Gallery: "specification"
If you’re searching for a microcosm of Brexit Britain, you could do worse than begin by scrutinising the UK’s widget manufacturers. Over the past few weeks, I’ve scoured the wholesalers on Dryburgh industrial estate for well-designed electrical widgets, or “wiring accessories” as M&E engineers call them.
As I hunted through trade outlets and online, my path crossed with some Buy British enthusiasts, who are on a mission to support the UK economy at this difficult time; shades of Al Murray’s Pub Landlord and his campaign to Save the Great British Pint… So this is a rumination on whether we make stuff any more, and if so, whether it’s any better than what we import.
Buy British is sometimes overtaken by the imperative to Buy Scottish, but there are a few exceptions. You’d think that with two of the UK’s Big Six energy suppliers based here – Scottish Power is headquartered in Glasgow and Scottish & Southern Energy in Perth – there would be a thriving electrical components industry in Scotland? Sadly, no.
Scottish firms concentrate on the heavy end of electrical engineering: Brand Rex at Glenrothes make cables, Belmos in Motherwell make distribution boards, Parsons-Peebles at Rosyth build electric motors, Bonar Long in Dundee used to make power transformers and Mitsubishi Electric at Livingston still makes air conditioning and heat pumps. However, we appear to have neglected the well-designed, good quality switchplate.
“The door handle,” said Juhani Pallasmaa, “is the handshake of a building.” Presumably the light switch isn’t far behind. It’s another point of close contact, yet many switches are made from white moulded plastic, which looks cheap, feels cheap and isn’t made to last. Neither is there any thought given to its environmental impact – so we should listen to Dieter Rams, the German industrial designer about whom a documentary film was released recently.
Rams was Braun’s chief designer from the late 1950’s to the mid 1990’s, and in that time he designed hundreds of products which we’d now call minimalist. He wasn’t a stylist, but approached each product ergonomically, so that it would be well made, long lasting and intuitive to use.
Dieter Rams has been talking about the social, political and environmental impact of design for more than half a century – interestingly, the antithesis of the line taken by late Isi Metzstein, who complained that too much consideration is given to the social and operational aspects of design, as opposed to the architectonic.
Many of the products Rams designed for Braun were made from injection-moulded plastic, which isn’t in the least environmentally-friendly. However, he and his contemporaries didn’t make disposable goods, they made things to last: lots of people have Braun products such as calculators, radios and kitchen gadgets which still work, 30 or more years after they were made. 30 years or more can’t be said for cheap light switches.
It’s rarely worth trying to repair white moulded plastic faceplates when they break, and they can’t be recycled either. Similarly, manufacturing in the Far East then shipping components to Britain is madness, no matter how cheap it is today to stick things in a container. So, bearing in mind environmental impact as well as aesthetics and practicality, the following thoughts come from my experience as a specifier who insists on seeing and feeling samples, and also from listening to electricians and electrical engineers.
Where to begin? I’m told that in the 1960’s, Crabtree accessories were robustly made, albeit rather old-fashioned and chunky in appearance. Then MK Electric produced a slimmer, sleeker style of faceplate which became more popular. However, sockets and switches from the 1970’s and earlier were made from ivory Bakelite, which is pretty much bulletproof, whereas the moulded urea-formaldehyde plastic used by everyone since then is easy to crack.
Recently, a spark took me aside to ask why architects specify MK Logic Plus so frequently. He felt it must just be habit, because while MK Logic accessories used to be "Made in UK", MK was bought by Honeywell a few years ago, and some of its products are now "Made in Malaysia". Their website does say, “MK Electric, unusually for the sector, still manufactures its products for the UK in the UK; with a factory in St Asaph as well as Southend.” The electrician complained that he often had to return MK accessories to the wholesaler, because the fixing screws were jammed solid against the terminals, and he blamed that on manufacturing in the Far East. Perhaps that's just prejudice, though.
Which makes would he recommend? Hager, Contactum, Schneider. Doing a bit of digging, “In the UK, Hager has a well-established R&D team and global resource to meet the needs of the market. This is backed up by the UK factory.” Contactum, “is one of a few remaining manufacturers of electrical wiring accessories and circuit protection products in the UK, and manufacturing still continues today at its factory in Cricklewood, London.” We'll come to Schneider later.
