J W Dunne projects

Splitting hairs a bit, but he describes two flights before Wright on the same day. It is, indeed, the same text as in Flight 1911.

Today's visit to the archive turned up a lost treasure. Dunne lost his two key documents on his early work into "spinners", leaving us all in the dark as to what they were. He wrote a note which he gave to HG Wells to pass on to Lord Rayleigh, and he made a provisional patent application. He was unable later to lay his hands on either document. Today, the second of these turned up - it had been in among those endless boxes after all! Patent applications are not made public by the Patent Office and I don't suppose they are kept overlong either, so this is the only remaining copy - or rather was, as I now have a second one.

Yes, they were definitely what one Science Museum curator once deduced were "rotor aeroplanes", but as to how Dunne used them to create stable aircraft - that can wait for my book.

He also records in one of his letters that Rayleigh replied to the effect that rotors were inefficient and he had best look for a stable fixed wing, so at least we know Rayleigh got the write-up even if we still do not know what it said.

I’ve kept off this thread because of the occasional “de haut en bas” tone but I think part of my ongoing mild scepticism (be it due to prejudice or be it ignorance I simply wouldn't dare to judge) about Dunne's significance springs partly from a feeling that the label 'tailless aeroplane' was not as remarkable a thing c. 1904 as it is now. (Goodness, tailless glider from Emmanuel Swedenborg c. 1714 – hopeless, but tailless …) Brearey's oscillating wing-designs c. 1879-1885 - not at all plausible in themselves note - include (I think) pre-Dunne tailless biplanes but what of it? I would be more sceptical still of someone talking up (say) Clément Ader's 'tailless' contribution but not much more. And the claim 'self-stabilising' is a tiny bit self-aggrandising, n'est ce pas? And often undesirable even if it could be achieved – say if one is flying a fighter, no? As for the Wright Brothers, rumour hath that if you move the c. of g. of the Kitty Hawk flyer forward a bit and give it a fixed horizontal stabiliser, bingo you have a "self-stabilising" biplane - capable, so I hear, of flight more or less hands-free.

Sorry but I think successful application counts for something too. Where are the successful applications in production aircraft of Dunne’s designs? (Of course, it was a Burgess-Dunne float-plane that caught Kaiser Bill, wasn't it? Or did I dream that?) And alas I too cannot count the DH. 108 that killed Geoffrey de Havilland (Jr.) and (by his own testimony) nearly killed Eric Brown as a success. I mentioned Barnes Wallis above (although I agree that he went off the rails somewhat) because he designed sundry devices that were implemented on a very large scale and saw unique military (and other) applications.

As for chalk and cheese, well, in a way that's my point: 'Renaissance Man' is a lovely, warm but awfully vague label, like many labels, and it tends to lend itself to claims that float off into the stratosphere. One thinks of Tesla: now there was a man of genuine achievement (genius even – a term which I trust no one is seeking to apply to Dunne) but also the centre of a cult (the word is not too strong) that would have him responsible for everything. Dunne was remarkable but maybe a sense of proportion can yet be maintained. Ministries took counsel of all manner of sorts during WW2 and it maketh not a case for unique or even significant influence. Maybe an instructive parallel is with Burnelli …

I can see I am wasting my time here. There's no point in posting my latest research if this is the treatment it would receive. 'bye all.

Sorry that you feel that way, but research needs a certain amount of scepticism, and if your research is good it will withstand critical attention.

Absolutely, new research and open discussion of the findings is always welcome.

I may be a voice crying in the wilderness, but I don't think that you are wasting your time, steelpillow. I read what you post with interest. Hopefully it is sufficiently robust to stand up to objective critiscism. I fear that there is a rather too much subjectivity in the last post by Wingknut even though, I suspect, his/her intentions are genuine .

One correction I will make. I based the claim that the DH.108 was first to (unofficially) break the sound barrier on several otherwise reliable written sources. Babington Smith, in "Testing Times" writes that Chuck Yeager had already done so on several occasions. I do not know the truth of the matter.

