Pigeon Guided Missiles E-Book

James Moore

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

During the Second World War, an American behavioural psychologist working with pigeons discovered that the birds could be trained to recognise an object and to peck at an image of it; when loaded into the nose-cone of a missile, these pecks could be translated into adjustments to the guidance fins, steering the projectile to its target.Pigeon-Guided Missiles reveals this and other fascinating tales of daring plans from history destined to change the world we live in, yet which ended in failure, or even disaster. Some became the victims of the eccentric figures behind them, others succumbed to financial and political misfortune, and a few were just too far ahead of their time. Discover why the great groundnut scheme cost British taxpayers £49 million, why the bid to build Minerva, a whole new country in the Pacific Ocean, sank, and why the first Channel Tunnel (started in 1881, over a century before the one we know today) hit a dead end.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Our thanks

Introduction

1Pigeon-guided missiles

2The international ‘hot air’ airline

3The ‘Spruce Goose’

4A sound plan for defence

5The diabolical death ray

6Tesla’s earthquake machine

7Edison’s concrete furniture

8The misplaced Maginot Line

9The great ‘Panjandrum’

10The first Channel Tunnel

11London’s Eiffel Tower

12Nelson’s pyramid

13Wren’s missing marvels

14The tumbling abbey habit

15Why Lutyens’ cathedral vanished

16New York’s doomed dome

17Exploding traffic lights

18The steam-powered passenger carriage

19Flying cars

20The atomic automobile

21The X-ray shoe-fitting machine

22The cure that killed

23The ‘cloudbuster’

24The brand new continent of Atlantropa

25A nation built on sand

26The Darien debacle

27The lost US state of Transylvania

28The French republican calendar

29Latin Monetary Union

30A tax on light and air

31Paxton’s orbital shopping mall

32Cincinnati’s subway to nowhere

33Is it a train or a plane?

34How the Cape to Cairo railway hit the buffers

35From Russia to America by train

36British Rail’s flying saucer & the ‘great space elevator’

37Why the bathyscaphe was the depth of ambition

38The perpetual motion machine

39Brunel’s not so Great Eastern

40Bessemer’s anti-seasickness ship

41Escape coffins for the mistakenly interred

42Chadwick’s miasma-terminating towers

43Bentham’s all-seeing panopticon

44The self-cleaning house

45The jaw-dropping diet

46A nutty plan to feed the masses

47Ravenscar: the holiday resort that never was

48Why Smell-O-Vision stank

49The metal cricket bat

50Bicycle polo & other lost Olympic sports

Illustrations

Sources and Resources

OUR THANKS

Like all writers, we earn our livelihoods not just through the words we put on the page, but on ideas; some big, some small, a few exciting, others more mundane. Occasionally we go through a purple patch of rather splendid ideas; more frequently our concepts fall by the wayside, perhaps even laughed at by our clients and families and friends. Or worse still, ignored. That’s when we know we’ve really got things wrong. Now if we were adept at coming up with questionable ideas, surely it must happen to others? With this germ of a concept, the origins of Pigeon-Guided Missiles were formed. But we couldn’t have done it alone. For making sense of some subjects in which we were hardly experts, for sourcing pictures where we had none, and for the occasional sanity or fact check, we needed help.

So we’d like to extend our warmest thanks to: Linda Bailey, Malcolm Barres-Baker, Tim Clarke, Jason Flahardy, Professor Christian G. Fritz, Amy Frost, Harry Gates, Stephen Guy, Simon Hamlet, Jan Hebditch, Richard Hebditch, Patricia Hansen, Ted Huetter, Aideen Jenkins, Owen Jones, Matthew Marshall, Amanda McNally, Geoff Moore, Laurie Moore, Philippa Moore, Sam Moore, Tamsin Moore, Dr Tom Moore, Marguerite Moran, Dr Claire Nesbitt, Neil Paterson, William Poole, Hannah Reyonlds, Kasey Richter, Sarah Sarkhel, David Smith, Robert Smith, Peter Spurgeon, Mia Sykes, Julie S. Vargas, Spencer Vignes, Paul Waddington and Dean Weber.

Thank you all.

INTRODUCTIONIN SEARCH OF HISTORY’S LOST IDEAS

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

Albert Einstein

Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.