The electrician reckoned that Telco, LAP and Knightsbridge were firms to avoid; according to him they are cheap and appear to be made abroad. So perhaps there is a correlation between where a thing is made and its quality. Is that economic nationalism, “common sense” as Al Murray’s Pub Landlord might put it, or pure prejudice? Many of us are cynical about the quality of imports – in other words, we believe that these things could be made much better than they are.
Personally I used to reach for the MEM catalogue as my default for white accessories – MEM Premera faceplates appeared to be decent quality, looked slim, and a full range of accessories is available. MEM is now owned by Eaton, an American corporation, which shut down its factory in Oldham in 2005.
But compared to white plastic, metal faceplates win every time. They’re not manufactured from petrochemicals, they won’t shatter like plastic does, they don’t turn yellow with age, and “live” finishes such as bronze will develop a patina with use, which we find attractive. Finally, if we’re finished with them the metal can be recycled rather than going to landfill or incineration.
Metal faceplates got a bad rep in the 1980’s when there was an outbreak of Victorian Brass in suburban Britain. Once that subsided, polished chrome became popular, and now in theory you get a brass, bronze, chrome, stainless steel, nickel or copper finish, as well as powder-coated or clear polycarbonate “invisible” switchplates. Most of the major accessories firms offer several ranges in metal, and after some research I discovered that quite a few still manufacture them in the UK.
Wandsworth Electrical produce a “premium designer electrical socket which is 100% designed and made in Britain.” Focus SB sell “Quality Electrical Accessories Made in Britain: we are the only UK company licensed to manufacture electrical accessories for export to China.” So it isn’t all one-way traffic. Similarly, Hamilton Litestat have a Union Jack on their website and offer “largely UK-made products”; M. Marcus manufacture all their accessories at a factory in Dudley; and according to G&H Brassware, “All our products are hand assembled at our premises in the West Midlands.”
But the best-designed products I’ve come across were made in Britain by GET Group. Their sockets and switches were presented in a box with a translucent sleeve which slid back from the carton to reveal a switchplate which followed the same design ethos as the keys on a MacBook’s keyboard. The plate’s corners were neatly radiused, the rocker edges were rounded off and their action was a well-damped clunk, rather than the nasty click-clack of a £2.50 switch.
GET’s accessories were made from steel and brass and high density polymer, and even came with M3.5 screws in two different lengths, to suit different depths of backbox. That level of design thinking is rare, especially at the consumer end of the market. Electricians liked their robustness and the ease with which the terminals could be wired; I guess architects liked their aesthetic, bearing in mind that they were Mac-like, and of course Apple designer Jonathan Ive was heavily influenced by Dieter Rams … so ultimately the widget makers could learn from Rams' design approach and sustainable philosophy.
GET Group plc was swallowed up by Schneider Electric of France a decade ago, and their clever designs have gradually disappeared, which is a great shame. It’s not clear from Schneider’s website whether they still manufacture in the UK, either. That adds to the feeling that well-known firms have been taken over by overseas companies, production moved offshore, and the quality may suffer while the brand trades on its past reputation.
On the other hand, the contract quality fittings which architects specify for higher end projects are quite different to the budget quality you find in B&Q, Homebase et al., and the former are still made in the UK, if not Scotland. They might incorporate sophisticated electronic dimmers, or bespoke finishes which use metalworking skills developed by locksmiths and ironmongery hardware makers in the Black Country.
In conclusion, the future seems to lie in making high value products, yet there doesn’t appear to be a design-led electrical accessories firm in this country any more. Perhaps James Dyson will take up the challenge, having already launched his own ranges of taps and lights …
A while ago, I wrote about the Beech Starship, a business aircraft which looks like an artefact from a future civilisation. By contrast, the DH103 Hornet fighter appears hopelessly old-fashioned – yet it reached almost 500mph in level flight, which made it the fastest piston-engined aircraft of its day. It could cruise at the speed of today’s jet airliners, and outran the first jet-powered fighters. The chances are, if you took a Hornet to the air races at Reno in Nevada today, it would out-run all the souped-up Mustangs and Sea Furies, setting a new absolute speed record.
In many senses, the Hornet was the piston-engined aircraft perfected. A few weeks ago, the BBC showed a documentary about Eric “Winkle” Brown, the Scots-born test pilot. As a naval aviator, he set a record for the number of landings on aircraft carriers which has never been beaten, and when in his unassuming way Brown describes the Hornet as the favourite from all the different aircraft he flew, that means something. Captain Brown has flown more types of aircraft than anyone else in history.
