August 1915: The Board of Invention

These days, The Engineer gets quite a few of its research stories by looking at who’s been awarded EPSRC grants. One of this organisation’s main forerunners, the Board of Invention and Research, was set up by the Royal Navy a century ago, and it’s fair to say that our predecessors met its formation with a fair amount of scepticism. And at the root of The Engineer’s concerns was the composition of the board. The problem? Not enough engineers.

Unsurprisingly, all of the board members were men. The chairman was Admiral Lord John Arbuthnot Fisher, known as Jackie (but probably not to his face, at least by the ratings), who had recently retired as First Sea Lord, according to The Engineer because of a difference of opinion (our subsequent research finds that the disagreement was with none other than Winston Churchill, and was about the Gallipoli campaign).

Today’s inhabitants of Engineer Towers must admit to never having heard of Jackie Fisher, but on checking his Wikipedia entry we find that he was instrumental in switching the Navy from wooden warships with muzzle-loading cannon when he joined the service in 1856, to steel-hulled battlecruisers, submarines, and the first aircraft carriers. Apparently he was noted for being argumentative, energetic and reform-minded: one thing that modern sailors can thank him for is his replacement of weevil-infested ship’s biscuit for daily-baked bread as the mainstay of rations.  And just to emphasise the period of change he oversaw, on his first day at sea as a 13-year-old midshipman (on HMS Victory of Trafalgar fame!), he witnessed the flogging of eight ratings. He passed out.