False claims I can take - as you see, I make a few myself. Sensibly-framed questions too deserve an answer. Scepticism is healthy, as long as the sceptic offers soundly-sourced and rational criticism. But hypocritically “de haut en bas” nonsense peppered with old allegations and ignorant sarcasm is something I can do without.

Hi Steelpillow,

must of us like your work,please continues in you research for any company of aviation,
believe me,skeptics are every where,even when you submit a small suggesting.

Hesham, you say that as if scepticism is a bad thing. It is not, it is what underpins all scientific enquiry. An idea is put forward, evidence is presented, questions are asked, details are subjected to test, then if the idea stands up to scrutiny it is accepted. Historical research should be treated in exactly the same way.

Schneiderman,

I agree with you,but I spoke about the people who suspect in every word you say it,
that's not good behavior.

I welcome new research and good research but I agree scepticism is a healthy thing in all research.
This looks like a promising line of research that's bound to have new insights into Dunne's work.

Admittedly, you don't want to show us all your research into his paper's and spoil the impact of your book, but from what you've posted it seems he was well-connected and established but not residing within the mainstream, he still had to mount an extensive letter writing campaign to get his ideas across and attempt to secure interest in them. This does not seem to mark someone who knew how to operate the levers of power in his favour. He knew the top men and his fellow pioneers well but did he really know what their design teams were doing in detail? From what you've told us, it seems he certainly wanted to collaborate with his equals, chatting to Geoffrey de Havilland Snr. is one thing but how much of that got back to his designers and vice versa?
Was it because he wanted to be a free agent that he did not seek a place inside an established company or research establishment?

Interestingly, with strong links to HG Wells, one wonders if he knew of his (intermittent) friendship with Churchill and tried to exploit that link to get official interest?
The letter to Masefield seems odd, almost too whimsical though it shows he knew something of what the Germans were doing. It's hard to judge from one letter you highlight and I suspect you've got a better idea of the overall pattern and tone of his letters.

Certainly you are not wasting your time and we're interested, there is a lot of unknown and forgotten aspects out there and slowly all the pieces will fit back together.

Thank you to all for your kind words. You have persuaded me that my posts here are not in vain.

This is mainly in reply to Hood, but with some new findings too.

On his WWII comeback, Dunne was well versed in the levers of power - and needed to be, for by WWII he had been out of mainstream aeronautical work for a quarter of a century and his connections were going rusty. His lobbying through a combination of official and social channels was - and still is - exactly the kind of thing one does in order to catch the ears of power.
His poor health meant he could never work nine-to-five. His father had refused to allow him to learn mathematics. He had earned his living for the last twelve years on the strength of his philosophical writings. Emotionally and intellectually, he could never work on somebody else's kind of aeroplane and his, despite GTR Hill's best efforts, had never found a customer. No company dirung wartime had room for such private research. I would suggest that he was an unemployable outsider and the role of free agent was the only one available to him.
That he was taken seriously enough to be offered a slot in the NPL wind tunnel is astonishing enough. It is hard to say, but my best guess is that he had stumbled on a laminar-flow aerofoil in one of his models, as his claims of amazing performance chime closely with those made for laminar flow around that time. The later Tailless Aircraft Advisory Committee would be much taken with the idea of a laminar-flow wing relieved of the tail excrescences which they felt held back machines such as the North American Mustang.

The tale of Dunne and de Havilland has been revealing some extraordinary twists, not wholly aeronautical. Here I tell how de Havilland would tease his younger staff, who were working on the DH.108 project, that Dunne had done it all decades before and made it work, so they had better get it right too. When TG283 flew, DH personally sent Dunne a photograph.