Eric Brown is a top candidate for the Most Interesting Man in the World. As a schoolboy, he attended the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and met a WW1 flying ace. During WW2, he escaped from the wreckage of a torpedoed ship, helped to liberate Belsen and took 2,000 enemy prisoners armed only with a pistol – not to mention a few close calls where he had to abort and promptly GTFO using a parachute. After the War ended, he interrogated leading Nazis including Hermann Goering, aircraft manufacturer Ernst Heinkel and designer Willie Messerschmitt. Brown was the first man to fly a jet on and off an aircraft carrier, and he set aviation records that will almost certainly never be broken.
The de Havilland Hornet was his favourite, "For the simple reason it was over-powered. This is an unusual feature in an aircraft, you could do anything on one engine, almost, that you could do on two. It was a 'hot rod Mosquito' really, I always described it as like flying a Ferrari in the sky." The Hornet was the fastest twin piston-engined operational combat aircraft in the world while in service, and the first aircraft to demonstrate a cartwheel manoeuvre.
"For aerobatics the Sea Hornet was absolute bliss. The excess of power was such that manoeuvres in the vertical plane can only be described as rocket-like. Even with one propeller feathered the Hornet could loop with the best single-engine fighter. I had felt such absolute confidence that I was mentally relaxed … Indeed, there was something about the Sea Hornet that made me feel that I had total mastery of it.”
"In my book the Sea Hornet ranks second to none for harmony of control, performance characteristics and, perhaps most important, in inspiring confidence in its pilot. For sheer exhilarating flying enjoyment, no aircraft has ever made a deeper impression on me.”
At the root of any aircraft’s design is the equation which resolves power, weight, lift, drag and trim into performance. In simplistic terms, power makes an aircraft climb whereas attitude varies its speed. The Hornet’s high rate of climb came thanks to the Rolls-Royce Merlin, arguably the engine of the 20th Century, which in this case developed more than 2000hp from 27 litres of swept volume. Just like the Mosquito, the Hornet had a pair of Merlins but in this case they were faired into streamlined “power eggs”.
The Hornet’s top speed is partly the function of a low co-efficient of drag arising from a sleek fuselage and a laminar flow wing; this thin wing was made possible by new materials. The Hornet’s long range came thanks to its light weight; both strength and light weight derived from de Havilland’s early mastery of composite construction.
During the 1930’s, aircraft structures evolved from doped fabric stretched across an ash frame, to the geodesic spaceframe of steel tubes which Barnes Wallis used in the Wellington bomber, and eventually to all-metal stressed skin structures. De Havillands went their own way, searching for a different method of achieving strength and lightness. They settled on timber, but rather than a load-bearing timber frame (like a Morgan car or a timber kit house) they developed the first composite monocoque.
Unlike the Beech Starship, a revolutionary aircraft which used carbon composites, the Hornet wasn’t a great leap into the unknown; it’s an evolutionary aircraft, albeit one at the very apex of its line of evolution. De Havillands had been working on composites for a decade before the first Hornet took flight - although their initial objective was to build stronger, lighter propellers.
In order to cope with more powerful engines, propellers had grown in diameter, gained more blades, and their tip speeds were approaching the sound barrier. As a result, the centrifugal forces at the propeller hub had increased to the point where there were many catastrophic failures. De Havilland Propellers worked with Aero Research at Duxford to overcome the drawbacks of laminated timber props, successfully using phenol-formaldehyde resin in the manufacture of propellers. The attraction of this material was that, with a density of around half that of aluminium alloy, centrifugal forces at the root were greatly reduced.
De Havillands was a rare aircraft company which made everything for itself. Piston engines were built at Stag Lane in Edgware, then jet engines and later rocket motors plus of course complete aircraft at Hatfield, Leavesden and later Hawarden. As a result, it was able to cross-fertilise materials research between propellors, wings and fuselage design.
The work on propellers “spun off” into fuselage and wing structures for the (almost) all-timber Mosquito, which the wartime Press christened the Wooden Wonder. The Mosquito was built from sandwich panels consisting of thin skins of plywood veneer bonded to a core of end-grain balsa wood. The core functions just like the web of an I-beam while the plywood skins function as the flanges. The sandwich panel's bending stiffness is proportional to the core thickness, in the same way that an I-beam becomes stiffer as the web deepens. Doubling the core thickness yields a panel roughly six times stronger and 12 times stiffer.