Winston Churchill

The past is littered with examples of grandiose schemes and ambitious ideas that never quite took off. While there are plenty of books about the visions, plans and inventions that did go on to transform our world, these heroic ‘might have beens’ have found themselves largely forgotten, carelessly dumped on the scrapheap of history.

This book sets out to rescue some of those incredible concepts and dreams, which, however briefly, promised to change our lives and the face of our planet. It also reveals the fascinating, flawed and tirelessly optimistic characters behind them. From soaring edifices that never were, to fanciful devices to change our daily lives; some of the ideas are simple, others breathtakingly outlandish. Eccentric engines of war, peculiar methods of transport, sporting follies and nation-building blunders – they’re all here. Each example proves the precarious nature of success and shows how, but for a bit of serendipity, the world we live in today could have been very different. They are also testament to the dedication, inspiration and, at times, sheer bloody-mindedness of the people who conceived them.

Pigeon-Guided Missiles: and 49 Other Ideas that Never Took Off covers a lot of ground and we don’t pretend to have been scientific in our choices. But in choosing these stories, we’ve relied on a few guiding principles. Every chapter endeavours to reveal a relatively unknown proposition from history, investigates what drove its proponents and why they failed. We have looked for engaging tales that are often humorous and sometimes tragic, but always contain the seeds of truly radical thinking.

In this book we’ll discover that some, like Sir Edward Watkin’s attempt to build a rival to the Eiffel Tower in London, or William Beckford’s enormous gothic home, were the victim of bad planning. Others, such as Fulton’s flying car, succumbed to lack of cash. The pyramid in London’s Trafalgar Square and Bessemer’s ship to cure seasickness were simply too audacious, while the first gas-powered traffic lights were too ahead of their time. Radar-style warning dishes made from concrete were overtaken by technological developments. Robert Fludd’s perpetual motion machine and Harry Grindell Matthews’ death ray simply seemed to defy the laws of physics. A lot, like so many good ideas, were just unlucky; failing to catch the eye of those who mattered, dismissed as preposterous or left gathering dust thanks to the prevailing political or commercial climate.

One thing becomes very clear from our research – that history is so often driven by a few industrious men and women, who, verging on the obsessive, never stop coming up with ideas that they genuinely believe will be a step forward for science, will help mankind or enhance the world we live in. As this book shows, they don’t always get it right, but the story of how they fail, often spectacularly, is endlessly captivating and there is usually something to be salvaged from the ashes of their efforts – even if it is occasionally just a good belly laugh.

PIGEON-GUIDED MISSILES

Since Hannibal crossed the Alps with his elephants in the third century bc, aiming to conquer Rome, mankind has frequently used all sorts of animals as tools of war.

One creature to make a considerable contribution to the sphere of human conflict is the humble pigeon. During the Second World War some 250,000 homing pigeons served with British forces. Thirty-two were even awarded the Dickin Medal, the military’s version of the VC for animals. The US had its own Pigeon Service and one of its ranks, nicknamed GI Joe, was credited with saving 1,000 lives.

Yet some believed the pigeon’s military capabilities lay beyond carrying messages. In 1945 an official at Britain’s Air Ministry Pigeon Section, Lea Rayner, spoke of how pigeons might carry explosives and even become vehicles for bacterial warfare. But it was in America that the boldest designs for the use of pigeons against the enemy were formulated – by the renowned behavioural scientist B.F. Skinner. Through his work with the birds, Skinner believed that they held the key to perfecting the next step in military technology, the guided missile.

Burrhus Frederic Skinner, born in 1904, was no quack; and for a time the US authorities didn’t think his ideas were bird brained either. They took him very seriously indeed and funded his pigeon project, hoping that harnessing the abilities of these winged wonders would give them the critical edge in defeating the Axis powers, and the key to their country’s future defence.

The nose cone of a prototype pigeon-guided missile, as pioneered by behavioural psychologist B.F.Skinner in the 1940s.

By the time the Second World War broke out, Skinner, who later went on to become a professor at Harvard, was already a successful psychologist. He had helped pioneer a theory called operant conditioning. In essence he believed that animal and human behaviour was reinforced by external factors like rewards or punishments. Legend has it that, after seeing a flock of birds flying alongside a train, Skinner suddenly realised that his research on conditioning had a practical application for the war effort. He could train birds to guide missiles to their targets. ‘It was no longer merely an experimental analysis. It had given rise to a technology,’ he said.