Churchill did show some interest, he saw a Dunne fly at least once. I am sure that Wells lobbied as best he thought fit. Unlike today's world of excruciatingly administered impartiality, that was how things were expected to be done in those days. You gained your position and exerted your influence through your personal and social connections. The paperwork was usually little more than a rubber-stamping of what had already been agreed. But the Admiralty had more interest in airships than aeroplanes at the time and by the time that had changed, Churchill had moved on.

The British knew in broad terms what the Germans were doing in WWII and published it with delight. I have since found that Dunne kept an extensive collection of press clippings and magazine articles. I don't know what he thought would happen if the Nazis got wind of his latest scheme - he knew as well as anyone that Lippisch was ten years ahead and busy ripening the fruits for Messerschmitt. Dunne's obsession with secrecy was shared by his old taskmaster and friend John Capper and seems to have been common enough among military men of that generation. Then suddenly they would need publicity and the veil would be frantically torn aside as if it had never existed - until the next bright idea. "Whimsical" seems as good a judgement as any.

On a quite different tack you may already have come across the murky tale of how one (or two?) Burgess-Dunne machines were purchased by Canada in 1914, shipped to England and offered to the War Office. Predating these events by several weeks is a private suggestion from the Marquis of Tullibardine, Dunne's company Chairman and also an MP, to do exactly this. If you are into early Canadian aviation history, the plot truly thickens!

Nice Info Steelpillow.

Many thanks Steelpillow, that information has helped me understand the situation better.
I've always been fascinated about the various personal relationships and how they were used within the aircraft industry and aeronautics more widely. The aviation pioneers certainly make an interesting set of personalities to study, they never lost their ability to influence events, even into the 1960s.

Phew! Today I finished the last of Dunne's aeronautical archive material. Some recent higlights:

According to one letter by his father, he began his aeronautical investigations "long before" he joined the Yeomanry in 1900. There is no hint what form these took.

At some point he began methodical experiments and kept notes. Some of these notes survive, torn from an exercise book. About a dozen concern various Magnus and wing rotors, the next batch all kinds of weird wing planforms, some curled up at the back. Most are sketched. Let's hope I can afford the license royalties for the book.

In the run-up to his engagement at the Balloon Factory, the correspondence passing between the various players - Baden-Powell, Dunne's father, Capper, the War Office, the Royal Engineers and of course Dunne himself - shows just how tight-knit the whole community was.

All the monoplanes built in England by the Syndicate belonged to Colonel Capper. He started on the first one, nowadays called the Dunne-Capper monoplane, way back in 1910 because he wanted to learn to fly in it. When it refused to fly the Syndicate agreed to modify it, test it and give it him back. Followed a total of four crashes at Dunne's hands alone and two total write-offs with replacement machines built for him, all in the name of "testing". After the last smash it languished in sheds until the Syndicate bought it in exchange for shares in order to clear the decks for a takeover (of which more in a moment). Poor Capper never once got to fly his own aeroplane. Much of that frankly was Dunne's fault and the two rather fell out - Tullibardine had to work to keep them apart at one point.

Dunne did not leave aeronautics completely in 1913, he merely gave up flying. Not only did he remain a leading figure in the Aeronautical Society and Aero Club, but he also remained an active designer and director with the Syndicate, corresponding even from his hospital bed described in An Experiment with Time. The Syndicate didn't fold in 1914 either, it was taken over by Armstrong Whitworth, with Dunne and some of the other directors staying on. They were gearing up to produce Dunne's latest design when war broke out and their team pulled onto more urgent engineering work. many and in some cases quite bizarre were the schemes tried to try and find a manufacturer for the Dunne. Burgess would have done more if the Admiralty had not busied him so with orders for conventional seaplanes.

As for Nieuport, I have only unravelled the tip of an iceberg, as it were, but there is a drama to be told there all right. For example The Aeroplane, 12 Feb 1914, carries on p.146 a large advertisement by Nieuport (England) Ltd which includes among its offerings the Nieuport-Dunne Biplanes, while among the small ads on p.167 of the same issue is one for the Blair Atholl aeroplane Syndicate Ltd's Dunne Patent Safety Aeroplanes.