At a time when other WW2 combatants were desperately trying to smelt cobalt, vanadium and other rare metals into exotic alloys, it seems bizarre that de Havillands were in the market for balsa wood. You can only assume that German spies put this down to British eccentricity, if they even remarked on it at all, yet Baltek’s sawmills in America struggled to keep up with demand. Today the technology seems so accessible; hobbyists and model-makers have access to the same plywood veneers, balsa wood and epoxy glues that de Havillands used.
Plywood was a relatively new material, and also a composite, with plies of different thicknesses and orientations providing degrees of strength and stiffness. As well as de Havilland themselves, the Mosquito was built by Roe, Gloster, Phillips & Powis and even Venesta – the forerunner of Venesta Cubicles which is still in business today. In 1937 their "Venesta" plywood and "Plymax" metal-faced plywood made them an ideal choice as fabricators of ply composite aircraft such as the Mosquito.
The Mosquito was built by the furniture industry, which was mostly based around its traditional centre in Buckinghamshire: incidentally, that’s the reason High Wycombe was one of the most heavily-bombed London suburban towns. The industry had a long history (Defoe mentions it) in the town and in the 1940’s there were still many local manufacturers. The Windsor chair was its most famous product, but practically every other sort of furniture was also made. Components for the Mosquito were reportedly produced by Marples and G-Plan, and supplying the materials was a multi-national effort: the frames used Alaskan spruce and British ash, the sandwich used 3-ply Canadian birch plywood and Ecuadorian balsawood.
The DH103 Hornet evolved from the DH98 Mosquito - and as is the way of things, it became lighter, faster, more powerful and stronger. Both aircraft used variations of a pre-formed plywood monocoque shell strengthened with spruce stringers and constructed using high-strength synthetic bonding resins. This technique had been pioneered on the famous DH.88 Comet racers, and would also be used to great effect on the Dragonfly light twin and the Albatross airliner of 1938. One step forward from the Mosquito was the way de Havilland built the Hornet’s wing spars, and another was the wing surfaces themselves.
Mosquito wing spars have all-wooden tension and compression booms, but this would have been impossible for the Hornet, because of the large cross-section of wood necessary for the more highly-loaded wing. The problem was overcome by making the tension booms from aluminium extrusions, and using wood for the spar webs and compression booms. A layer of veneer was bonded to the aluminium parts then everything was assembled to form a spar of remarkably low weight and high strength.
Moulded wood veneers of a type that we’d now term cross-laminated timber were combined with more conventional parallel layered glulam to produce spars of amazing accuracy and complex geometry. Tapered and kinked spars with “L”-shaped sections were formed using this technique, which was originally developed for manufacturing Isokon furniture. Isokon is well known in architectural circles, thanks to the Lawn Road Flats designed by Wells Coates…
The Hornet’s wings comprised an aerofoil with a composite wood and metal internal structure, with a stressed birch-ply double upper skin and an under surface of reinforced “Alclad”. This was the first time that aluminium had been bonded to timber in a structural fashion. Lift acting on the Hornet’s wing meant that the metal skin on the underside of the wing went into tension, and the ply-balsa composite went into compression – so the materials’ inherent qualities were used to best advantage.
The idea of combining skins of ply and aluminium with a lightweight core was a conceptual leap born of on a new generation of synthetic adhesives. De Havillands’ composite structures relied upon a new epoxy resin developed by Aero Research. This glue, “Redux 775”, was developed in 1941 as the first modern, synthetic structural adhesive for metals - and it was first used in the Hornet Mk1 which was built at Hatfield. Hornet construction, like that of the Mosquito before it, used similar techniques as modern fibreglass wet layup. The positive mould was covered with wax, then strips of thin veneer were laid up in different directions to improve the tensile strength in all directions, just as today you would lay up glass or carbonfibre mats.
The first skin would be covered by a sandwich layer of balsa wood, followed by another layer of veneer. Metal fittings were embedded in the wooden layers and a low voltage applied to heat the resin electrically, which speeded up curing. Once everything was dry, the fuselage or wing half would be removed from the mould then after installation of some formers, cables and wiring, glued to the other half. Finally the fuselage would be covered in another layer of thin wood, covering the glued joint, then covered in aircraft linen, doped and painted to improve aerodynamic smoothness.
