"Brits who made the modern world"

I stand corrected…..Phew! 🙂

Creaking Door, you are correct, it wasn’t.

Michel Wibault’s design didn’t use the thrust from the engine, it was an Orion turboprop that powered 4 centrifugal blowers through seperate gearboxes.
The genius of Hookers scheme was the single engine with four rotating exhaust outlets. The bifurcated jet outlets from the Sea Hawks Nene was a big inspiration.

Wasn’t the layout of the Harrier’s engine / nozzles originally conceived by a Frenchman…

…sorry, blasphemy! 😮

When is the ‘Harrier’ episode on by the way?

Considering how many myths are cherished just to keep up a pathos of nationalistic pride, I’m not surprised the documentaries aren’t really well-researched. Don’t check a good story to death. There are plenty of brilliant British inventions and achievements, but they were brilliant because of what they are, not because where they’re from.

I don’t know how often I’ve been here countering the persistant myth that the true inspiration for the Mirage delta’s was the Fairey FD2, just to name one example.

The Tilting Train

Depressingly another all to familiar story, build something, ****** it up at the last hurdle, shelve it, then buy it again from another country using all the technology we originally developed… 😡

The Lotus 25 programme was appalling in its inaccuracies and covenient deletion of important and relevant information that didn’t suit their premise that the monocoque Lotus 25 was the greatest revolution in F1 history (it certainly wasn’t).

It also used poor computer graphics, awful reconstructed footage and archive clips of the wrong cars in the wrong races.

I have to say it was one of the worst documentaries I have EVER seen.

I may watch the Harrier episode just to see how badly wrong they can get it.

There is going to be one about the Harrier and how the government didn’t want to get involved until the Americans became interested.

Started last week actually. The first one was about Lotus and Colin Chapman, although I haven’t actually got around to watching it yet…