Late, great engineers: R J Mitchell - creator of the Spitfire

Image captions:
The Supermarine Spitfire prototype K5054 in 1936 - Air Historical Branch-RAF

 There’s a powerful mythology connected to the Spitfire fighter plane. So powerful in fact that by the 1960s, when sales were at their peak, Airfix was shifting more than 350,000 injection-moulded plastic scale model kits of the aircraft per annum. That’s four times as many as the Hawker Hurricane that could be convincingly argued was the more lethal and influential combat unit. But the British public needed a technology icon of the Second World War, replicas of which it could dangle from the nation’s collective bedroom ceiling, and it chose the Spitfire. British broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson sums up the aircraft’s appeal: “The fact is simple. The Spitfire looked good. It was every bit as dashing as the young men who flew it, and in flight it was as graceful as any bird… effortless, as though it was simply riding the breeze, and its Merlin engine was only there to provide a suitable soundtrack.”