In 1948, de Havillands acquired an aircraft factory at Hawarden Airfield near Chester: it was used to build and assemble the Hornet Mk3, while other parts were manufactured at the firm’s factory in nearby Lostock. Incidentally, Hawarden is now called Broughton, and after de Havilland became part of Hawker Siddeley it developed sophisticated wings for their airliners: today, it builds every wing for every Airbus airliner, and is owned by GKN. The “N” in GKN stands for Nettlefolds, and when the Hornet was in production they had several huge factories in the Black Country, stamping out millions of cross-head screws an hour. Today, GKN uses carbon fibre to build composite aero-structures which owe a great deal to the principles that de Havilland developed three quarters of a century ago.
The Hornet’s fuselage was built in two halves which joined together on the centreline, so called “egg carton” construction using cold moulding to form the curves. This monocoque structure gave the fuselage a high degree of redundancy which meant that the aircraft could sustain terrible damage yet keep flying. Many Mosquitos returned home missing large chunks of wings, fins and control surfaces, shot away by enemy cannon fire. Timber composites also avoided the hidden dangers of metal fatigue, which de Havilland fell foul of with their Comet airliner during the 1950’s.
Without the work of Aero Research and de Havilland Aircraft during the 1930’s and 1940’s, it’s arguable that there would be no plywood composites or structural adhesives, hence the SIP panel and the JJI joist wouldn’t exist, either. It’s also worth noting that the Beech Starship, which was hailed as revolutionary in form and construction, isn’t as original as I implied. The Starship was also built in two halves, and epoxy resins were also used to bond its composites together. Just like de Havillands, forty years before them.
Although it marked the apex of de Havilland’s piston engine development, there’s no sense in which de Havillands developed a Pygmalion-like relationship with the Hornet. Even as it first flew in 1944, the firm was already building jet-propelled aircraft, so the Hornet’s career was cut short. After the DH98 Mosquito and DH103 Hornet, De Havilland’s plywood-balsa-plywood sandwich was later used to form the fuselage of the Vampire and Sea Venom jets.
De Havilland refined the assembly process: steel bands were latched onto heated jigs with quick release toggles, to ensure smooth fuselage cross-sections. Adhesive curing cycles were carefully instrumented and automated. Smaller glue-laminated components such as the engine intake ducts used thin timber strips which were cold-formed on jigs to tight radii. Nonetheless, the Hornet's gift to us all is composite construction, which the designers of racing cars, airliners, yachts, buildings and even fridge freezers take for granted.
The late Martin Pawley was fascinated by these technology transfers, and the crossovers between architecture and other fields. As a columnist in the AJ, BD and so forth he wrote about the design of tube trains, cars and aircraft – seeing them as complementary to architecture. He recognised the truisms that racing improves the breed, and war pushes technology forwards faster than peace. While this bandwagon was passing, I thought I'd jump onto it…
Pawley was in tune with the spirit prevailing during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, when Richard Horden built a series of houses using off-the-shelf components from racing yachts, then Rogers and Foster completed a series of buildings which borrowed from the automotive and aerospace industries, such as neoprene gaskets and super-formed metals. This climate gave birth to a thousand architectural dissertations about Lotus sports cars, Slingsby sailplanes and McLaren's F1 operation. Unwittingly, they echoed a pattern from 50 years before, when wartime firms desperately hunted around for peacetime outlets once hostilities ended. De Havilland were fortunate, as their focus shifted readily from military to civilian aircraft. Venesta gave up flying and came to specialise in toilet cubicles and IPS systems. Others were not so lucky.
What about the legacy of Ronald Bishop, who designed the Hornet? He should be remembered for helping to win the War using pioneering materials: but today it seems that War means rousing musicals, martial style (smart uniforms never go out of fashion) and the cult of the Great Man. Our superficial treatment of that era ignores Bishop and his counterparts Barnes Wallis, RJ Mitchell and Roy Chadwick who were responsible for the Wellington, Spitfire and Lancaster respectively. They were complete designers, in the sense that they harnessed materials science, structures, aerodynamics, manufacturing techniques as well as considering damage tolerance and repairability.
They also had a sense of purpose which is difficult for us to grasp now: they were part of Churchill’s enormous enterprise which stretched from shadow factories making widgets to the invention of operational research.
The sadness is that no Hornets survive at all today, although there are rumours that an entire squadron was dismantled and buried under an airfield in Malaysia when they became surplus to requirements. It seems unlikely that anyone will disinter them, but you never know…
Some images used here are courtesy of the Hornet Project website, which has temporarily disappeared from the web.