Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer is the partial autobiography of the British novelist Nevil Shute. It was first published in 1954. Slide Rule concentrates on Nevil Shute's work in aviation, ending in 1938 when he left the industry. The book begins with details of Shute's childhood and upbringing, his school years, events in the Easter 1916 Dublin Rising, where his father was Secretary to the Post Office in Ireland, and service during World War I. Shute came into contact with aircraft while a student at Oxford, when he worked at the de Havilland aircraft factory during the vacations.
| Attributes | Values |
|---|
| rdf:type
| |
| rdfs:label
| - Slide Rule (nl)
- Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer (en)
|
| rdfs:comment
| - Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer is the partial autobiography of the British novelist Nevil Shute. It was first published in 1954. Slide Rule concentrates on Nevil Shute's work in aviation, ending in 1938 when he left the industry. The book begins with details of Shute's childhood and upbringing, his school years, events in the Easter 1916 Dublin Rising, where his father was Secretary to the Post Office in Ireland, and service during World War I. Shute came into contact with aircraft while a student at Oxford, when he worked at the de Havilland aircraft factory during the vacations. (en)
- Slide Rule (Engels voor rekenliniaal) is de titel van een gedeeltelijk (auto)biografisch boek van de Britse schrijver Nevil Shute, geschreven toen hij ongeveer 55 jaar oud was. De volledige titel van het boek, dat hij in 1955 schreef (vijf jaar voor zijn dood) luidt Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer. Het tweede deel van Slide Rule omvat zijn oorlogservaringen met wapensystemen en vliegtuigen. Hij was mededirecteur van vliegtuigfabriek Airspeed, die de Horsa-gliders tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog bouwde, en die o.a. bij de slag om Arnhem zijn ingezet. (nl)
|
| foaf:depiction
| |
| dcterms:subject
| |
| Wikipage page ID
| |
| Wikipage revision ID
| |
| Link from a Wikipage to another Wikipage
| |
| Link from a Wikipage to an external page
| |
| sameAs
| |
| dbp:wikiPageUsesTemplate
| |
| thumbnail
| |
| has abstract
| - Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer is the partial autobiography of the British novelist Nevil Shute. It was first published in 1954. Slide Rule concentrates on Nevil Shute's work in aviation, ending in 1938 when he left the industry. The book begins with details of Shute's childhood and upbringing, his school years, events in the Easter 1916 Dublin Rising, where his father was Secretary to the Post Office in Ireland, and service during World War I. Shute came into contact with aircraft while a student at Oxford, when he worked at the de Havilland aircraft factory during the vacations. The rest of the book is divided into two parts. The first is about Shute's experiences working on the R100 airship project at Vickers. This was the private counterpart to the Air Ministry's R101, both designed as part of the Imperial Airship Scheme to develop airships capable of flying the Empire routes to India, Canada and Australia. Shute's job was initially that of Chief Calculator, responsible for overseeing all the stress calculations needed. On the resignation of the airship designer, Barnes Wallis, he became the project chief engineer. He was also a passenger on the airship's flight to Canada in 1930. He recounts the experience of a mid-air repair of a rudder over the North Atlantic, and of being caught in an up-draft over a thunderhead over Canada. The R100 design was the project on which he mentions using a slide rule ( a Fuller cylindrical model), only mentioned once in the book. The stress calculations for each transverse frame required computations by a pair of calculators (people) for two or three months. The simultaneous equation contained up to seven unknown quantities, took about a week to solve, and had to be repeated if the guess on which of eight radial wires were slack was wrong with a different selection of slack wires if one of the wires was not slack. After months of labour filling perhaps fifty foolscap sheets with calculations "the truth stood revealed (and) produced a satisfaction almost amounting to a religious experience". The final part of the book is about Shute's experiences in co-founding and managing Airspeed Ltd between 1931 and 1938. During this time, there was little business and much difficulty. As Shute tells it, the first time the company made a profit was in 1938, the year he resigned as a director. Shute then spent the war as a reluctantly commissioned naval officer working for the "Wheezers and Dodgers" (the British Admiralty's Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development) with time off to write a few novels, before becoming disillusioned by the post war UK government and emigrating to Australia. There his considerable success as a best-selling author kept him active until he died from a heart attack in 1960. He never wrote his planned follow up to Slide Rule (which had the working title of Set Square). Much later, American Julian Smith wrote a comprehensive and somewhat controversial biography. (en)
- Slide Rule (Engels voor rekenliniaal) is de titel van een gedeeltelijk (auto)biografisch boek van de Britse schrijver Nevil Shute, geschreven toen hij ongeveer 55 jaar oud was. De volledige titel van het boek, dat hij in 1955 schreef (vijf jaar voor zijn dood) luidt Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer. Bij zijn werk als constructeur van het Engelse luchtschip HMA R100 gebruikte hij een speciale cilindervormige versie van zo'n rekenmachine. Het grootste deel van de biografie omvat zijn ervaringen met de "kapitalistische" door in Howden gebouwde HMA R100 en de wedstrijd met de "concurrerende" HMA R101, die in de nacht van 4-5 oktober 1930 crashte en verbrandde bij Beauvais/Allonne in Frankrijk. Bij vertrek was het weer stormachtig en Shute was niet de enige die het onverantwoord vond om in die omstandigheid met zo'n kwetsbaar luchtschip te varen. Het tweede deel van Slide Rule omvat zijn oorlogservaringen met wapensystemen en vliegtuigen. Hij was mededirecteur van vliegtuigfabriek Airspeed, die de Horsa-gliders tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog bouwde, en die o.a. bij de slag om Arnhem zijn ingezet. Het laatste deel beschrijft zijn emigratie naar Australië (kort na de demobilisatie in 1945), mede als reactie op het verbod om zijn boek Most Secret uit te mogen geven. Nevil was faliekant tegen te veel overheidsbemoeizucht. In de zomer van 2010 is er een biografische aanvulling op Slide Rule verschenen onder de titel Parallel Motion. Ze is geschreven door John Anderson en uitgegeven bij de Paper Tiger. ISBN 978-1-889439-37-2 (nl)
|
| gold:hypernym
| |
| prov:wasDerivedFrom
| |
| page length (characters) of wiki page
| |
| foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf
| |
| is Link from a Wikipage to another Wikipage
of | |
| is Wikipage disambiguates
of | |
| is foaf:primaryTopic
of | |
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)
