Zaidi, S. Waqar H. (Author)
Technology and Culture
Volume: 49
Pages: 62--88
Publication date: 2008
Language: English
Barnes Wallis has long been the most famous British engineer of the twentieth century. Celebrated for his invention of the "Bouncing Bomb," used in the "Dam Busters" raid during World War II, he has been the subject of the immensely popular and still well-known British film The Dam Busters, released in 1955, and a major BBC television documentary in 1967 and two biographies, one in 1973, the other in 2005. The Bouncing Bomb and the Dam Busters raid have been the subject of numerous popular books, while his representation in The Dam Busters has itself received attention from historians. In 2001, a public poll made him one of the hundred "Greatest Britons" ever---the only other engineers on the list were Isambard Kingdom Brunel, James Watt, and Frank Whittle. But fame is not power, and there were postwar engineers who had greater influence and were more grandly decorated than Wallis. In interesting and important ways, however, Wallis stood for engineers as a whole and their power and influence, or lack of it, for many decades. Although his fame as an engineer and representative of British engineering endures, his powerful and distinctive vision of a future England and English engineering---the one most clearly articulated by an engineer during the postwar period---does not.
...MoreDescription On the famous British engineer and his role during and after World War II.
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