In 1940 his initial work at the University of Minnesota had shown that pigeons could be trained to repeatedly pick out a target by using the reinforcement technique of pecking at pieces of grain. In this way they could be conditioned to keep pecking at a target and their movements linked to mechanisms that would alter the guidance controls of the missiles. One of Skinner’s birds pecked at an image more than 10,000 times in forty-five minutes and, by 1941, he was able to show that it was possible to train pigeons to steer towards small model ships. Despite this, after taking his research to defence officials, he was told that his proposal ‘did not warrant further development at this time’.

Then, in 1942, Skinner’s work was suddenly dusted off by researchers looking for a psychologist to train dogs to steer anti-submarine torpedoes. It eventually led to a grant of $25,000 from the US Government to develop the idea via a company called General Mills, who also wanted to do their bit for the war effort. During this further research, Skinner found that a pigeon would track an object by pecking at a screen even under all sorts of difficult conditions, including rapid descent and the noise of explosions. Subsequently, plans were drawn up to experiment using the pigeons inside the new, aptly named, ‘pelican’ missiles.

Skinner’s plan was to load three pigeons into their own pressurised chambers inside the missile nose cone. Lenses in the missile threw up an image of the target on a glass screen. Once they saw it the pigeons would start to peck and their movements translated into adjustments in the missile’s guidance rudders. The results amazed fellow scientists with some saying that the pigeons’ accuracy rivalled that achieved by radar. In addition, using pigeons in this capacity didn’t involve radio signals that could be jammed by the enemy.

Skinner himself explained why three birds were needed:

When a missile is falling toward two ships at sea, for example, there is no guarantee that all three pigeons will steer toward the same ship. But at least two must agree, and the third can then be punished for his minority opinion. Under proper contingencies of reinforcement a punished bird will shift immediately to the majority view. When all three are working on one ship, any defection is immediately punished and corrected.

Prototype missiles were built and legions of pigeons prepared to be trained up for service. Mass production of the missiles was primed to snap into action in just thirty days. But, at a high level demonstration in 1944, government officials simply couldn’t get their heads round the idea that pigeons could ever be satisfactorily controlled. Skinner said: ‘The spectacle of a living pigeon carrying out its assignment, no matter how beautifully, simply reminded the committee of how utterly fantastic our proposal was.’

That wasn’t quite the end of the project. In 1948 it was revived by the US Navy under the name Project Orcon (organic control). This time a pigeon’s beak was fitted with a gold electrode which would hit a semi-conductive plate to report the target’s position to the missile’s controlling mechanism. But a line was finally drawn under the project in 1953 when further developments in electronic guidance systems made the pigeons redundant.

Skinner’s pigeon-guided missile system never took off. A plan for bat bombs, also tested during the 1940s, met a similar fate. The creatures were to be fitted with mini parachutes and timed incendiary devices and released en masse from aircraft. The idea was that, after being dropped over enemy cities, they would naturally look for places to roost in buildings and set them alight, causing a firestorm. The $2 million project was abandoned not long after a colony of bats accidentally blew up a fuel tank at the Carlsbad Air Force base in New Mexico. Meanwhile, Soviet forces trained dogs to blow up German tanks. This produced mixed results when some of the dogs ran towards their own lines: they’d been trained to listen for the engine noises of Soviet tanks, not enemy German ones.

The world’s military did not give up on using animals in warfare in the ensuing decades, however. More recently the Soviets experimented on training so-called kamikaze dolphins at a secret base on the Pacific coast, to see if they could carry mines to attack enemy warships. The programme was halted by the break up of the Soviet Union and some of the kamikaze dolphins were even sold to the Iranians, though quite what they did with them remains unclear.

Russians have trained seals to locate mines with more success, while the US today uses sea lions to protect one of its important naval bases against terrorists. The sea lions have been trained to place a cuff, like a handcuff, on enemy divers, who can then be reeled to nearby boats. Animals in military service also still save lives on a daily basis; in 2010 a black Labrador called Treo was awarded the Dickin Medal for his work sniffing out bombs in Afghanistan.

