Chelmsford, but resigned in 1951 because he wanted to be able to follow up his own initiatives more freely. His wife’s inheritance from her father had been invested in a boat-building business at Oulton Broad, near Lowestoft, and Cockerell went to work for the company designing motorboats. He soon became interested in the possibility of minimizing the resistance of the water to a boat’s progress by floating the vehicle on a cushion of air. In December, 1955, he filed a patent for his hovercraft design.

Cockerell could not get industrial backing to develop the hovercraft, and the Admiralty was not impressed either, although the Ministry of Supply was instructed to put it on the secret list. Saunders Roe, on the Isle of Wight, undertook to build a prototype for the ministry and reported favorably on its progress in 1958, at which point the company was commissioned to build a much larger 400-ton model for potential use as a cross-channel ferry. It proved impossible to maintain secrecy, and the project was declassified. The National Research and Development Corporation (NRDC) then provided financial support, forming a subsidiary company, Hovercraft Development Ltd., in January of 1959. Although the company’s offices were initially located in Cockerell’s home in East Cowes, Cockerell was merely a director and technical consultant, while the chairman and managing director was the NRDC’s Dennis Hennessy. When the company moved across Southampton Water to Hythe in 1960, Cockerell bought a house there, where he lived for the rest of his life.

The Saunders Roe model SR-N1 was shown to the press on June 11, 1959, causing something of a sensation. On July 25, it made a channel crossing, fifty years to the day afterLouis Blériot’s first aerial crossing. An experimental track for hover trains was set up near Cambridge. Hovercraft Development eventually filed some two hundred patents, fifty-nine of them in Cockerell’s name. Licences to build hovercraft were granted to various companies, including Saunders Roe, Vickers, Folland, and Cushion Craft in the United Kingdom; Bell Aircraft in the United States; and Mitsui and Mitsubishi in Japan. The various British enterprises were soon merged into the British Hovercraft Corporation—a move strenuously opposed by Cockerell, who believed (correctly, as it turned out) that the merger would stifle innovation. He resigned from the new entity on March 23, 1966. He was knighted in 1969 for his contributions to engineering.

In the 1970’s, Cockerell became very interested in the possibility of developing technologies of renewable energy that would outlast intrinsically limited supplies of coal and oil. He and Edwin Gifford, with whom he had previously worked on hovercraft development, formed a company called Wavepower Ltd. to exploit a number of patents that Cockerell took out for devices to produce electricity from the energy of waves. The prototypes worked, but the electricity they produced was far more expensive than conventionally generated electricity, and the company had to be wound up in 1982.

By this time, Cockerell was in his seventies, and he was unable to initiate a further phase of his remarkable career, but he remained very active as a public figure, firing off scores of letters to the press and various institutions, frequently complaining about the low status of engineers in British society and the fact that the British education system was turning out “half-educated people” with no appreciation of science and technology. He died in 1999 in Sutton Manor Nursing Home in Hampshire and was survived by his two daughters, Anne and Frances.

Impact

Cockerell became famous as the archetypal British inventor of the twentieth century, and the hovercraft became—somewhat ironically, as things turned out—a key example of British technological ingenuity. The hovercraft failed to live up to his hopes, at least in the fact that its development was far more successful outside Britain than within, and proved to be of peripheral value in a relatively limited range of contexts.

Cockerell was quite right to regard his war work as the greatest achievement of his career. He played no small part in saving Britain from an invasion by air that would have changed the history of the twentieth century dramatically had Nazi Germany succeeded, and he also made a key contribution to facilitating the counterinvasion of northern France that eventually brought the war in Europe to an end. Of all the many inventors and engineers who played a part in the war effort, there was probably none whose summary contribution was more important than Cockerell’s.

Bibliography

Johnson, P. S. The Economics of Invention and Innovation: With a Case Study of the Development of the Hovercraft. London: M. Robertson, 1975. An interesting analysis of the difficulties of exploiting Cockerell’s key invention.

Wheeler, R. L. “Sir Christopher Sydney Cockerell.” In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. A succinct but comprehensive biography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Sir Christopher Sydney Cockerell CBE, RDI, 4 June 1910-1 June 1999.” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 47 (November, 2001): 69-89. A more leisurely biography than the same author’s entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Covers the same ground in slightly more detail.