Ultimately, the Dunne patent safety aeroplane did not fail because it was wrong. The Syndicate failed because a mixture of chronic lack of funds, mismanagement and unfortunate timing led to insufficient development and to customer orders being either massively delayed or turned away. Even that did not finish the Dunne, for by mid-1914 three established manufacturers around the world were gearing up to do the job properly: the coup de grace was the assassination of a certain Archduke and the subsequent global diversion of military aeronautics along more developed principles.

Meanwhile there is twice as much non-aeronautical material yet to keep me busy. I'll be happy to follow up sensible comments here, but will probably not have any more news for some time.

If these posts are anything to go by, the book will be well worth the waiting. Thank you, steelpillow.

I've only discovered this topic tonight and I'm simply amazed by the volume of information you've dug out, steelpillow, and especially impressed to hear that you've only even scratched the surface! I mean, Dunne possibly being behind the DH.108 Swallow and Things to Come, no less! Even plotting to be undermined in his efforts in order not to awaken the Germans to his comeback?? That's awesome material for a book!

Yes, skepticism is important, but there is a thin line between that and criticism. People have every right to question an assertion but not to target an individual or question his motives. I'm glad that you reconsidered your hasty decision to leave, which merely resulted from the attitude of a single individual.

By all means, steelpillow, your work is highly valuable, and I can see nothing wrong in whatever speculation you may have made because I know you will not stop at that but go all the way to either prove your point or dismiss it entirely. And I'm certain that your book, when it's published, will become a definitive source on the subject.

A word of warning now: only yesterday, an acquaintance of mine told me the details of how some wolves passing off as sheep on his FB groups (NOT aviation-related) had waited for him to post rare material, even requested stuff by PM, and thereafter published books reusing all his research, photo-editing and everything without even crediting him! I'm shocked to hear such stories, but I believe such wolves probably also exist in the aviation circles, so my advice would certainly be to not post too much, especially not too detailed stuff. While I trust that a vast majority of the people on this forum are decent people who certainly would not even dream of such misdeeds, you never know about the occasional visitor who happens on your page and thinks there's a few bucks (or quid) to make...

Anyway, keep up the great work, steelpillow, it sure is a captivating enterprise!

If you review the RAeC archives at
http://raec.daisy.websds.net/search.aspx
you will see that Dunne actually held only a minor role with the Club, serving as a member of the Grounds Committee that administered the Eastchurch flying grounds, where he owned a shed, prior to the War. There does not appear to be any mention of him having any role after 1915.

Schneiderman said:

I do think that Wingknut has a point. There is no doubt at all that Dunne carried out a great deal of valuable pioneering work but in the post WW1 world he was working well outside the mainstream or progressive sides of research and his influence was increasingly marginal. It is hard to attach the term Renaissance Man to his contribution, which is not a criticism, merely an observation. It is, after all, hard stay at the cutting edge of any technology. To be honest I feel that Barnes Wallis suffered from this too.

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Schneiderman said:

If you review the RAeC archives at
http://raec.daisy.websds.net/search.aspx
you will see that Dunne actually held only a minor role with the Club, serving as a member of the Grounds Committee that administered the Eastchurch flying grounds, where he owned a shed, prior to the War. There does not appear to be any mention of him having any role after 1915.

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In this respect, he reminds me of other pre-war pioneers such as Pemberton-Billing and Grahame-White. If anyone had foretold in 1915 that either of them (and Dunne too) would be all but forgotten and become a mere footnote of aviation history, that prophet would have been laughed at. And yet they more or less vanished after 1920, despite their amazing predictions about the future of aviation. And even the fact that they so vanished doesn't diminish in any way the invaluable contribution they made to the early days of aviation, which would not have been the same without them (that's especially true of Grahame-White I think). To some extent the same thing could even be said of Glenn H. Curtiss in the United States, without whom aviation simply would not have been the same, yet is scarcely acknowledged in the measure he deserves. And though his name is well-known, it has lived on mostly through aircraft he had no involvement in, produced after his death by a company that was mostly directed by people from the Wright end of the merger, once his fiercest competitor!