Well after the Second World War MI5 kept a stock of trained pigeons for its security work. And of his experiments with pigeon-based warfare, B.F. Skinner himself admitted: ‘I knew that in the eyes of the world we were crazy.’ But, in an article in American Psychologist in 1960, he also told how he believed that many genuine scientific advances would never have been achieved without the odd ‘crackpot’ idea. His research on pigeon-guided missiles certainly demonstrated how powerful the idea of conditioning could be. Incredibly, six years after the first pigeon project had ended, Skinner found that some of the pigeons he had trained could still identify the same targets.

THE INTERNATIONAL ‘HOT AIR’ AIRLINE

It was to be the first international airline and the first airmail service. But the difficulties of launching the Aerial Transit Company, which planned to shrink the globe from its headquarters at a lace factory in Somerset, proved insurmountable. This was 1842, the age of steam, and getting an aircraft off the earth’s surface was proving to be a lot of hot air.

Unlike the story of Icarus, who attempted to flee Crete by flapping feathered wings designed by his dad Daedalus, the international steam-powered airline is no myth. Inventors and entrepreneurs William Samuel Henson and John Stringfellow followed in a succession of aspiring aeronautical engineers who, since Icarus, have tried to defy gravity with an array of hapless devices. In 1540 in Portugal, João Torto believed he’d bettered Daedalus’ design by using two pairs of cloth wings while wearing a helmet in the shape of an eagle’s head, but this only served to double the speed with which he plummeted to earth after jumping from a cathedral tower. In 1712 Frenchman Charles Allard strapped on wings of an improved design and launched himself from the Terrasse de St Germain in the direction of Bois du Vésinet, but only completed the Terrasse de St Germain part of the journey before dying from multiple injuries. And in 1739 steeplejack and occasional tightrope walker Robert Cadman entertained the residents of Shrewsbury with his own spectacular and rather messy death, while attempting to soar from the spire of St Mary’s Church to the far bank of the River Severn with the help, or hindrance as it turns out, of an overly taut piece of cord that snapped under his weight. This may have been more an extravagant abseil than genuine flight, but the result was much the same. Cadman’s wife, passing round a hat below, dropped all the donations when told how he had been ‘dashed to pieces’ while her back was turned. A stone memorial now commemorates the achievement, recalling Cadman’s:

attempt to fly from this high spire across the Sabrine he did acquire His fatal end.

So the fact that no one had actually been airborne for more than a few seconds – and only then in a strictly vertical and downwards trajectory at speeds they hadn’t expected – should have made the task of starting the world’s first international airline rather daunting. But in the industrial age, along with the rapid advancements of scientific theory, inventions were coming thick and fast. There was no reason that man shouldn’t get into the air and return to earth thousands of miles from his starting point with his limbs attached in the traditional formation. Indeed Henson, the son of a lace factory owner, and Stringfellow, a toolmaker who made bobbins, thought they knew how.

With the expertise of their friend Sir George Cayley, who had designed the first glider to carry a human being and who is sometimes described as the father of aviation, they calculated what it would take to build a passenger-carrying, self-propelled aircraft. Having studied birds in flight extensively and – this being the heyday of natural history – practiced their trajectory across a room with stuffed ones, they felt they were comfortable with the concepts of movement in three dimensions. ‘My invention,’ said Henson in his 1842 patent, ‘will have the same relation to the general machine which the extended wings of a bird have to the body when a bird is skimming in the air.’ Such aeronautical taxidermy was all very well, but they also needed mechanics. A boiler, a paddle wheel, and somewhere to sit while the pilot stoked the engine would suit perfectly.

Before beginning international flight operations, they first had to build an aircraft. Henson’s designs were elegant and Stringfellow’s lightweight engines, in deft contrast to the other industrial monsters of the age, inspired. Under prevailing UK patent rules that didn’t require evidence that inventions worked, they would create a machine ‘to convey letters, goods and passengers from place to place through the air.’ They called it the Aeriel or the Aeriel Steam Carriage; a monoplane with a wingspan of 150ft that would carry a dozen passengers 1,000 miles, although with a top speed of just 50 mph, this would mean 20 airborne hours, which was asking a lot for a lightweight engine of 50hp (37 kW). In terms of practicalities, 2 square feet of supporting surface added a pound of weight, requiring the engine to generate 20hp per ton to stay airborne. It worked on paper.

