Henry Tizard - Overview

Overview

"The secret of science" he once said "is to ask the right question, and it is the choice of problem more than anything else that marks the man of genius in the scientific world." Tizard's chosen problem became aeronautics. At the outbreak of the First World War he joined first the Royal Garrison Artillery (where his training methods were famously bizarre) and then the Royal Flying Corps, where he became experimental equipment officer and learned to fly planes - seemingly his eyesight had improved. He acted as his own test pilot for making aerodynamical observations. When his superior Bertram Hopkinson was moved to the Ministry of Munitions, Tizard went with him. When Hopkinson died in 1918 Tizard took over his post. Tizard served in the Royal Air Force from 1918 to 1919.

After the war he was made Reader in Chemical Thermodynamics at Oxford where he experimented in the composition of fuel trying to find compounds which were resistant to freezing and less volatile, devising the concept of "toluene numbers" - now referred to as octane ratings. After this work (largely for Shell) he took up again a government post as assistant secretary to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. His successes in this post (and after promotions to permanent secretary) included the establishment of the post of the Chemical Research Laboratory in Teddington, the appointment of a Director of Scientific Research to the Air Force (H. E. Wimperis) and finally the decision to leave to become the Rector of Imperial College, London, in 1929, a position he held until 1942. In May 1926 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society He was awarded CB in 1927, KCB in 1937 and GCB in 1949.

In 1933 Tizard was appointed as chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee and served in this post for most of the Second World War. He supervised and championed the development of RDF (radio-direction finding, later to become more familiarly known as radar) in the run-up to the war.

In 1940, after a top secret landmark conference with Winston Churchill at which his opposition to R.V. Jones' view that the Germans had established a system of radio-beam bombing aids (Battle of the Beams) over the UK had been overruled, Tizard led what became known as the Tizard Mission to the United States, which introduced to the US, amongst others, the newly invented resonant-cavity magnetron and other British radar developments, the Whittle gas turbine, and the British Tube Alloys (nuclear weapons) project.