I rate Dunne's contribution to aeronautics in a completely different league to G-W and P B. A true pioneer who laid down a sound base for aerodynamic development.
G-W was great at the promotion of aviation as a business but delivered little to advance the science. His absence after the war was largely because he chose to withdraw after the acrimonious arguments with the Government over Hendon. A loss as an entrepreneur only.
P B's contribution was minimal and his fall of his own making. No loss at all.
Curtiss, like Dunne, was a great pioneer and had much to offer, but neatly shot himself in the foot over his feud with the Wrights. A waste of a great talent.
The absence, or very low profile, of Dunne during and after the War is hard to understand. He had solid links to the Short brothers and Richard Fairey, plus, as mentioned above, a business relationship with Armstrong Whitworth, so he as not short of potential partners of employers. His work on tailless aircraft was needlessly curtailed. Having resolved many of the issues of stability and control the next step would have been to push ahead with machines of greater potential. Whether A-W's purchased intrest in the Blair Athol Group restricted his control of the concepts and restricted his ability to develop them further would depend on the ownership of his earlier patents, amongst other things.

Schneiderman said:

I rate Dunne's contribution to aeronautics in a completely different league to G-W and P B. A true pioneer who laid down a sound base for aerodynamic development.
G-W was great at the promotion of aviation as a business but delivered little to advance the science. His absence after the war was largely because he chose to withdraw after the acrimonious arguments with the Government over Hendon. A loss as an entrepreneur only.
P B's contribution was minimal and his fall of his own making. No loss at all.

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G-W did a few valuable contributions, his many books (one book every year or so for nearly a decade) were informative and contributed to popularize aviation among the young (with quite a bit of self promotion, I'll admit). He also had some interesting advanced concepts for airliners, mailplanes and bombers in the immediate post-WW1 era. His 1919 conferences on the future of aviation were noted in most publications of the time as eye-openers. It seems to me that he was treated unfairly about the appropriation of Hendon by the government, given his early contributions, but of course I'm not conversant with all that happened, and probably only see part of the story.

I agree that P-B was quite behind the other two. Mostly an uppity aristocrat full of himself that tried to pose as an essential figure through his writings... then accelerated his demise through his insufferable political rhetorics. His only true contribution is that Supermarine would not have existed without his company.

Schneiderman said:

Curtiss, like Dunne, was a great pioneer and had much to offer, but neatly shot himself in the foot over his feud with the Wrights. A waste of a great talent.

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You make it sound a bit like Curtiss was the troublemaker in this affair. Keep in mind that it was the Wrights who couldn't bear to see anyone use any concept that might be even remotely connected to their machines and sued systematically every competitor. They refused to admit that that their own solutions were often inadequate, that others such as Curtiss had a much better understanding of the technical side and how fast things evolved. Curtiss merely defended himself. He had to constantly find inventions that would keep his aircraft out of Wright trouble, and it is to his credit that he mostly succeeded. After the death of his brother, the surviving Wright (never know which is which) intensified the hassle. Curtiss had to go one step further and decided to prove that the Wrights were not really the inventors of aviation, and that other earlier concepts were feasible and lacked only the technical knowledge (notably engine-wise) to be successful. The whole Wright thing wore Curtiss out, it really messed with his health, and after 1923 or about he no longer was involved directly in his company.