With a patent granted and investment raised from a small group of friends, attention turned to the second key aspect of the plan: publicity. In this, Henson and Stringfellow went to town. If you’re going to launch the world’s first international airline, then the world has to know about it. To Sir George Cayley’s consternation – he was to withdraw eventually from investment – posters and flyers began to appear of the plane in the unlikeliest locations: here’s the Aeriel in flight over London; and here it is again, this time over the Giza pyramids; and now India. An advertisement of the plane soaring over China was a particular favourite of the two inventors, who hoped to build eastern markets for British commerce.

China, though, would have to wait, for Chard had to be conquered first. Residents of the Somerset town were to be Henson and Stringfelllow’s first audience – and, it was to be hoped, future airfare paying customers. The Ariel might not have been able to carry passengers at this – nor indeed any – stage, but the prototype was impressive enough: the first plane of modern construction with a 12ft wingspan, three-wheeled landing gear and power from two contra-rotating bladed propellers. Its first run, in contrast, was a thunderous disappointment all round. After shuddering down a short ramp, instead of taking to the air, it came to a pitiful stop.

Undaunted, Henson and Stringfellow set to work on a bigger model, with a broader 20ft wingspan and a steam engine that delivered greater power. Marketing was also stepped up. Promotional handkerchiefs, trays, wall tapestries and lace placemats joined the posters and newspaper advertisements. It was nothing but hot air. Over the course of three years from 1844, the larger model plane was tested over and over and over again. It never flew. Finally, at his wit’s end, Henson took drastic action; he married his girlfriend and, packing up the whole enterprise as a rum job, immigrated to the States, presumably by steamer. Stringfellow soldiered on, his aeronautical ambitions higher than ever. And for him at least, success followed.

In a redundant lace mill in June 1848, the model plane was launched from an inclined wire. Stringfellow had flight! Short flight, but flight nevertheless. According to some reports, the plane flew straight for about 30ft (although other reports dismiss its achievements as nothing more than ‘a short hop’).Delighted whatever the distance, Stringfellow repeated the exercise and said the plane even sometimes gained altitude – which would be handy for the journey to China. Accolades followed. When the Aeronautical Society awarded Stringfellow a £100 prize, Scientific American magazine was impressed. He was, they claimed, responsible for ‘probably the lightest ever steam engine ever constructed’.

By 1869, Stringfellow had developed the engine further. It now turned 3,000 revolutions a minute and, reported Scientific American, just ‘three minutes after lighting the fire the pressure was up to 30 pounds and in seven minutes the full working pressure of 100 pounds, generating just over one horsepower’. It was laughably insufficient to get passengers to the pyramids or New Zealand. It wouldn’t even get a full size plane airborne at all. But Henson and Stringfellow’s invention did become the first powered plane in the world to fly. While only a model, it was to form a landmark on the way to the first passenger flights. Just before his death in 1883, Stringfellow said: ‘Somebody must do better than I before we succeed with aerial navigations.’ Just twenty years later, with the internal combustion engine overtaking steam as the power of choice, the Wright Brothers were in the air.

THE ‘SPRUCE GOOSE’

Howard Hughes surely defined the word eccentric. One of the richest men in the world, he was famous for his maverick movie making, addiction to drugs and love of beautiful actresses. Stories of the billionaire’s bizarre behaviour are legion too. Legend has it that he once gave staff precise instructions on how to lift a toilet seat. On another occasion, he became obsessed with designing a complicated cantilevered bra for one of the stars in his movie The Outlaw. Hughes was also an accomplished aviator and innovative aircraft manufacturer who was, for a time, considered a crucial cog in visionary plans to defeat Hitler.

The early twentieth century gave birth to many unsuccessful aircraft. There was the Bristol Brabazon, for example, the trans-Atlantic flop of the 1940s which was just too big, too expensive and too luxurious for the job. But none of the many flying failures of the century had quite the glamour and audaciousness of Howard Hughes’ H-4 Hercules, better known as the ‘Spruce Goose’. In its day it was the world’s largest plane, and even today still holds the record for the longest wingspan of any aircraft. It was an invention that had all the grandeur, eccentricity and capacity for controversy as the man himself.

