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00:00In the age of the machine, every decade is defined by its engineering masterpieces.
00:15So join me on a journey through time as I experience the great machines that changed
00:22people's lives and shaped modern Britain.
00:30I'm in a decade that began with great advances in the quality of people's lives, yet ended
00:42in World War II, a decade where two million cars suddenly appeared on our roads.
00:49Streamlining was the watchword in technology, and speed records held the public fascination.
00:55Welcome to the 1930s.
00:58A decade whose mass production and speed technologies left Britain better prepared than many think,
01:04but on the road to war.
01:07I'm at Britain's main international airport, Croydon.
01:13What? I hear you say. Croydon? It doesn't even have an airport. Aha! It did!
01:30And in the 1930s, this stunning building was Britain's gateway to the world, the Heathrow
01:37of its day. The place that Amy Johnson took off from on the 5th of May 1930 for her record-breaking
01:45flight to Australia. And the base for Britain's major airlines, all competing with one another
01:51for the growing market in air travel.
01:56This is what remains of the old ticket hall. Down either side were check-in desks. Over there,
02:01Royal Dutch Airlines, now KLM. And just over there, Britain's Imperial Airways.
02:07In the 1930s, the check-in experience was somewhat different to today's, though.
02:13You couldn't check in your standard 20 kilos of luggage for a start. It was nearer half
02:17that. And it wasn't just the luggage that was weighed. It was the passengers, too.
02:21Those that failed the weight test had to sit slap in the middle of the aircraft, or once airborne,
02:27it would tip up. Let's hope the extra sausage this morning hasn't pushed me over the edge, eh?
02:32One would hope so, sir.
02:35Like the check-in experience, the aircraft of the day were very different, too. Some were antiquated
02:41machines with open cockpits, others airliners in the very real sense. More like cruise ships of the sky.
02:50I've been allocated a seat in the tail, but what sort of strange machine will I be flying in?
02:58This is it. The de Havilland DH-89 Dragon Rapide. This great machine was one of the world's
03:06first completely streamlined airliners. She operated as a short-haul specialist,
03:12speeding passengers all over Britain and Europe. So before I embark on a flight of my own,
03:18let's see what made her tick.
03:22What an absolute beauty. You can almost smell the 1930s coming off her.
03:26Aesthetically pleasing from any angle. Powered by two Gypsy Queen engines,
03:31inline six-cylinder air-cooled, each knocking out 200 horsepower.
03:37Pretty powerful by car standards, but not much as today's airliners go. Even the smallest
03:43modern jet knocks out about five times that. To help the engines get the aircraft off the ground
03:49and carry its payload of eight passengers. The Rapide has two 14-metre wings rather than just the one we're used to nowadays.
03:57And that gives it loads of lift.
03:59It might not look very advanced, but it was for the time, incorporating the latest watchword in 1930s technology. Streamlining.
04:12The whole of the exterior has a flowing slippery shape, right down to the trousered undercarriage. Reducing air resistance and maximizing its speed and range.
04:24With this slippery streamlining, the Dragon Rapide was good for 578 miles at 132 miles an hour.
04:32More than enough for its first operators, Hillman Airways, and their short-haul routes from southern England to Scotland, Ireland and France.
04:41Hillman were one of the world's first budget airlines, with the revolutionary idea of making air travel just like bus travel.
04:49But with the cost of a ticket, a one-way ticket to Paris, and just over £4, £350 in today's money, it was still a bit expensive for the average man.
04:58Let's have a look and see what you got for your money.
05:01There's only eight seats, and not a lot of luxury. But that's not the point. What made this machine great was the fact it could get you from the centre of London to the centre of Paris in just three hours and 40 minutes.
05:18The engines just chugging along nicely. They sound very smooth, very strong at the moment. Let's hope that remains the case.
05:27For years, I've had a fear of flying. So...
05:32Why are you going up in a 1930s airliner then? One would ask.
05:36Hey, you only live once.
05:38We are now, I would say, preparing for a take-off roll.
05:43You can hear the sound of the engines now as they rev right up. And this is a take-off roll.
05:48Up we go. You can feel the tail wheel lift now as we come along to the horizontal. It is a little bit blustery there, as we feel.