Sorry for the long digression, BUT it is especially interesting to conclude by mentioning Curtiss's very last project: not an aircraft he designed or built, but one he embraced as his own and spent the last months of his life backing and promoting outside of his company: the Safety Arrowhead, which was totally a Dunne-type aircraft. Curtiss had come to the conclusion that not only Dunne was right about many things from an aerodynamic viewpoint, but that the swept-wing tailless biplane was the perfect flivver everyone was hoping for in the post-Depression times. His death put an end to the project, despite the excellent flying characteristics of the prototypes (there is a topic on the Arrowhead here: http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,21272.0)

G-W could have been one of the great post-War aviation business leaders, in the style of Holt Thomas, Burroughes, and others, but he was always rather too keen to put himself in the spotlight rather than developing a strong team of designers and managers. Certainly he was ill-served over the Hendon affair but I think he would have struggled to survive within the aircraft construction business in the post-War years. The ideas he put forward in 1919 are no so different from those promoted by other companies at the time but in the main most of those were based around established design capability, which he lacked.

P B was no aristocrat, not even a minor one, just an ordinary London boy. In fact he saw himself as the champion of the working man, but few of them agreed. His key success was employing Scott-Paine, who actually built the Pemberton Billing and then Supermarine business, took on James Bird as partner and, of course, employed R.J. Mitchell

While the Wright's, their backers and legal advisors were most certainly doing their best to kill any competition Curtiss hardly covered himself in glory by choosing to fight them with his misguided attempt to prove that Langley had flown ahead of them.

Catching up with you all:

Thanks for the kind comments, I am only sorry it will be a long wait for those interested. In fact I have so much new material that I might have to end up writing one book on Dunne and another on his aeroplanes.

The Royal Aero Club online material is only a partial set of all its committee minute books, so any "nothing but" judgement based on such a limited docuemnt set does not stand up. True, Dunne was not as powerful a figure as he was in the Aeronautical Society, but he was significantly more than just another member.

Through much of 1914/15 he was still forbidden by his contract to the Syndicate - now owned by A-W - from working on aeroplanes elsewhere. Also, during WWI he was laid low by a succession of ailments: even his short time as a musketry (small arms) instructor "almost killed" him. He sill passionately believed in tailless automatic stability. Immediately after the war Fairey, Armstrong Whitworth and the rest were desperately downsizing and restructuring, and the last thing they had room for was the necessary programme of research. Innovators such as de Havilland preferred to make safe, incremental improvements to wartime technology. The man who was able to take the next step was GTR Hill: Dunne sent him a drawing (Dunne's copy survives) and stayed in contact for the next decade. I suspect that Dunne's incapacity to do mathematics was probably the killer blow against greater involvement in the design, while his frailty ruled out any more physical contribution. Given the Syndicate's track record of mismanagement under his Technical Directorship, the industry really did have no place for him. Had his father been less of an anti-intellectual and allowed the boy Ian to study mathematics while his brain was still developing, we would have seen a very different outcome. I blame the father.

Pemberton-Billing and Grahame-White were both self-promoters and, by many accounts, not very honourable in their dealings with other people. Neither seems to have made any major contribution to the science of aeronautics, though both in their own ways contributed significantly to its wider development, for example the Graham-White school at Hendon and the business that became Supermarine.

There are two sides to the Curtiss vs Wright spat. The Wrights certainly started out as honest, decent folk who hated sordid money matters. However when it came to licensing their patents, they had an unrealistic idea of their worth, demanding a thousand dollars for each aircraft. This was the reason their deal with the British War Office fell through, as is well documented by several historians.
Curtiss lost patience and crashed ahead anyway, selling his machines at a realistic price. I find myself unable to make any judgement on the morality of either case (though wisdom is another matter).
Burgess did take out a license but complained that the fee made his machines unsaleable. That was one of his big reasons for adopting the Dunne, but Orville chose to pursue that line too, even directly against his erstwhile acquaintance Dunne (as well as others) in Britain.
The British suit was soon laughed out of court, but the US ones were still ongoing after the war when Orville stepped back from running his company. Can anybody tell me how it all ended?

steelpillow said:

The Royal Aero Club online material is only a partial set of all its committee minute books, so any "nothing but" judgement based on such a limited docuemnt set does not stand up.

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Not at all. All of the main and subcommittee minute books have been scanned and made available on line. They represent a complete record of all the Club's activities.