Despite his famous foibles, Hughes, born in 1905 to an oil-industry entrepreneur, was an undoubtedly clever man. At 14 he took his first flying lesson and it led to a lifelong love of flight. Later, in 1930, he would splash out a then-vast sum of $4 million to make a First World War flying film called Hell’s Angels. In 1932 he set up his own aviation company, Hughes Aircraft, and went on to help design a number of planes, win flying trophies and set new air speed records. In 1938 he even flew right round the world breaking Charles Lindbergh’s New York to Paris record in the process.

When the war came along Hughes’ aircraft company was only employing a handful of people. By the end of the Second World War it would be employing tens of thousands, and along with aircraft development his subsidiaries would go on to supply the US military with everything from radar to air-to-air missiles and on board fire control systems. In 1942 he was approached by the industrialist and shipbuilder Henry Kaiser, who had a plan to tackle the huge losses being suffered by US shipping at the hands of German U-boats. A massive 800,000 tons of shipping had been sunk and Kaiser felt that the way round this was to build a huge aeroplane, capable of carrying 750 troops, and even tanks, across the Atlantic. Hughes enthusiastically embraced Kaiser’s idea and together they managed to obtain $18 million in funds to build a huge flying boat to be called the HK-1. According to later reports, President Roosevelt himself overruled experts to give Hughes the contract, along with another for a long-range reconnaissance plane, the XF-11.

Howard Hughes’ H-4 Hercules on its maiden (and only) flight in 1947. Dubbed the ‘Spruce Goose’, it was the world’s largest plane and still holds the record for the longest wingspan.

The pair were told to build three HK-1 prototypes to be ready within two years, and work duly began building the plane on a site in Southern California. Like many of Hughes’ films, the final design was truly epic. The wingspan of the Spruce Goose, as it was nicknamed by a newspaperman of the day, was 320ft. To put that in a modern day context, the Airbus A380’s wingspan is a mere 261ft, and a Boeing 747’s just 211ft. The wings of the Goose were 13ft thick and the tailfin alone was the height of an eight-storey building. The beast weighed 400,000lbs and its propellers were more than 27ft long. Together the plane’s eight 5,000lb, 28 cylinder engines boasted 24,000hp, while the plane could carry 14,000 gallons of fuel. All the more remarkable, because of wartime restrictions, it had to be made out of wood rather than metal – hence its moniker. In fact the Spruce Goose was mostly made out of birch plywood, not spruce.

But all the time needed to carry out research on such an enormous plane, as well as supply problems and Hughes’ debilitating perfectionism, meant that construction dragged; and in 1944 Kaiser quit the project, sensing the way the wind was blowing. The end of the war came and went and the aircraft, now officially called the H-4, still hadn’t made it to its dockside hanger. But Hughes didn’t care; he shovelled another $7 million of his own money into the plane’s manufacture despite the fact that, with the conflict over, the original need for such an aircraft had gone. Then, in summer 1946, Hughes suffered terrible injuries when, piloting his other experimental plane for the government, the XF-11, he crashed into a housing estate. That wasn’t his only difficulty. The government had started to ask questions. Where exactly, it wanted to know, had all its money gone? Why had no aircraft been delivered in four years?

In 1947 the US Senate War Investigating Committee began its hearings into Hughes’ company, amid lewd allegations of a history of sleazy backhanders involving Hollywood starlets. When Hughes appeared in front of the committee he brazened it out saying:

The Hercules was a monumental undertaking. It is the largest aircraft ever built. It is over five stories tall with a wingspan longer than a football field. That’s more than a city block. Now, I put the sweat of my life into this thing. I have my reputation all rolled up in it and I have stated several times that if it’s a failure I’ll probably leave this country and never come back. And I mean it!

But Hughes had been seriously stung by critics who described his beloved creation as a ‘flying lumberyard’ and taunted him that it would never fly. He loathed its derogatory Spruce Goose nickname. Hughes decided to show them all. During the hearings he had the only Goose ever completed at last delivered to Long Beach, California, and readied the craft for its first flight.

