Abstract
As announced in Nature of December 14, p. 867, Sir Ben Lockspeiser has been appointed chief scientist to the Ministry of Supply. Sir Ben, who is fifty-five, was at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. During the First World War he served in Gallipoli and Egypt. He afterwards worked at the Admiralty's Laboratory at Sheffield, and was for a time in the Inventions Department of the Ministry of Munitions. He joined the Royal Aircraft Establishment in 1921. His first work was to assist Dr. A. A. Griffith in investigations on phase complexity and on stress concentration in plastic crystals. He turned his attention, at the R.A.E., to a variety of aeronautical problems, such as wing flutter, instrument design, the design of windscreens and the prevention of ice accretion. Sir Ben was responsible, with Dr. Rams-bottom, for the development of the early form of chemical anti-icing device consisting of a porous wing nose-piece kept saturated with ethylene glycol, afterwards manufactured by the Dunlop Rubber Co. In 1936 he transferred to the Air Defence Department of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, where he was closely concerned with the development of the balloon barrage in the form in which it played an important part in defence during the Second World War, his work including theoretical aspects of the interception problem, practical trials and the effect of the employment of the barrage on aircraft design.
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Sir Ben Lockspeiser. Nature 159, 20 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/159020d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/159020d0