British technology pioneers who helped win World War Two

[Jim O]

Sir Barnes Wallis worked for Vickers-Armstrong at Brooklands, Surrey, during the Second World War when he came up with the design of the bouncing bomb. It was a variety of depth charge used to attack heavily-defended dams in Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley. The mission, in May 1943 and led by Guy Gibson VC, was immortalised in the film, The Dambusters.

Wallis’s idea came to him from his awareness that Royal Navy sailors in the 19th century had observed that cannonballs sometimes bounced on water which increased their range. Initially he intended that the bomb should be used to attack battleships instead of torpedoes but it was developed to attack the Ruhr dams which could not otherwise be reached. and which needed a massive explosion to destroy.

The bomb was designed to be spun backwards at high velocity before being released. It then literally bounced over the water (avoiding the torpedo nets) in the same way that a spinning stone will skip.

However, to achieve this effect the bomb had to be released with the utmost precision, from a low height, a specific speed and at an exact distance. Out of the six intended targets, four were damaged and two were destroyed.

He died in 1979 aged 92.


Alan Turing is sometimes called the father of modern computer science.

A gifted mathematician, logician and cryptographer, he worked at Bletchley Park, the top secret codebreaking centre in Buckinghamshire during the war.

For a time, he was head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German Naval cryptanalysis.

Turing was the key figure in the continual battle to decode messages encrypted by the increasingly complex Enigma machines. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the bombe, an electromechanical machine which could find settings for the Enigma.

The periods when the Naval code could be broken saw dramatic reductions in the shipping losses from the Atlantic convoys so essential to the conduct of the Allied war effort.

He died through an apparent suicide in 1954, aged 41.


Tommy Flowers was a British engineer who designed Colossus, the first digital, programmable, electronic computer.

With a degree in electrical engineering from London University, he joined the telecommunications branch of the General Post Office (GPO), and worked in its research station exploring the use of electronics for telephone exchanges.

His knowledge of switching electronics would prove crucial for his computer design in the war. Like Turing, he was worked on breaking a teletype-based cipher that was even more complex than the Enigma system.

The decoding procedure involved trying so many possibilities that it was impractical to do by hand.

In February 1943, Flowers proposed an electronic system (Colossus) using 1500 valves which operated five times faster and was more flexible than the previous system, code-named Heath Robinson, that used electro-mechanical switches.

Ten Colossus machines were completed and used in British decoding efforts. For his efforts, Flowers received only limited recognition, an MBE and £1,000.

After the war, Flowers returned to the Post Office Research Station where he was head of the Switching Division.

He died in 1999 aged 94.


Source: Telegraph | News