What extraordinary footage, and what extraordinary colour footage ! Thank you for the link.
All this seems like long ago and yet the land looks exactly the same, all these stories just the flicker of an eye in this ancient landscape.
I can almost taste the dust and feel the bewilderment of being such a tiny thing in this massive landscape. Not a great place to crash land an aircraft into, in the intrepid 30’s or wartime 40’s. It is fantastic to see Sydney Harbour and Darwin as it looked like in the war, and of course an Empire Flying Boat.

It makes me think of how vulnerable everything was. Most of Australia’s and New Zealand’s road making equipment was lost in Malaya in 1941, and if it was not for US industrial capacity and the Construction Brigades (CeeBees) coming in it would have been a terribly difficult Pacific War to run. The guts of it was American Caterpillars and Fork trucks traded for canned peaches and meat under Lend Lease.

All those trucks and graders left in Malaya were used by the Japanese and later returned into Allied hands as the Japanese were pushed back, with the CeeBees making good use of abandoned Japanese rollers to crush coral on many Pacific Islands. I can imagine an old, leather skinned Australian road maker in a battered hat finding his old grader, lost in Malaya, years later in Borneo, and with a quiet smile getting into the familiar saddle again.

Great footage. Great, brave times, such different, honest work for a man than being a derivatives trader today!

I would love to get high res copies of the Demonstrator photos, particularly with the fairing stripped off, as they show a wealth of technical detail and bracketry. Along the bottom are the grease nipples that allowed remote greasing of hinged components throughout the airframe, a ‘selling point’ that for ‘ease of maintenance’ that nudged out Camm and Hawkers in favour of Bristol for the 1929 RAF fighter contract. The fabric work on the Demonstrator looks superb.

Wind generator

I have seen photos of wind powered generator in the same position, but attached only to front bracket. I have also seen photos of wind generator on starboard side, where I figure the port side was ‘reserved’ for gun camera. In this photo of a Paris Exhibition Bulldog in 1929, a wind generator with variable speed prop can be barely seen.

Camera gun

What a delightful series of photographs of the Demonstrator ! There look to be bags of ballast or smuggled gold in sacks, where the radio installation would be. A later, helmeted Jupiter and fancy exhaust collector I guess indicate a model that needed to be ‘all things to all people’. I cannot fathom what the larger, pitot like tube above the standard pitot is. Perhaps a more fancy pitot fitted by Martlesham to verify speed claims?

Here are some photos of a camera gun fitted to the offending brackets, same aeroplane from side and oblique view..

Pollard. Pollard was the structures guy at Bristol’s from F2B to Brabazon and an influential author and lecturer. You could also follow the air cooled engine history from Bristol Jupiter-Pegasus-Hercules-Centaurus (Fedden). I can write the thesis in return for beer!

Big, fascinating topic. That’s why the 15 pints are there !
Performance is POWERPLANTS and STRUCTURES.
Powerplants = better metals to contain more horsepower/thrust as better fuels developed higher compression ratios and better metals stopped the engines falling apart. This is the story of steel (crankshafts, conrods, exhaust valves) & forging practice (aluminium, magnesium, pistons – cast v forged) for better grainflow. Graphs of HP(eventually thrust)/Engine weight illustrate progress. For jets/thrust it was all about controlling expansion of turbine blades, but that’s putting us into 1946.

Structures = better metals to manage higher speeds/greater forces. This is the evolution of duralumin alloys, monocoque structures versus faired over truss structures. This is the Uiver Douglas DC2 in the 1934 London Melbourne Air Race scaring the UK so Bristols made the ‘Britain First’-Blenheim and shifted the UK from steel structures to aluminium, co-incidental with the development of better duraluminium alloys in 1935.

There is so much in this topic, including national biases in material selection, that your friend might be better to confine the story to progress in one nation, and progress via ‘archetypes’ that illustrate use of materials. If its UK, 1935-45 :

Development of RR Merlin engine from 700HP to 2000HP. (plenty of literature)

Development of Bristol ‘Bulldog-Britain First-Blenheim-Beaufighter-Brabazon (brains to tap Barnwell, Frise and materials man (can’t think right now, shame, but he was self effacing and HUGELY influential through SBAC on all constructors)
or
Hawker Hind-Hurricane-Typhoon…(brains to tap Sigrist and Camm)
or, not forgetting wood
deHavilland Tiger Moth-Comet-Albatross-Mosquito-Vampire (brains to tap Bishop, dH)

I hope your friend makes a good fist of it as it EXPLAINS everything developed in WW2. All the ideas were already there in 1935, just the resources to rapidly develop these ideas became available with the reconfiguration of entire national incomes into the war effort.
The next big punch was the Space Race.
Go girl !