06:03But the big biplane now is in the sky. A very short little take-off round there. And we are in the skies. Absolutely magnificent.
06:16You can hear the smooth two Gypsy Queen engines dragging us up. And we seem to be airborne with very little effort.
06:33There weren't any stewardesses on this aircraft because there simply wasn't any room.
06:37So I'll show you the emergency exit myself. And here it is. It's simply a hole in the roof.
06:45What you did was you pulled this here. Pull emergency use only. There's a little blade in there.
06:51And it cut a hole in the roof. And out you went.
06:55What you did when you got there, I don't know. But there it is.
06:59There were no in-flight announcements from the pilot because there was no intercom. Instead, and I love this, every now and then a hand would appear from the cockpit with a note.
07:13Oh, here's one now. We're over Dover. Pass it back. The pilot. It works.
07:27So, the passenger experience was fairly basic. But what was it like for the pilot?
07:33Hi, Mary. Hi, Chris. How is she handling today? Well? It's very well. Quite good flying conditions today. So it's relatively smooth as you can feel for yourself.
07:41Visibility here is fantastic, isn't it? It's panoramic all the way around the cockpit. The first, last cockpit that you never heard of.
07:51That all-round panoramic view really came into its own. For landing.
08:00The aircraft's curved, streamlined wingtips help it go faster. But they also mean it has a tendency to tip stall or swing round on landing.
08:10Meaning this is very much a machine the pilot's got to fly all the way to touch down.
08:16Well, we're coming in to land now. Absolutely superb flight. Quite a steep descent there. And before we know where we are, we're touching down.
08:31Oh, bit of a, bit of a, bit of a, bit of a, bit of a, bit of a, bit of a one there. Bit of a one. And we're down. We are down. We are down.
08:37And that was a remarkably smooth landing. We're a tail dragger, of course. And there you can just feel the tail bouncing down.
08:46Really, really impressed am I with this aircraft.
08:50Throughout the 30s the Dragon Rapide carried passengers all over Britain and Europe.
08:55But not all airliners of the period were quite what they seemed. Many were used to test new bomber technologies.
09:03Or in the case of the German carrier Deutsch Lufthansa, for spying runs over British airfields.
09:09When war broke out, the Dragon Rapide would be called up in large numbers.
09:13Its wooden structure making it quick and easy to build. And it would serve largely as a navigation trainer.
09:18But for a few happy years in the 30s, Britain's great short haul airliner simply played its part in changing the way people travelled.
09:29Changes that weren't just limited to air travel.
09:35In the 1930s, new mass production techniques imported from America were being harnessed by British factories.
09:41For all manner of labour-saving goods. From teasemades to vacuum cleaners. Making them affordable for ordinary people and transforming their lives.
09:50British car manufacturers like Morris Motors adopted mass production too.
09:56With the result that more and more people could afford to own a car.
10:00By the end of the decade, there were two million vehicles on the road.
10:05Great! But at the beginning of the 30s, there was one small problem.
10:09There were very few proper roads to drive cars on.
10:14Happily, or rather unhappily, the beginning of the 30s also coincided with the peak of the Great Depression.
10:21Millions of people were unemployed, so the government came up with a plan to kill two birds with one stone.
10:28A massive road building programme.
10:30Thousands of miles were built during the 30s, with the new Liverpool to Manchester road alone employing 809 people and 220 construction lorries.
10:43Construction lorries like this, a 1934 Sentinel steam wagon.
10:48Yes, a steam wagon. Believe it or not, they were still building them in the 30s.
10:55It might seem antiquated, but this really was a great British machine.
11:00Boiler pressures of 255 pounds per square inch, the same or even more than a steam loco, meant these steam wagons generated five times as much power as the petrol lorries of the day.
11:11Making them very much the workhorses of choice for the construction industry.
11:18Driving a steam wagon is a tad different to driving a car.
11:22For a start, you've got a baking hot fire in the cab with you, heating the water to a staggering 165 degrees Celsius.
11:30A fire you've got to keep going by shoveling coal into the boiler here via the stoke chute at the top.
