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Walter Wilson: Portrait of an Inventor A Gordon Wilson
Prologue: the lost engine
The friendly figure of Andrew Sinclair, our producer, with a reassuring smile and a final wave, receded into the distant shadows of the barn-like studio. The hand of the clock reached the half hour and the little red light glowed. We were on. Two massive cameras mounted upon grotesque trucks, their vizored operators seated high above the are-lights, advanced upon Lord Braye, in the adjoining cubicle. Through the partition, I could hear him saying his piece. He was doing well. He had finished. Now it was my turn; the huge machines turned and wheeled towards me, bearing down remorselessly upon the little desk behind which I was pinned against my background photograph. I started intoning my well-rehearsed part, perspiring gently under the make-up, the heat and the glare, my thoughts at that moment on no higher plane than on completing my words and getting to grips with the whisky and soda that had been promised me when it was all over. We were at BBC Television's Lime Grove Studios, and it was just after 9.30pm on 6 August 1959. Three of us - Lord Braye, at whose home Perey Pilcher's fatal accident had occurred; Mr Charles Gibbs-Smith, the aeronautical historian; and myself, son of Percy Pilcher's partner - were entertaining the watching millions with an account of what we knew or - more accurately in my case - what we did not know of the engine that my father had built for the flying machine in which the machine's designer, Percy Pilcher, was so tragically killed in a gliding experiment on 30 September 1899. In their series Lost Without Trace, the BBC dramatised the loss of three very different historic relics: the manuscript of Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the engine that my father built for Percy Pilcher's Flying Machine. My mortification at my failure to learn more of this historic effort more than matched my apprehension at having to appear before a vast, unseen audience to reveal how little I actually knew of the details of what my father had done.
By that time I had spent some 38 years in engineering of one sort and another. I had thereby acquired a sufficiently jaundiced view of a career among nuts and bolts to experience surprise on discovering that an engine could, in other people's estimation, rank equally with a manuscript or a Dead Sea Scroll in romance and interest. This somewhat traumatic appearance on television, coupled with regret at my inability to make a more significant contribution that evening by simply not having asked my father to tell me more about the subject before his death two years earlier, brought home to me the realisation that engines - and those who make them - can disappear suddenly and, once gone, can never be recreated. What struck me even more forcibly was that, if a piece of machinery like this could really take its place among such historical works of art, how much more interesting to succeeding generations could be the lives and personalities of those who invented and made them. My father's active life, in the last 30 years of which he and I had worked together closely enough for me to see a little of how his mind operated, had spanned the six decades which saw the birth of the motor car and the aeroplane. These two means of transport have altered our lives enough to merit some detailed and personal insight into the lives of those pioneers and inventors whose work made them possible. During his lifetime, my father had seen the motor bend aircraft industries grow into industrial giants; had seen their products reach a degree of use undreamed of when he and his contemporaries took their first faltering steps to prove them practical. He had made one of the first - if not the first - attempts to build a petrol-driven aircraft engine. He had designed, made and sold motor cars when they were considered an eccentric rarity. And he had made possible the fighting tank in the first of two world wars, and had pioneered a revolutionary gearbox that led to the breakthrough in automatic transmissions in the motoring world. This story is an attempt to bring to life the more personal side of the birth and development of these inventions and to portray his personality and those of some of the people with whom he worked. It is also an effort to probe the reasons why the real fruits of his inventiveness were to elude him and to show the slender chances upon which hang the fame and fortunes of those who, like him, point out to others the way that so many things may be done.
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