On 2 November, with Hughes himself at the controls, the plane skimmed across the water before suddenly gliding into the air for the first time. Hughes flew it at just 70ft for a total of 1 mile. It wasn’t much, but Hughes had proved that the Spruce Goose could, indeed, fly. The investigation into Hughes’ affairs never really got anywhere, but the government still cancelled its order for the plane.

Even by 1948 it was clear that Hughes, an obsessive, hadn’t given up. A glowing report in Popular Mechanics reckoned the plane ‘is slated to be for many years the biggest plane that ever flew’. Sadly it was also destined to be the biggest plane that never flew again. Still Hughes, who subsequently became a recluse, could never let go. For the next quarter of a century he kept it in a specially designed, climate controlled hanger at a cost of $1 million a year.

After his death in 1976 no one quite seemed to know what to do with it. Even Disney didn’t want it. Finally, in the 1990s, the Goose found a buyer who wanted to make it part of his own collection of wartime aircraft. And, in 2001, the fully restored dinosaur went on display at its new home, the Evergreen Aviation Museum in Oregon. There the plane remains as a fitting memorial to a man who just didn’t know when to stop.

A SOUND PLAN FOR DEFENCE

Just beyond a row of unremarkable looking bungalows, near the lonely foreland of Dungeness on Britain’s south coast, a group of strange concrete monoliths loom out of a flat gravel landscape. Today these crumbling concave edifices provide an eerie spectacle in the hush of their marshy surroundings. They are, in fact, the bizarre remains of a cutting-edge defence system designed to protect the country from the roar of war.

Before radar famously helped Britain fend off the menace posed by the Luftwaffe in 1940, government technicians had been working on another top-secret technology to protect the country from airborne attack. All that is now left as a reminder of this fascinating chapter in the defence of the realm are a few imposing ruins. These huge acoustic mirrors, abandoned in the Kent countryside, were once the key to the plan.

The strange story of the sound mirrors begins amid the carnage of the trenches. In 1915, as the First World War raged, a bright solider with a degree in physics called William Sansome Tucker was working with a unit experimenting on sound ranging – a way to detect the location of enemy artillery from the sound waves produced by shell fire. Tucker managed to come up with a ‘hot wire’ microphone which eventually allowed units to pinpoint artillery to about 50m, allowing more accurate retaliatory attacks. Meanwhile, back in Britain, experiments with sound mirrors were already afoot. The Zeppelin threat to Britain had led a Professor Mather to start looking into huge dishes which would focus the sound of enemy aircraft and airships so that they could be heard, though still well out to sea, before they came into visual range. In 1916 he’d had a crude 16ft mirror dug into a chalk hillside in Kent, and went on to do early work with concrete versions of these sound mirrors. One of these early designs was able to pick up a plane 10 miles away.

Acoustic early-warning mirrors near Dungeness on Britain’s south coast. Constructed from concrete in the 1920s, they were designed to detect enemy aircraft out to sea.

After the war, Tucker got the job of Director of Acoustical Research at Air Defense Experimental Establishment, where he was able to bring together his work on microphones and the sound enhancing capability of the satellite-dish-style reflectors. His efforts were centered on a site near Dungeness. This location, just yards from the coast, was felt to be far enough away from extraneous noise, and in 1928 Tucker oversaw the construction of a concrete mirror, 20ft in diameter. The general idea was that the low frequency sound waves from aircraft would be harnessed and concentrated, then picked up by a microphone. A man would stand next to the mirror listening in with a stethoscope and, in this way, be able to give the alert when aircraft were approaching. A bigger, 30ft mirror was built in 1930. Its larger surface area made it more accurate, and the ‘listener’ was able to work from inside a sound-proofed compartment. By moving the microphone collector horizontally and vertically using foot pedals and a wheel, he could identify the direction the sound was coming from and get a bearing on, say, a squadron of incoming aircraft.

In the same year another huge mirror with a different style of design was built – 200ft long and 26ft high with a curve of 150°. In this design a set of twenty microphones were built in to help pick up the sounds. The mirror’s new design also enabled it to pick up sounds with the longer wavelengths usually created by aircraft. In 1932 this mirror was able, on one occasion, to locate aircraft 20 miles away. The human ear could only pick them up around 6 miles away. Tucker was beginning to finesse the technology.