11:37Now, given that steering and shoveling coal is a bit tricky to do at the same time, steam wagons were most definitely a two-man operation.
11:46This is my stoker, Jim Sarney.
11:48When these wagons were used commercially, they covered hundreds of miles, even hundreds of miles in a day sometimes.
11:59A fireman was essential.
12:02Basically, the fireman, his job is to stoke the boiler and keep pressure up. That's his main job.
12:09It might seem a bit primitive, but believe me, these things go like stink.
12:16So, Jim, this wagon will be good for 50 mile an hour?
12:22Oh, yes, yes. When these wagons were filled, there was nothing to touch them.
12:27Nothing to touch them for speed, nothing to touch them for power.
12:33These massive haulage machines don't just run on coal.
12:37They need water, too, to make their steam, and can only carry enough for 30 miles.
12:41So, what did the steam wagons do when they needed to fill up?
12:47They couldn't just pull up at a petrol station. No, it was much more fun than that.
12:52They simply kept an eye out for ponds and streams as they went along.
12:55And if they couldn't see any of those, simply borrowed it from whatever they could find.
13:00Fire hydrants, or even animal troughs.
13:03So, here we are.
13:05A horse trough full of water.
13:08Now to deploy the steam wagons water borrowing device.
13:11And here it is, essentially a hose with a filter on the end to keep out sticks and fish and the like.
13:15Now, using the wagons steam power, the hose essentially sucks up the water into the tank.
13:23Take it away, Jim.
13:24A thousand and fifty-four water sucking, smoke belching sentinels were made in the thirties.
13:40With some adapted for all manner of roles, including road building.
13:43Well, flat beds like this one would have simply carried the construction materials to the site.
13:49But, there were other much more specialised sentinels out there.
13:52Like this wonderful sentinel concrete mixer.
13:57A lot of 1930s roads were made of concrete, with the concrete poured into vast wooden frames.
14:03Frames like this, only bigger, where the concrete was smoothed over and left to set.
14:10On some 1930s sites, there would have been hundreds of these concrete squares, all joined one to another.
14:17Once the concrete had set, they pretty much had their road.
14:21However, concrete on its own is fairly slippy.
14:24So, to help the Kiles get some grip, they often added one more ingredient.
14:33Tared chippings. And that's where the specialist sentinels really came into their own.
14:39They made perfect tar transporters, as the heat from their steam boilers could be used to keep the tar melted.
14:47So, with your skid proof surface applied, that was more or less it.
14:53One new 1930s road. Simple as that.
14:56With a decent road network in place, the 1930s motorists could finally tour the country with ease.
15:06In one of the popular cars of the time, like this wonderful Morris 8.
15:10A small car, but a great one.
15:13Because thanks to its cheap price and vast numbers produced, it brought car ownership to the masses.
15:19Freeing them for the first time from the tyranny of bus routes and timetables.
15:24But that freedom came at a cost. As these new roads and cheap cars came with new traffic regulations.
15:33Costing the princely sum of 37 pence, 1935 saw the introduction of the compulsory driving test.
15:43There were no test centres as such. You just picked up your examiner at a pre-arranged spot by the side of the road.
15:49Which is exactly what I'm going to do now. Wish me luck.
15:58This is my driving examiner, Alan Spillman. He's a Morris 8 man through and through.
16:05Alan, so, back in 1935, that first driving test, what sort of things would have been in the test?
16:13Well, first of all, there was the highway code, as per now. But the questions were a little bit different.
16:18OK. Try me.
16:21What is the correct way to overtake a tram?
16:24Subject to local provisions. To the contrary, a tram car may be overtaken on either side.
16:31Correct. What must you not do to a traffic constable?
16:36Never, if it can be avoided, put questions to a constable regulating traffic.
16:42This may distract him, causing obstruction or danger.
16:47Brilliant.
16:53OK. Now for the practical test.
16:56One of the main things was arm signals.
16:58A lot of cars didn't have any indicators. So there were loads of arm signals in the test.
17:04Starting with turning left.
17:07Now you may be wondering how on earth do you do that?
17:09Do you have to lean across your passenger and stick your arm out of the other window?
