What is it about the Brits? From Jet engines to Warp drive.

John - was that CMP in Bolton with the Bedford CF van?

Murray

There is some doubt about who invented the Jet engine, as Whittles first patent of 1930 was published and circulated via the new patents publications all over Europe, and it is also known that University of Gottingen, where Von Ohain had studied and was then a research assistant, recieved a copy of this publication. If von Ohain was working on jet propulsion at the time, it is a little far fetched to suggest that he would not have read it! Von Ohains patent came out in 1936, and was internally different to Whittles, but then it would have to be or it would not be able to get a patent!

Phil

Lucas, later Lucas Chloride, 2 deadly enemies but yes Bedford CF's. It was way ahead of it's time really and involved some DTI funding - hence Lucas working with Chloride. They wouldn't fund 2 companies working on the same thing. The Chloride side seemed to be mostly moved to Wolverhampton when it was merged but there was something further north and I think it was in Bolton. It went purely Chloride after I left and that was based in Redditch. Lucas was clearly dismantling the whole group at the time and didn't want to take anything they did any further forward just run it down and sell anything they could including the various companies which eventually allowed them to do a massive raid on the pension fund.

The Lucas controller was thyristor based. Chloride's transistor. The Lucas one was more or less shelved when it was finished.

John

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Do you have any reference to back any or part of that up?

Steve

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John,

I presume you are thinking of Ralph Nader

MichaelG.

Whooo! I heard some fun stories about the electric CFs a few years ago when I was running a petrol one.

There's a poor soul who actually has one running:

www.looneyland.freeserve.co.uk/bedford.htm

And another who is probably lucky to be alive:

bedfordcfelectric.blogspot.co.uk/

"Every morning before setting off I suck out the Hydrogen gas with a Hoover to prevent the gas evolved during charging from igniting from sparks while traveling."

Takes all sorts...

Neil

Hi

"Every morning before setting off I suck out the Hydrogen gas with a Hoover to prevent the gas evolved during charging from igniting from sparks while traveling."

Hydrogen Gas - Hoover - Commutator Sparking = Hydrogen Powered Jet Engine

Surely it was Frank Whittle sucking petrol fumes through a Hoover that the resulting rapid movement of the Hoover that inspired him to invent the jet engine.

Eric

The first link shows a pure Lucas CF and no way did Lucas and Chloride help each other Neil, Lucas more or less ruined Chlorides automotive battery sales via various patents. They couldn't match the prices either.

Out of interest the step down was via a chain drive as it was more efficient - when set up - but sadly that dropped off with use so may as well been gears.

One curious thing is that there was no real problems with explosions. Hardly surprising really batteries have been gassing around in cars for donkeys years. The stuff disperses very easily. At one point there were some melt downs. Some of the batteries were fitted with gassing detectors to control the charging. It's easy to turn the mix of hydrogen and oxygen that comes off charging batteries back to water, it's the perfect mix so just throw a match into it and bang. It's a super high explosive and leaves a tiny drop of water. There are these things called recombiners that do this slowly but no one would trust them, the bit that slows them down might break. No one had any idea why this mechanical gas flow detection device was causing batteries to burn so it was dropped. The whole idea was to reduce water loss during charging to a minimum as topping up was painful. It's interesting to see that they fitted some sort of auto watering system. At gas detector time and long after the water loss was such a problem that the batteries were not being fully recharged and that wasn't very good for them at all.

Actually the auto top up would concern me. It looks remarkably like a very early one.

The guy who has removed the battery pack aught to build himself a hover pallet - literally a purpose built hover craft. They can be got in and out with ease with that and the air pressure needed was surprisingly easy to generate with a fan. The general manager of the project was into flying his own hover craft so it was a popular idea as a solution to that problem and worked well and cheaply.

A domestic charger was also produced that came with a 3 pin plug. It drew exactly 13 amps with a unity power factor. They found that few UK sockets could actually take the load. MK sometimes did and that was about it. It took way too long to charge the battery pack anyway.

The controller reliability was awful for many years. When I started there I used to joke that the service people should wear a mexican style bandolier loaded with those rather large and very expensive fuses that can be seen. I also made myself very popular by asking the general manager how the hell one department could decide to use gold plated pins on a plug and another normal tin on the socket. That and one or two other things lead to a much appreciated career change.

The motor that drove them was a wonderful piece of work. They used separate field and armature excitation and clever analogue feed back to avoid the need for any sort of speed sensor.

They look like thyristor controller to me as well. Sounds like the effort to get them reliable did pay off and the Chloride transistor one died off even when Chloride owned the lot. Actually with the other kit needed around them a number of aspects were way way ahead of their time.

Could every one run one ? No way. The planet hasn't got enough lead for that sort of battery.

John

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Jet engines - obvious development from Parsons steam turbine work and he knew it.

John

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Edited By John W1 on 31/07/2015 00:17:04

Taking a slightly less focused view of all this. I read (on the internet, so it must be true!!) recently that a Japanese engineer did a survey of patents around the world, going back to the beginning of patents. He found that 80% of technical patents were originated in the UK.

Clearly this may not be accurate, but that's what I read.

Food for thought in this service industry world though

cheers

Bill

NO.

I don't think this is the right thread to discuss the development of the jet engine but there are many reasons to dismiss this statement. Only one country, and it was not the Russians, continued developing the German engines. It set them back many years. Although, during the War, the British concentrated on centrifugal compressor engines the RAE engine, which was a direct ancestor of the Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire, used an axial compressor and was considerably better than any of the German engines.

JA

So the German jets engines were over there, but their engines were short lived due to lower grade materials.