The Reception of the ACA

Before we look at the early Reports and Memoranda generated by this re­search program, something should be said about the public and professional reception that was given to Haldane’s new committee. If there was a cautious welcome in some quarters, elsewhere bitter disappointment was expressed that the commercial manufacturers of aircraft and the pioneers of flight (who were usually the same men) were not represented. To these critics the ACA was just a committee of professors, not of producers. Even the inclusion of Lanchester did not satisfy the critics. He had written books on airplanes, but these were dismissed as theoretical works. He had not built airplanes, only motorcars (and some of the critics didn’t even like his cars). Where were the names of Britain’s aeronautical pioneers, such as Handley Page, Fairey, Roe, Rolls, Short, or Grahame-White?48

To prepare the ground for the prime minister’s announcement of the Ad­visory Committee, Haldane had written on May 4, 1909, to the newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe, who had been agitating for government action. “We have,” Haldane said, “at last elaborated our plans for the foundation of a system of Aerial Navigation.” The government had created “a real scientific Department of State” for its study. In his reply of May 9, Northcliffe was dismissive. He gracelessly declared that the composition of the committee “is one of the most lamentable things I have read in connection with our national organisation.” He conceded that Rayleigh was a good choice as chairman, but “the Committee should certainly include the names of some of the now numerous English practical exponents.” As for Lanchester, he was known to be critical of the Wright machine,49 about which Northcliffe was enthu­siastic, and was “the same Mr Lanchester, I understand, who is responsible for. . . one of the most complicated motor cars we have ever had.” This was Northcliffe writing to a member of the Cabinet; when corresponding with his political cronies he simply referred to the Advisory Committee as Haldane’s “collection of primeval men.”50

In reply to Northcliffe (on May 18) Haldane said that the advice he had been given had convinced him “of what I was very ready to be convinced, that here as in other things we English are far behind in scientific knowledge. The men you mention are not scientific men nor are they competent to work out great principles: they are very able constructors and men of business. But in this big affair much more than that is needed.”51 Predictably, this response failed to mollify Northcliffe and his friends, such as J. L. Garvin of the Ob­server (“too many theorists”; May 7). Nor were they alone in their negative response. The Tory Morning Post of May 7 had declared that “too much value has been attached to the purely theoretical side, while no evidence is forth­coming that the practical side will be advanced at all.” In an interview for the Post, the aviation and motoring enthusiast Lord Montague said that “the Commission is composed of theoretical and official people as distinct from practical men. . . . I do not recognize the name of any man on it of actual practical experience.”52 The journal Flight joined in and got its revenge for its failed prediction over the Wright brothers’ contract: “It is a bad system to encumber enterprise by establishing ‘Boards of Opinion.’ The opinions of the practical men who are doing the work are worth more to the nation than those of a miscellaneous collection of scientists.”53

A more positive response to the committee was to be found in a short article in the pages of Nature on May 13, 1909.54 It was by the brilliant and opinionated mathematician George Hartley Bryan, himself a wrangler and a former fellow of Peterhouse College.55 Bryan welcomed the creation of the Advisory Committee, saying: “It is clear. . . that mathematical and physi­cal investigations are to receive a large share of attention, and that the mere building of aeroplanes and experience in manipulating them are not to in­terfere with the less enticing and no less important work of finding out the fundamental principles underlying their construction” (313). The problem of stability, he noted with satisfaction, had been singled out for attention, though the “mathematics of this problem are pretty complicated” (313). Bryan was not surprised that newspapers were complaining that the committee was too theoretical in its orientation and that the “practical man” was not properly represented. The real problem, said Bryan, was not too much theory but too many publications that contained equations and algebraic symbols written by people who did not understand mathematics. “Indeed, in many cases it is the ‘practical man’ who revels in the excessive use and abuse of formulae, and the mathematician and physicist who would like to bring themselves in touch with practical problems are consequently deterred from reading such litera­ture” (314). There was an urgent need, Bryan concluded, “for a clear division of labour between the practical man and the physicist” (314). The failure to create such a division, he argued, had already cost England the loss of its chemical and optical industries, and France had a long head start in automo­biles. Now at last there was a chance to make up the ground in aeronautics.

Bryan’s reaction was just the kind that Haldane would have been hoping for, though the reference to the “mere building of aeroplanes” was hardly politic. These two initial responses—that of Northcliffe and his allies and that of Bryan—indicate the tension surrounding the ACA. They also serve to introduce some of the labels that were used at the time to signalize the differ­ent and opposed parties. The term “practical man” does not refer to a cloth – capped artisan but primarily to engineers and entrepreneurs, and included, for example, the Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls. The label was a badge of honor intended to mark the contrast with university academics, civil servants, and others with no direct involvement in market processes.56 I follow out some of the further expressions and consequences of this social divide.