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INTRODUCTION

Speed and elegance must have been associated in the human mind from the very beginning, surely for tens of millennia. Certainly cave painters appear to have revered and even fetishized the swift and powerful animals they hunted. Tens of thousands of years later we still admire a racehorse or greyhound at full stretch, a cheetah closing on its prey, the folded raptor as it stoops with a shriek of air. It is an atavistic pleasure that can bring with it a momentary, almost superstitious, chill.

In her book The Living Mountain, the late Scottish writer and hill-walker Nan Shepherd muses startlingly on the swiftness of the eagle and the peregrine falcon, the red deer and the hare, wondering why grace has been added to the severely practical necessity of speed. Perhaps ‘the swoop, the parabola, the arrow-flight of hooves and wings’ become lovely through their obedience to function so that ‘Beauty is not adventitious but essential.’1 In 1934 and in a wildly different context, the copywriters of Madison Avenue made the same point about Chrysler’s new streamlined car. ‘Old mother nature has always designed her creatures for the function they are to perform. You have only to look at a dolphin, a gull, or a greyhound to appreciate the rightness of the tapering, flowing contour of the new Airflow.’2 Lyrical copy, even if the car failed to sell.

Nan Shepherd probably need not have wondered why ‘grace’ accompanies speed. We must be genetically engineered to view litheness as admirable, implying a pared-down, unencumbered quality. Even though the word ‘streamline’ dates from around 1870, the earliest hunter-gatherers would have observed how hawks gain speed by streamlining themselves when diving, wings folded and beak foremost. (The peregrine falcon has claims to be the fastest animal on earth, having been timed in a dive at 217 mph [349 kph].) Supposedly ‘primitive’ fisher-folk would have noticed that predator fish (sharks, tuna, mackerel, etc.) are shaped for speed rather than for cunning methods of camouflage in order to catch their prey. They might not have been able to measure a swordfish’s top speed as 80 mph (129 kph) but they would have noticed a correlation between shape and velocity. It seems beyond argument that a respect and admiration for speed in nature should be hard-wired into the human psyche. As a burst of speed demands energy, it always contains an element of competitiveness – the quicker you are, the less likely you and your family are to go hungry. This basic truth undoubtedly lies behind our continued fascination with any form of speed, such that we have always stylised our instinct for predation by means of races. Being a kind of proxy hunt in which the winner might take over as the new tribal leader, racing each other soon extended beyond mere running to take in skill on horseback or in sailboats. In case anyone thinks there is something modern about a yacht or speedboat owner boasting of their craft’s speed or elegance, they should remember the Roman poet Catullus:

That elegance and speed often go hand in hand is an underlying assumption in this book, although the pairing will be moderated by what is technologically feasible at any given moment. Catullus’s ‘bean-pod’ boat is a good description of a design that even then must have been ancient. A craft that is long, pointed at both ends and with a rounded bottom is clearly better designed for speed than a raft or barge. This shape, classically that of a canoe, must originally have been the result of much trial and error, backed up by biomimesis: the copying of shapes from archetypes in nature – in this case swift predators like swordfish or porpoises. When the early British pioneer of flight, George Cayley, proposed an airship in 1804 he gave its envelope the profile of a trout, reasoning that the trout had the best-shaped body for slipping through the air. The legend of the young Icarus is equally about biomimesis, since his father Daedalus stuck feathers to their bodies with wax for their attempted escape from Crete by flying. Similarly, in one of his sketches for a glider, Leonardo da Vinci gave it bat’s wings. More recent examples of people hoping to fly also began with wings modelled on those of birds. This mimicry was quite conscious in Otto Lilienthal’s successful designs for early hang gliders in the 1890s. It appeared equally so in the early Austrian powered aircraft, the Etrich-Rumpler Taube (‘dove’) which became Germany’s first mass-produced military aircraft just before the First World War. Despite its remarkably birdlike appearance, it turns out that its wings were actually modelled on the seeds of a Javan cucumber that can cover considerable distances when dispersed on the wind. Even though the Taube’s wings were not inspired by birds, they were undoubtedly biomimetic. Despite being an early flying machine with a rattly engine, its lines had a certain primordial elegance.

The Etrich-Rumpler Taube (‘dove’) became the world’s first warplane in 1911, when an Italian pilot in Libya dropped hand grenades from it. By the First World War the type was already obsolete. This one, with an enclosed cockpit, was Rumpler’s ‘Dolphin’ model.