As this thread has had its tangential moments, perhaps I can crave your indulgence to permit another, albeit briefly. Noël Pemberton Billing was an 'interesting' character whose rôle beyond the early years of aviation was significant only if seen through his eyes. Perhaps one of the best illustrations of this was his 1936 contribution to popular flying, the Pemberton-Billing Skylark. Only the kindest of critics could suggest that it contributed anything of value to aviation. However it does show that whilst he chose not to follow the well trodden path, the path he did choose was neither revolutionary, innovative or ingenious (even though it might be said that he pinched the basic idea from Henri Mignet and then managed to produce something significantly poorer than the original HM.14). One might describe the Skylark as pathetic if it hadn't been so hare brained as to be positively dangerous to anyone who might have been foolish enough to try to coax it into the air - but fortunately it was not completed and never flew. Had it done so, Pemberton Billing might not have survived until 1948 and may have shuffled off this mortal coil in a manner not dissimilar to that of Frank Barnwell and Richard Taylor!

It is curious that as a self-proclaimed 'expert' in all-matters related to aviation I can find no record that P B ever flew other than the short flights required to obtain his aviator's certificate.

By the way I have never found any mention of Dunne in post-War RAeC publications. Does anyone know whether he ever presented any papers or participated in the question-and-answer sessions after presentations? Curiously at Hill's presentation on his tailless aircraft experiments in 1926 Dunne does not appear to have been present, which is a little odd.

Schneiderman said:

steelpillow said:

The Royal Aero Club online material is only a partial set of all its committee minute books, so any "nothing but" judgement based on such a limited docuemnt set does not stand up.

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Not at all. All of the main and subcommittee minute books have been scanned and made available on line. They represent a complete record of all the Club's activities.

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Note that the Grounds Committee is not listed: http://raec.daisy.websds.net/papers.htm
The site says "All the main committee minutes" but not "all" the sub-committees.

He joined 5 Nov 1907. He played a leading part in the division of responsibilities between the Club, the Society and the Aerial League (whose role it became to promote aeronautics nationally). Please now turn to the minutes you mention. A few online copies are corrupted but the gist of them is that from 1911 he served on several of them. He was also a regular denizen of the Club grounds for five years and a good personal friend of key figures such as Huntington, McClean and Ogilvie, so one might hazard a certain customary wielding of influence through social channels. All this notwithstanding their correspondence files and other documents not readily available. "Not at all" is seldom a safe comment to throw back at me (grin).

I have not found evidence that he participated significantly after the end of the war. Dunne did know about Hill's 1926 lecture...

Actually the Grounds Committee did not keep separate minutes. We have scanned and loaded all of the Club archive minute books, there is no corruption if you view the scans as pdf and not the character recognition extracts.

Dunne was elected as a Member two years earlier than you mention, in November 1907, I guess that was a typo. The 900 boxes of archive material has been catalogued and nothing that would link Dunne to key Club officials post-War, or even pre-War, has been located. When Ogilvie and Associates was established in the early 1920s this would have been a likely place to find Dunne alongside other ex-Aircraft Factory types, such as Mayo, but no sign that he was involved.

Thank you for the tip. I didn't know you were active in this or I would have pestered you to death with questions two years ago!

Yes, that '09 was a typo (now corrected), it was the year his mother and sister joined.

As I have already suggested, by 1920 I don't think Dunne was suited to any role in an aircraft company any more - I would add that he didn't have the cash to become an investor either. Ogilvie would have known that.

Rest assured that if I do find anything that relates to Dunne's post-War activities you will be the first to hear. I am always looking for signs of people who may have been working behind the scenes with limited external profile

One other small update: I found no documentary evidence linking the formation of the WWII Tailless Aircraft Advisory Committee to Dunne's previous lobbying and dropping out. Nor is there any in the TAAC's own files. The timing within the Air Ministry remains for now a tantalising coincidence.

