Document Type: Book (Historical Study).

Purpose: Informational.

Authority: Author Expertise.

Scope (from the Foreword): "This book recounts the episodes that the author considers most significant both as regards his own full life and the technical developments which he has seen and influenced. It is of interest that the year of his birth (1885) was also the birth of the first real motor cars, for in that year both Daimler and Benz in Germany first made road vehicles fitted with internal combustion engines. The episodes are recounted very modestly, and in describing his career at Cambridge the author attributes a great deal to the then Professor of Mechanical Sciences Bertram Hopkinson, for his teaching and, above all, for his encouragement and invitation to assist in his research programme. Hopkinson's ideas were well ahead of his time, but he made an apt choice of assistant in the undergraduate who, before the age of twenty, seemed to have absorbed most of the current knowledge of the internal combustion engine, and who was at that time designing a two-stroke engine to embody an obscure theory put forward by Dugald Clerk. The engine, known as the 'Dolphin,' is covered by a patent specification dated 1906 (in which the author is described as a student) and proved so successful that it was made under licence by a number of firms until the outbreak of war extinguished the market for it."

Contents (from the Table of Contents):

- "Foreword

1. Early Life

2. Family Background

3. Schooldays

4. Mechanical Engineering at the Turn of the Century

5. Some Early Endeavours

6. Cambridge

7. The Dolphin Venture

8. Start of a Career with my Grandfather's Firm

9. The End of the Beginning

10. The First World War

11. The First Tanks

12. Formation of My Company

13. A New Direction

14. Some Episodes from the New Company

15. Patents and Royalties

16. Some Frivolous Pursuits

- Index"