Yet merely imitating nature is not enough. As industrialisation rapidly increased in the nineteenth century, engineers needed to know in detail how water, steam or air flows in pipes and around obstructions. The basic physics had been established by Newton, but in 1738 Daniel Bernoulli published Idrodinamica, or ‘Hydrodynamics’, in which he expounded what soon became known as Bernoulli’s Principle. This explained at length the behaviour of fluids – air as well as water – and was to become the basis of both aerodynamics and hydrodynamics. So important has his principle proved that, in 2002, Bernoulli was posthumously inducted into the San Diego Air & Space Museum’s Hall of Fame. It is this principle that explains why, when air moves faster over the curved upper surface of an aircraft’s wing than it does over the flat underside, the pressure above the wing is less than that below and thus generates lift. In countless bathrooms the inward ‘suck’ of shower curtains towards the fast-flowing stream of water is an even more familiar daily testament to Bernoulli’s insight.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, naval architects increasingly needed to know exactly what happens when a stream of water flows around a ship’s hull. By 1880 ‘streamlining’ (although the word itself had barely been coined) became a matter for serious study, where speed was essential and competitive for clippers or battleships, racing yachts, sculls and liners. If at a practical level this mostly concerned shipwrights it was simply because no land vehicles such as trains or the earliest cars were yet fast enough to make questions of aerodynamics relevant, and powered flying machines (as opposed to Lilienthal’s gliders) were still theoretical. Even so, George Cayley had built himself a machine with a whirling arm to measure the lift and drag of differently shaped wings. Its inherent drawback was that a simple revolving arm meant the model wing was always flying into the wake of its own turbulence. In 1871 two Britons, Frank Wenham and John Browning, built what was probably the world’s first proper wind tunnel using a steam-powered blower. An article written by Wenham was spotted by the Smithsonian Institution, who recommended it to the Wright brothers. It almost certainly influenced the design of the ‘Flyer’, for in 1901 the Wrights also built themselves a small but effective wind tunnel to conduct their own tests of wing and propeller shapes. It was already clear that the more speed an aircraft had, the more lift its wings could generate.

By 1900 transatlantic passenger ships had become big business and were already highly competitive. The lucrative trade taking the flood of European emigrants over the ocean to America was such that owners needed their liners to make the crossing in the shortest possible turnaround time. Speed was thus essential, and in turn the design of the hull and propellers became critical – although new ideas often turned out to be difficult to implement because shipbuilding was an ancient craft and yards tended instinctively to adhere to traditional styles and working methods. This was especially true in Britain since, thanks to its immense empire as well as to having pioneered the Industrial Revolution, it had the world’s biggest shipbuilding industry and merchant fleet. Any incentive for its shipyards to innovate was often frustrated by complacency and convention.

In both ships and locomotives everywhere steam still provided the motive force, but by 1900 the technology of steam power had largely peaked. Once it had developed enough for it to be clear that the internal combustion engine had superior power-to-weight ratio, smaller size and greater flexibility, it was merely a question of time before ships would also be driven by reciprocating engines. The one exception to this trend was that, following Charles Parsons’ demonstration of his fast launch Turbinia in 1897, the steam turbine was developed as a smoother alternative to reciprocating engines, although before long its steam would be raised by oil-burning rather than by coal. The turbine itself gradually went in a separate direction, most notably as the principle of the jet engine.

In 1885 Karl Benz’s Patent-Motorwagen became the world’s first car to be driven by a petrol engine.

Meanwhile on land the internal combustion engine was refined into a novel source of power. If we date the first automobile with an internal combustion engine to the Benz Patent-Motorwagen of 1885, it is extraordinary how rapidly the efficiency of this type of engine grew. It not only made the Wrights’ powered flight possible in 1903 but promised increasingly fast and reliable terrestrial transport. Industrial technology was already associated with speed thanks to the invention of the steam locomotive in the early nineteenth century. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, however, speed itself became a commercial, social and even aesthetic marker, especially when associated with the new technologies of aircraft and cars.