Oh, and absolutely nothing to link Dunne to the Levis-Belmont affair (aka James monoplane). The purported connection seems to have frothed up out of James' habit of comparing his ideas with Dunne's, the coincidence in timing leading decades later to Penrose's unsupported and frankly inexplicable claim that the D.9 was built by Levis. Dunne kept so much correspondence it is a reasonable proposition that the complete lack of any such in this connection, either here or in contemporary records of Levis and Belmont, indicates that there never was any such connection.

Yesterday a nice find in the SM Archive: original correspondence in Lord Rayleigh's own hand, from 1905 and 1910. The Baden-Powell correspondence in the National Aerospace Library includes a typed transcript of letters exchanged between Dunne and Lord Rayleigh (Astronomer Royal and researcher into the Magnus effect on tennis balls, among other eminent scientific thing), discussing a small flying model "rigid Rogallo" delta wing that Dunne sent him in 1905, having discovered it in 1904. In 1910 the question of primacy arose, owing to an apparently independent American patent. I found a copy of the transcript in the Dunne archive some time ago, and yesterday Rayleigh's original replies to Dunne turned up. So that is now three contemporary copies of the evidence, one the original.
I do think the RAeS needs to be told. Are there any members reading this?

There may be but why not contact them directly? They have a specialist Historical Group, the committee consisting of many well-known names in the aviation world, ex-museum archivists, magazine editors, eminent writers. Their website, with contact details, is
https://www.aerosociety.com/get-involved/specialist-groups/business-general-aviation/aerospace-history/

Also they have an online Journal of Aeronautical History
https://www.aerosociety.com/news-expertise/journals-papers/journal-of-aeronautical-history/
to which you can submit papers

Thank you for those links. The journal page says that, "Papers will be considered for publication in The Journal of Aeronautical History if they meet the terms and conditions listed in the instructions for authors." I have a draft essay which I could tidy up and submit. But I can find no actual link to the instructions referred to. Some web sites don't like to play with Firefox on Linux, only with Microsoft or Apple, I might have missed something, or I might be expected to contact them for the instructions, you don't happen to know which, do you?

Unfortunately no, the website is a mess and it took me a while to find the pages even though I knew what I was looking for. Best is to e-mail the Historical group via the e-mail address on their page and ask for the criteria for papers.
You could also consider publication in a magazine if you have sufficient illustrations to make it visually interesting. The Aviation Historian would be a good option (their editors are associated with the RAeS group too, which is a bonus)

Thanks again. I already have a submission with the Aviation Historian, on the Levis-Belmont aka "James" monoplane. I'd like to try the stable wing on the RAeS first, after all Dunne went on to become a Committee member and its very first full Fellow. They ought to be interested.

Now, a drawing of the D.11, the last missing Dunne design.
So far we have a reasonable account of all the Dunne designs from the D.1 of 1907 to the D.12 of WWII, with one exception - whatever became of the D.11? The Dunne-Huntington was more of a general layout than a detailed design, so it never received a D identifier. It seems reasonable to assume that the 1923 design for GTR Hill falls into the same category. The design of the D.9 was abandoned around 1913 and the D.10, having failed, was converted to a D.8 not long afterwards, so what became of the D.11?
I believe that I can now answer this, though the evidence is indirect.
In the spring of 1914 the great engineering company Armstrong Whitworth decided to move into aeronautics and bought the struggling Syndicate's assets. An updated design was once more in the offing when war came and swept it aside.
I have found a drawing of a biplane in the Dunne archive dating from this time. It was surely the new design intended for A-W manufacture. It doesn't show more than the wing planform, but the accompanying notes and analysis set a minimum level as to how far Dunne had got into the design. It seems reasonable to suggest that (for this and other reasons) he had got far enough to give it a D identifier, and the next in the book at that time was the D.11.
So there we have it, the D.11 appears to have been a biplane designed in the first part of 1914, for manufacture by Armstrong Whitworth.