17:13No you don't. And I do know this one because it bears a resemblance to a certain salute I have to perform every now and then.
17:20And I'm indicating left now.
17:23Should have packed that spare arm, didn't you?
17:32You kept busy back in the day, weren't you?
17:34Next came reversing round a corner. Not as easy as you might think in these non-synchromesh cars.
17:46And finally, the emergency stop. A very different operation compared with today, using 1930s brakes.
17:54And stop.
17:59How was that?
18:0163% of drivers taking the new test passed. Many of them in Morris 8's.
18:10Mass production techniques pioneered by Morris's factory guru, Leonard Lord, meant the cars were plentiful and cheap.
18:18But the advantages of mass production didn't stop there.
18:22The economies of scale meant that cars were becoming cheaper.
18:25These huge concerns were able to tool up and offer extras on cars that would have been unthinkable five or six years before.
18:34And in terms of mass production, did that help in the maintenance of these cars?
18:40These cars are remarkably easy to work on for the DIYer.
18:46Well, I have to say, as I've been driving this car today, I've just enjoyed it more and more and more. It really is excellent.
18:57Everywhere you look, you see a nice little feature or a nice line. I love the steering wheel. It's beautiful. I love it. I really do.
19:04The only things that weren't great in their day were the lights. But even then you could still see where the road went thanks to an ingenious piece of 1930s invention.
19:16Cat's eyes.
19:17Rumour has it their inventor, Percy Shaw, was driving home one dark night in 1933 when his headlamps were reflected by a pair of cat's eyes.
19:28In a eureka moment, he decided to try and copy them and use them to mark unlit roads at night.
19:35So how did he do that?
19:37Like all the best ideas, incredibly simply.
19:39He just got four small glass reflectors, embedded them in a block of rubber, two at either end, and attached it to the road via a metal plate.
19:53Very much the same as this.
19:57When a car shines its headlights at it, the light is reflected back marking the line of the road.
20:02And if a car drove over it, the reflectors simply got squashed down into the soft rubber base and didn't break.
20:11And here's the really clever bit. If the rubber block was wet from the rain, it would actually wipe the cat's eyes clean before they popped back out again. Brilliant.
20:23One of those little British inventions that took the world by storm and has stood the test of time.
20:28Today, there are 20 million of them on Britain's roads.
20:37But in the 1930s, the road builders and car manufacturers weren't having it all their own way.
20:4620,000 miles of rails crisscrossed the country, with four major train companies offering something the crowded roads couldn't.
20:55Speed.
20:56Fastest of all was the London and Northeastern Railway, operating the route from London to Edinburgh.
21:03Their trains, including the famous Flying Scotsman, could cover the distance in 7 hours 20 minutes.
21:09That's much faster than the average 1930s car, and with considerably more comfort as well.
21:15You can even have a haircut.
21:16The driving force behind the LNER's speed was their chief designer, Sir Nigel Gresley.
21:26Gresley's great skill was to track down the best train technologies in the world and apply it to his own machines.
21:32To this end, the early 1930s found him in Germany, travelling on the Fliegender Hamburger, the fastest train in the world at the time.
21:41The Fliegender harnessed the new science of streamlining, and Gresley decided to apply the same technology to the LNER locomotives back in Britain.
21:51Streamlining centres on making the airflow over a given machine as smooth as possible, minimising wind resistance, maximising speed.
22:05Great in theory, difficult to work out in practice, as you can't actually see the air flowing over a given machine.
22:11Or you couldn't, until wind tunnels came along.
22:15Britain's main wind tunnel was built at the National Physics Laboratory in Teddington, London.
22:20And that's where Gresley headed next.
22:23In a wind tunnel, air is blasted over a machine, like this.
22:30And then smoke, or some other indicator, is added to see how the air is flowing and generally behaving.
22:38Using the wind tunnel, Gresley calculated that by adding streamlined plates to his prototype, like this,
22:46his locomotive would need 40% less power to overcome air resistance and could reach a much higher top speed.
22:53That model became...
22:56This.
22:58The Gresley A4 Pacific.
23:00For my money, the greatest steam locomotive ever built.
23:08As you can see, every surface of this enormous machine is smooth and curved, minimising drag and maximising speed.