Speed for speed’s sake soon became its own message. As early as 1905, in their seminal work Modern Advertising, the Americans Earnest Elmo Calkins and Ralph Holden looked at the limited but ever-growing market for automobiles and saw the challenge of selling them as that of ‘expressing the inexpressible, of suggesting not so much a motor car as speed’. The promise of fast and ubiquitous travel heralded a new technological, military, economic, political and social dawn: a revolution that was first eagerly embraced by pre-1914 artistic movements such as Futurism in Italy. In one way or another, speed would turn out to be the hallmark of the entire twentieth century.

The builders of early aircraft soon realised that flying faster was not merely a matter of increased power but depended crucially on aerodynamics. Fast-moving air did indeed provide lift, but it also caused drag. The science of streamlining thus became increasingly important. The earliest automobile designers, on the other hand, had been dealing with such low speeds they hardly needed to take wind resistance into account. Their designs essentially took over that of horse-drawn vehicles, the limousine driver (like any coachman) being exposed to the elements for much of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Yet speed still implied competition and it was not long before people began racing each other in cars, the first official automobile race being held in Paris in 1894. Even so, in the case of cars the idea of streamlining was still more a developing aesthetic than an aerodynamic necessity. Henry Ford’s land speed record of 1904 was achieved in his ‘999’ car: a huge engine mounted on a bare wooden chassis with four wheels, no body and a crude brake. Ford steered while his mechanic operated the throttle. Together they set a new record of 91.37 mph (147.05 kph). The chief idea behind this vehicle’s design was clearly to save weight rather than to minimise drag. A few judicious light fairings might have reduced wind resistance and enabled it to go still faster, although any gain would have been marginal.

Yet the concept of a highly streamlined vehicle had already flown in 1900, in the shape of Count Zeppelin’s first dirigible airship, the LZ1. A massive structure 128 metres (420 ft) long with a diameter of only 11.75 metres (38.5 ft), it was a slender tube and thus shaped like a cigar – or better, a cheroot. George Cayley would surely have recognised this as a plausible design for minimising air resistance even if it wasn’t exactly trout-shaped. Successive airships confirmed that streamlining was an essential principle not only of flight but of anything built for speed. Even bullets had become pointed cylinders rather than balls. Once the idea of motor races and land speed records had taken hold it was clear that the designers of cars, aircraft and ships needed a sound understanding of the underlying physics. Speed meant science, science meant speed, and together they spelt the future.

Henry Ford (standing) and a mechabic (seated) with Ford’s ‘999’ car in which he set a new speed record of 91.37 mph (147.05 kph) on a frozen lake in January 1904 – a feat that proved an excellent advertisement for his new company.

As it happens, the first road vehicle to exceed 62 mph (100 kph) was not driven by an internal combustion engine but by electricity. In 1899 a torpedo-shaped Belgian electric vehicle with its driver sitting high up – and ruining its otherwise excellent aerodynamics – set a new world speed record of 65.8 mph (105.9 kph): much faster than any contemporary petrol-driven car. (It was still far slower than the best steam railway engine. That same year a German engine managed an amazing 130 mph [209 kph].) The Belgian electric vehicle was appealingly named La Jamais Contente (‘The Never Satisfied’), and the bullet shape of its light alloy body was a clear indication that matters of wind resistance had been fully considered – even though the point had not yet been reached when the driver was included in the calculations.

Count Zeppelin’s first airship, the LZ1, being towed out for its first flight on Bodensee in July 1900. The engines in the two gondolas drove four propellers via inefficiently long drive shafts.

In 1899 the charmingly named Belgian electric car, La Jamais Contente, became the first road vehicle ever to exceed 62 mph (100 kph): a new land speed record.

This vehicle is also a reminder that, at the turn of the twentieth century, not only were half of all cars electric and not petrol-driven, but in New York alone there were already 16,000 charging stations. Apart from being quieter, mechanically simpler, faster and much easier to drive, electric cars had the further enormous advantage of reliability. Petrol-driven cars of the day constantly broke down, and if they didn’t, they usually had to stop every 20 miles or so to allow the engine to cool. Electric runabouts such as the Baker Electric of 1910 were such that a New York lady might use one for her shopping, steering it herself by means of a tiller. It was claimed to have a range of 100 miles (161 km) between charging. The reason petrol overtook electricity for motive power was simply because it became a lot cheaper. In every other respect – especially in terms of pollution – electricity was much superior. It is wholly ironic that, 120 years later and in one form or another, it is being seen as the future of all terrestrial transport.

