Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer

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Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer — a concise, easy-to-understand version

Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer is Nevil Shute’s partial autobiography, first published in 1954. It focuses on his work in aviation up to 1938.

Shute’s early life includes his childhood, school years, and service in World War I. He lived in Ireland for a time because his father worked for the Post Office there. He first encountered airplanes as a student at Oxford, when he worked at the de Havilland factory during holidays.

The book has two main parts. The first covers Shute’s work on the R100 airship project at Vickers. He started as Chief Calculator, in charge of stress calculations, and later became the project chief engineer after the airship designer Barnes Wallis left. He even traveled as a passenger on the R100’s flight to Canada in 1930. He describes dramatic moments like repairing a rudder in mid-air over the North Atlantic and dealing with a strong up-draught over Canada. He mentions using a slide rule during the work. The stress calculations for each transverse frame were very hard, often taking months and many pages of work. After long effort, the results finally made sense and gave a deep sense of accomplishment.

The second part covers Shute’s role in founding and running Airspeed Ltd between 1931 and 1938. The company faced many difficulties, and it wasn’t until 1938 that it finally made a profit, the year he left the company as a director. During World War II, he served as a naval officer in the Admiralty’s weapons development unit, with some time off to write a few novels. After the war he became unhappy with the UK government and moved to Australia. There he had continued success as a best-selling author and lived until his death from a heart attack in 1960.

Shute had planned a follow-up book called Set Square, but he never wrote it. Later, American biographer Julian Smith wrote a comprehensive, sometimes controversial, biography about him.