The United Kingdom has for many years had the image of a country of engineers and inventors. The roots lie in the industrial revolution of the 19th century. But in the 20th century, the inventive drive faded. Actually, British invention during the Second World War developed largely thanks to the technical phobias of the Nobel Prize winner in literature Sir Winston Churchill and was rooted in patents of the 1930s, which is clearly visible in the top achievements of British scientists and engineers of those years.
Statistics on the total number of patents issued in Great Britain in 1939-1945. gives about 10 thousand documents per year, which is 2-3 times less than in the USA, but 4-5 times more than in the USSR.
Turbojet aircraft
Although Sir Frank Whittle received patent No. 347206 for a turbojet engine back in 1930, the British government was not particularly interested in the development. Therefore, work progressed slowly.
However, the first in the world to fly was the British jet Gloucester Meteor on March 5, 1943. The aircraft was put into operation at an accelerated pace, while Messerschmitt began participating in combat operations on April 1, 1944, the Meteor entered service only on July 27, 1944. The fighter was a twin-engine jet aircraft that saw action during World War II and performed well. On a number of occasions it was used to intercept V-1 missiles. True, due to the fear that it might fall into the hands of the Nazis, its use was limited. The creation of this aircraft was a major milestone in British military aircraft production and made the United Kingdom the first country in the Allied camp to use jet fighters in combat. Having been produced during the Second World War, the machines turned out to be of such high quality that their operation continued for many years. They even managed to take part in the Korean War.
Radars
The first radar technology (Radio Detection and Ranging) was developed in the 1930s by Robert Watson Watt and Arnold Wilkins. It made it possible to prevent the threat of aerial bombardment. The radar received an English patent in April 1935. Before 1945, a number of significant improvements were made that made it possible to detect aircraft and similar aircraft such as FAA missiles up to 100 km.
Historians say the outcome of the Battle of Britain may have been determined by the British reliance on radar defense systems and the German decision to focus on bombing cities. As a result, the British were able to spot German bombers while they were up to 100 miles from the shores of Foggy Albion, and prepare to repel attacks.
By the way, a prototype of a computer mouse was created to control radars. We have devoted a separate material to this invention .
First programmable computer
Alan Turing invented an electromechanical machine called the Bombe, which helped break the German code of the legendary Enigma machine. Although technically not exactly a computer as we know it, the Bombe was the forerunner of the Colossus machines, a series of British electronic computers for breaking messages encrypted using the German Lorenz cipher. British engineer Tommy Flowers and his team created the Colossus electronic programmable computer. The device consisted of 1,500 vacuum tubes, making it the largest computer of its time. The 2,500-tube Colossus Mark II upgrade is considered the first programmable computer in computer history.
Before the creation of Colossus, it took several weeks to decrypt messages, but now the result became known within a few hours. The vehicle was fully operational by the time of the Normandy landings in 1944. Thanks to Colossus, in particular, it became clear that the Allies had successfully misinformed the German troops. After the war, Churchill ordered the destruction of all computers, but in 1994, engineers managed to restore a working version of Colossus Mark II from photographs. Thanks to this work, it became known that a half-century-old computer operates at approximately the same speed as a laptop with an Intel Pentium 2 processor.
Sea mines
In naval battles, German submarines caused a lot of damage to British military convoys, in particular, those sent to the northern ports of the USSR as part of allied assistance with weapons and military materials. The obvious solution was depth mines, installed both from destroyers and dropped by aircraft.
In principle, mines with contact fuses have been known since the First World War. A British achievement was that from the mid-1930s. H. Taylor, head of the Mine Weapons Development Department, invented and then improved a proximity fuse based on an induction coil. The first mines of the "A" series - "A Mark I" were produced and entered service in early 1940. Production was carried out in the Royal Navy Armament Department - Powder Works near Wareham and in the Frater Mine Shop in Gosport. The first use took place on April 14, 1940 by aircraft during mining of the Danish Straits. In just 5 years (1940-1945), the Royal Air Force deployed more than 48 thousand mines in the European Theater, which blew up more than 1 thousand ships and vessels, of which 700 sank.
NucThe Second World Warlear weapon
Great Britain was among the three initial leaders in the development of nuclear weapons (with Hitler's Germany and the USA). The special body “Maud Comitti” (eng. MAUD commitee) or “Thomson Committee” is known. This is the name of the committee of English and German scientists who worked on a nuclear bomb - Military Application of Uranium Detonation. The ideologist was the German physicist of Jewish origin Rudolf Peierls, who was forced to flee Germany. The project was initiated by Churchill's adviser, the prominent scientist Henry Tizard, to whom Peierls approached with the idea of the need to create an atomic bomb. By the way, Peierls was the initiator of inviting the Soviet spy/intelligence officer Klaus Fuchs to the atomic weapons project.
However, these current developments were carried out with understandable phlegmaticity, caused by massive German bombing.
At the Institute of Theoretical Physics named after. Landau (Chernogolovka) joke that the world's first realistic estimate of the critical mass of a uranium nuclear bomb was made by Rudolf Peierls in collaboration with Otto Frisch in March 1940. Before them, it was believed that tons and tons of uranium-235 were needed.
Peierls and Frisch calculated that half a kilo would be enough. They did not have reliable physical data, but they formulated two fundamental physical assumptions, alas, both numerically incorrect. Fortunately, the two mistakes almost canceled each other out. Before the Peierls-Frisch Memorandum, it was believed that a nuclear bomb was impossible due to the unbearable weight. After their Memorandum, work on the bomb intensified.
Surprisingly, Rudolf Peierls, who spoke excellent Russian, was married since 1931 to Leningrad scientist Evgenia Kannegiesser (also a physicist), sister of Kannegiesser, who killed the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Uritsky, in 1918. Evgenia was a friend of the famous Soviet physicists Gamow and Landau. In the 1980s, Rudolf Peierls was in Moscow at the Space Research Institute and grinningly told his Soviet colleagues: “As a leftist, I was not allowed to participate in the top-secret development of radars in England, so out of nothing to do, I took up the problem of the atomic bomb.”
In December 1940, Halban and Kowarski, after conducting experiments at the Cavendish Laboratory with the first laboratory reactor using uranium oxide and heavy water, wrote a detailed report, which even then stated definitely: “... the nuclear reactor will work...”.
At the beginning of 1942, Metropolitan-Vickers began developing industrial equipment for the separation of uranium isotopes using gas diffusion on membranes using Michael Clapham technology. In the middle of the same year, membrane assemblies were installed in Rydymvine and Manchester. Gas mixtures began to be passed through the assemblies to obtain data on the industrial capabilities of isotope separation.
At the end of 1942, a uranium production project in Canada began, in particular in September 1942, a group of physicists led by Halban went to Montreal to select a site for the construction of a heavy water reactor.
In 1943, a pilot plant was built in Great Britain, which produced 200-pound bars of uranium metal for factory experiments. However, soon all developments were transferred to the USA, where the matter was completed. We have already written about this earlier.
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