A Baker Electric runabout of 1910. With its silence, mechanical simplicity and lack of exhaust fumes it was unquestionably a graceful way of getting around.

The importance of streamlining and aerodynamics was thus appreciated well before the First World War and physicists considered the ideal design for the least wind resistance to be teardrop-shaped, with the bulbous side foremost. This can be seen in an extraordinary futuristic car produced in Italy in 1913, the prototype Alfa Castagna Aerodinamica. It was beautifully finished in swirl-pattern polished aluminium, leaving only the four wheels exposed and unshrouded. With its curved, flush (but not yet shatterproof) windscreen, porthole windows and pointed tail it was twenty years ahead of its time, as can be seen by comparing it with the model of a streamlined car made by the American designer Norman Bel Geddes in 1932. As it offered the least wind resistance, the teardrop or bubble shape for vehicles of all kinds became one of the essential components of the ‘streamline moderne’ style. Although this was to dominate American industrial design in the 1930s with examples like Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Car No. 3, it had several precursors apart from the Italian Aerodinamica car. Even the cover of Scientific American’s 5 January 1918 issue showed a futuristic bubble-style car billed as the ‘Motorist’s Dream’.

The Alfa Castagna Aerodinamica of 1913 – years ahead of its time in terms of overall streamlining.

Norman Bel Geddes’ Motorcar No. 9 of 1933. He was already famous for his streamlined industrial designs and this model’s number was his estimation of how many years ahead of its time it was.

Buckminster Fuller’s concept car, the Dymaxion No. 3, on display in 1934 at the World’s Fair in Chicago. Its Ford V-8 engine allied to the aerodynamic ‘teardrop’ shape reportedly gave it a top speed of 120 mph (193 kph).

The ‘Father of Streamlining’ was the title given to the Paris-born Raymond Loewy, who moved to the United States after the First World War and came to prominence as an industrial designer in the late 1920s. He designed cars, streamlined housings for locomotives, household appliances and – in 1961 – the Studebaker Avanti now coveted by automobile collectors. When designing the Avanti, Loewy said he wanted something that suggested a supersonic aircraft – yet more evidence of the massive influence aviation had on vehicles of all kinds. It was surely no coincidence that in his youth in France, Loewy had won several awards for his model aircraft. During the First World War the styling of aircraft, especially their fuselages, was progressively influenced by the aerodynamic advantages of streamlining. In America some years later, Loewy applied the same principles to a ship, the Virginia Ferry Company’s SS Princess Anne, whose rakish lines made it look much swifter than it actually was. In this he was possibly influenced by Norman Bel Geddes’ model of a proposed streamlined passenger liner.

Bel Geddes’ Streamlined Ocean Liner: a 1932 concept. Note the overall ‘torpedo’ shape, the ‘teardrop’ fairings of its two funnels and the bridge shaped like a wing.

Raymond Loewy admitted that his streamlined 1933 design for the Princess Anne owed less to a desire for better performance than to what was by then a matter of normal modernist styling. The ship was scuppered in Florida in 1993 as an artificial reef.

Bel Geddes’ futuristic Aircraft No. 4 (1929) was influenced by contemporary ‘flying wing’ designers like Boris Cheranovsky in the Soviet Union and Jack Northrop in the US. It was perhaps closer to the ‘lifting body’ principle of the aircraft built by his fellow American, Vincent Burnelli.

Bel Geddes was another industrial (and theatrical) designer of the time, whose 1932 book Horizons was highly influential. He left a multitude of models and sketches, many of them quite impracticable and futuristic but showing how well he understood the glamour of speed and modernity. It was he and contemporary designers like him who gave swift, rounded shapes to domestic appliances like refrigerators, cookers, vacuum cleaners and even to humble desktop pencil sharpeners.

