Personalities

Lanchester came to loath Bairstow and what he called “the Cambridge School”—a group to which he had no hesitation in assigning Bairstow, de­spite the latter’s London provenance.63 Unlike the positive comments he made about the National Physical Laboratory in 1915, in later years Lanchester ex­pressed resentment at the lack of support he had received from that quarter and identified the majority of those working there as effectively belonging to the “Cambridge School.” In a memorandum written in 1936, in which he sought recognition from the Air Ministry for his contribution, Lanchester expressed himself with some bitterness: “The trouble is, or arose from the fact, that with the exception of Lord Rayleigh, the N. P.L. did not take my work seriously. . . . They fell into the error, and for this Leonard Bairstow was mainly to blame, of casting doubt on my work, I believe because my methods did not appeal to them in view of their training. They mostly belonged to the Cambridge School, whereas I was the product of the Royal College of Science (then the Normal School of Science)” (19-20).64 He recalled that, on more than one occasion, Bairstow had asserted, during meetings of the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, that “we do not believe in your theories” (20). In an earlier letter of 1931 to Capt. J. L. Pritchard, the secretary of the Royal Aeronautical Society, Lanchester referred to “that man Bairstow who would have nothing of the vortex or cyclic theory and took every occasion when I was a member of the Advisory Committee to laugh and jeer at it.” 65

The minutes of the Advisory Committee do not contain any specific re­cord of episodes of this kind.66 Whether those writing the minutes drew a veil over such exchanges or whether Lanchester’s memory was at fault is im­possible to determine. Nevertheless there is no reason to doubt the essential accuracy of Lanchester’s account, and the minutes contain clear evidence of Bairstow’s opposition. There is also ample corroboration in the public realm. As J. L. Nayler, the secretary of the committee, put it, in his early years Bair­stow was “a dominant and almost pugilistic character.”67 In another letter to Pritchard, Lanchester left no doubt as to where he placed the blame for the opposition to his work. “The whole thing,” he asserted, “originated with Bairstow backed up by Glazebrook.”68

The personalized focus of this explanation has been taken up by others. This was the line taken by J. A. D. Ackroyd in his Lanchester Lecture of 1992. After giving an authoritative account of Lanchester’s contributions to aerody­namics, Ackroyd posed the question of why there was so little interest in the circulatory theory. “Perhaps part of the problem,” he suggested, “lay in the personalities involved.” 69 Ackroyd, however, did not place all the emphasis on Bairstow’s personality but noted the role of Lanchester’s own strong per­sonality and his inclination to be critical of Cambridge and London graduates and the work of the NPL. Perhaps, Ackroyd concluded, there was a mutual an­tipathy between the persons involved. In developing this argument, Ackroyd cited and endorsed the psychologically oriented explanation that had been advanced some years previously by the eminent applied mathematician Sir Graham Sutton FRS. Sutton pointed to what he called Lanchester’s “isolation” and put this down to Lanchester having been one of the great “individualists” of science. “Throughout his life he remained an individualist, perhaps the last and possibly the greatest lone worker that aerodynamics will ever see.”70

The clash of personalities must be part of the story, but can this really be the explanation of the opposition to the cyclic theory? I do not believe that it can. Consider the role of Bairstow’s personality. In the survey that I gave of the reasons advanced against Lanchester, it is clear that Bairstow’s arguments were aligned with those offered by others, such as Taylor, Cowley, Levy, and Lamb. Later I shall add more names to this list. I have seen no evidence that suggests they shared Bairstow’s main personality characteristic, that is, his aggressiveness. They had their own, quite different, personalities. Levy, for example, always said Cambridge was an unattractive place where the math­ematical traditions were too “pure” for his tastes. With his Jewish and Scot­tish working-class background, he said he did not feel socially or politically comfortable in Cambridge and declined the chance to do postgraduate work there. Levy’s class consciousness and bitterness at the blighted lives he had witnessed in the slums never left him.71 After graduating from Edinburgh, however, Levy used his scholarship funds to visit Gottingen (where he met von Karman) and then took himself to Oxford to work with the Cambridge – trained Love. The relation between Levy’s personal feelings and this career trajectory is not easy to fathom,72 but perhaps we do not need to understand such matters. What can be said about all these diverse and complex person­alities is that they all took a similar stance on the central, technical problems that were in question. They shared professional opinions and judgments, not individual personality traits. The explanation in terms of personality, there­fore, breaks down. The candidate cause (personality) varies, but the effect (resistance to Lanchester’s ideas) stays the same. This means that we must look elsewhere for the real cause.

What, in any case, would be the basis of an account that rested on an appeal to personality? No one believes that certain psychological types are selectively attracted to this, that, or the other preferred pattern of fluid flow, whether viscid or inviscid. Those who invoke “personality” generally do so in order to explain the disruption of a process of rational assessment that (it is assumed) would otherwise have proceeded in a different way. It is offered as a way of explaining why things went wrong. It is meant to explain why a theory was rejected when it should have been accepted, and the answer is found in individual psychological traits. But given that the assessment of Lanchester actually rested on the appeal to shared standards, common to a group of otherwise diverse individuals, this explanatory approach bypasses the most salient feature of the episode. Its outstanding characteristic was its systematic and shared nature. It had the character of a concerted action by a group.

A further point needs to be stressed. An examination of the technical ar­guments that were used against Lanchester suggests that the response to his work was not a disruption in the rational working of science but a routine ex­ample of it. It was orderly, consistent, and reasoned and drew upon a refined body of received opinion and technique. It is true that some of the complex­ity was factored out of Lanchester’s text, but that again was a consistent and shared feature of the response, not an individual variable. Personality played its part, but only by giving a different tone, and a different degree of intensity, to the expression of a central core of repeated, and overlapping, argumenta­tion. The common content of the arguments derived not from individual psychology but from participation in a shared scientific culture.

Lanchester himself hinted at an explanation of this kind. As well as his explicit and angry psychological account, focused on his irritation with Bair – stow, there was also an implicit, more sociological dimension to his account of the resistance to his theory. This aspect surfaced in his reference to the “Cambridge School” and the common background of training of the scien­tists at the NPL. We should also recall his 1917 discussion of the organizational characteristics of well-conducted aeronautical research. This, too, can be read for its bearing on the resistance encountered by Lanchester’s work. His central preoccupation was that the different parties to the process of research should confine themselves to their proper spheres of competence. No good would come, he argued, of mathematicians and physicists encroaching on territory outside the (narrow) limits of their expertise. What could have been in Lanchester’s mind? What examples of invasive physicists might he have cited? The public confrontation with Bairstow, two years previously, when they clashed over the proper scope of a theory of lift could not have been far beneath the surface. Was it necessary to find a universal law of nature, as Bair – stow wanted, or would a specialized, practically oriented approach suffice, as Lanchester believed? Whether or not this was the example in Lanchester’s mind, it illustrates the general problem to which he was referring, namely, the problem of the division of labor.

The division of labor generates a diversity of specialized perspectives and localized forms of knowledge. Professional subgroups and disciplinary divi­sions such as those between mathematical physics and technical mechanics are instances of this general phenomenon. What happens when the product of one of these subgroups and perspectives is assessed from the standpoint of another, different subgroup with a different perspective? We have here all the preconditions for a small-scale culture clash. Has the knowledge claim been properly understood, or has it been misinterpreted? Is a contribution to one project being assessed (deliberately or unwittingly) by criteria more appro­priate to another project? If I am right, this is exactly what happened when Lanchester’s work was assessed so negatively by the “Cambridge School,” and it was this problem (although it was not the only problem) that Lanchester was addressing when he discussed the proper organization of aerodynamic research.