Like the Swiss-French architect and urban planner Le Corbusier, Bel Geddes foresaw a future of mass travel in which aircraft would take on the dimensions of ocean-going liners. One of his projects between 1929 and 1932 was for a Transoceanic Passenger Plane, his Aircraft No. 4. This was a behemoth ‘flying wing’ seaplane with nine decks and a wingspan of 160 metres (525 ft). It was designed for 451 passengers and in Bel Geddes’ own words would be ‘equal in spaciousness and comfort to the most modern ocean liner’. The main dining room was designed to seat 200 guests, and the crew of 155 included two head waiters, two wine stewards and nine bar stewards – not to mention seven musicians, a masseur, a masseuse, a gymnast and a librarian. He was very much less specific about the mechanics of the thing. In sheer extravagance his Aircraft No. 4 might easily have featured as a typical cover illustration on any contemporary issue of a futuristic monthly magazine like Modern Mechanics or Hugo Gernsback’s Air Wonder Stories. The multitude of burgeoning technologies in the interwar years stimulated vast numbers of imaginative ideas, a few of which were truly prophetic – but most of which were mere science-fiction pipe dreams.

This ‘streamline moderne’ or ‘art moderne’ style also greatly influenced the late art deco school of architecture. An important ingredient was the idea of travel: the modern and widespread restlessness increasingly made possible by more money, new technologies, and work that depended ever more on attending distant meetings at a client’s expense. This architectural style favoured long horizontal lines with curved surfaces and nautical influences such as porthole windows, thus melding the stylish chic of ocean liners with that of gracious living at the best addresses on land. The Pierre Patout building (1935) on Paris’s Boulevard Victor is a good instance of le style paquebot or ‘ocean liner style’. An even more obvious example is the Hotel Normandie in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Obviously designed in honour of the 1935 liner Normandie (still judged by many as the epitome of speed and elegance among pre-war transatlantic liners) the hotel is long with a rounded front as if forging through ocean spray. The floors are marked horizontally like decks, with railings and even little ‘bridge wing’ protrusions at the four corners of the top ‘deck’. And as if to show that this style of architecture can still look thoroughly in place and contemporary, especially in a marine context, there is the Van Alen Building on the seafront in Brighton, England. Named in honour of the architect of the sublime art deco masterpiece, the Chrysler Building in New York City, this residential building was finished in 2001. Appropriately, all the apartments have sea views and there are even some porthole windows at the side.

In 1909 the avant-garde Italian poet Filippo Marinetti published his Manifesto of Futurism: a hymn to speed, technology and youth. It was a modernist philosophy whose wholesale rejection of anything old (especially politics) challenged established values and promoted a spirit of competitiveness, whether at a personal or national level. In particular, Futurism worshipped cars and aircraft for their speed and the beauty deriving from it. (That its praise of youth, power and violence helped it become a central text of Italian fascism is another matter. It was no coincidence that Mussolini, alone among leaders of the major combatants in the Second World War, had bought into this militarism by successfully gaining his pilot’s wings.) The spirit of Italian Futurism soon became internationally influential in the new century’s art, architecture, industrial design and much else, although the First World War mostly held such things in abeyance until 1920 or so. Even so, the war could be seen as providing other kinds of stimuli. In 1916 Henri Deterding, the chairman of Royal Dutch Shell who was also widely referred to as the ‘Napoleon of Oil’, predicted, ‘This is a century of travel, and the restlessness which has been created by the war will make the desire for travel still greater.’4

The Hotel Normandie in San Juan, Puerto Rico, opened in 1942 and was deliberately modelled on the SS Normandie’s ‘streamline moderne’ architectural style. The sign on the roof actually came from the ship after a refit.

What is inarguable is that the world’s first technological war hastened great advances in machines of all kinds and above all in aircraft, the speed of whose development was quite remarkable. In the summer of 1914 the average military aircraft was of unspecified role other than the all-purpose one of ‘observation’, since there were as yet no dedicated specialised types such as fighters or bombers. It was typically a fabric-covered wooden-framed biplane with a maximum speed of around 70–80 mph (113–129 kph), a maximum load of two skinny crewmen and an altitude capability of a few thousand feet that could take anything up to three-quarters of an hour to reach. Four years later there were fully aerobatic fighters capable of speeds of 145 mph (233 kph), an ability to climb to 20,000 feet in under twenty minutes and a service ceiling of 25,000 feet. By the end of the war in Europe many people had become accustomed to seeing flying machines; yet the idea of flight remained a marvel – even slightly mystical, which was why aircraft and their pilots acquired a prestige all their own for daring to scoff at the supposed laws of nature. The ‘conquest of the air’ seemed to most people the greatest marvel of human ingenuity to date, just as fifty years later the conquest of space would be.

ALSO BY JAMES HAMILTON-PATERSON

Contents

INTRODUCTION