23:22The driver, Stuart Nellums, and his firemen have been here since before dawn, heating the boiler and creating enough steam pressure for us to run.
23:33Steam pressure is round about the 250 pounds per square inch mark. We need a minimum of 150, so we're well ready for the off.
23:45The enormous steam belching engine feels like it's alive. And now I'm going to get to drive it. My greatest loco of all time.
24:04You can take the brake off, move it towards the window.
24:08And I'm looking at the brake. Oh, yep, there we go.
24:11And then onto the really important handle, which is the regulator. Now that lets the steam into the boiler.
24:16We're rolling a little bit anyway, but...
24:18Yeah, it's on a little bit of a gradient. If you ease that open...
24:23Oh, come on!
24:24There you go. Pause like that a second.
24:26Okay, and you can just feel the tape off. There's an awful lot of power on the end of that handle.
24:31And then, exactly, a lot of power on the end of that handle.
24:33Yeah, that's right, exactly.
24:34And then you put it back to where it was.
24:36Basically, we're letting 50 pounds of steam into the cylinders.
24:38Right.
24:39Out of a potential 250.
24:41Okay.
24:42Now we've got going a little bit, you can now alter the reverser a bit.
24:45Okay.
24:46To make better use of the steam.
24:47Right.
24:48So go back up to sort of 45, something like that.
24:49Okay.
24:50Off we go to Edinburgh.
24:52You can feel the power as soon as you open the regulator and get moving.
24:56That's right, there's an awful amount of power there.
24:57The power on the end of that handle is very evident.
24:59It really is.
25:00Okay.
25:01We're just rolling now, so we just let a little bit of momentum go.
25:04So that's just the momentum we're rolling on now.
25:06Incredible.
25:07Incredible.
25:08Trains do just as much rolling as they ever do with power on.
25:11Yeah.
25:12And the more weight you add, the quicker they'll go.
25:13Oh, yes.
25:17But, no matter how fast and powerful a locomotive is, it doesn't make a train.
25:21So before we go any further, we've got to pick up six or seven carriages in that siding over there.
25:33I've driven an A4.
25:34That's fantastic.
25:35That is fantastic.
25:36And the sense of power is greater than anything I've ever driven before.
25:40Bresley's ultra streamlined A4 began service on the 1st of October 1935.
25:49It was an instant success, smashing the journey time from London to Newcastle to just four hours.
25:55But that success was very nearly a failure.
26:03Bresley's streamlining made the locomotive incredibly fast and efficient, but the prototype had one major drawback.
26:10A drawback that meant you might get to Newcastle very fast, but you'd resemble a smoked kipper by the time you got there.
26:21It wasn't just air that flowed beautifully and smoothly over the surface of the engine.
26:27Smoke from the chimney did too, carried along the surface of the loco and onto the footplate and into the carriages.
26:33Definitely not good for comfortable travel, but solved by a piece of luck in the wind tunnel.
26:40During testing, someone managed to leave a thumbprint on the model by mistake, right here behind the chimney.
26:47But as luck would have it, once they fired up the wind tunnel, they found that the thumbprint actually solved the smoke problem.
26:54The indentation caused by the tester's thumb interfered with the streamlining just enough to let the smoke escape from the surface of the engine.
27:04So that thumb hole became part of the real locomotive being cast into the full-sized chimney.
27:10But the thumbprint wasn't the only clever part of the A4's chimney.
27:14It also has a device called a Kyle Chap double blast pipe, which improves the drafting of the fire, which makes the A4 go even faster.
27:23The Kyle Chap's extra speed was to prove vital, when on the 3rd of July 1938, the latest A4, the Mallard, set off on an attempt to break the world's steam speed record.
27:37If Gresley and the LNER could capture it, they'd gain a fantastic marketing tool against their competitors.
27:48At the top of a hill called Stoke Bank, Mallard started her record attempt.
27:52Everything now depended on fireman Thomas Bray, the rate at which he could shovel coal into the firebox, and how hot he could keep it.
27:59A mile downhill from the summit, Mallard was doing 87.5 miles an hour, then mile by mile 96.5, 104, 107, 111.5, 116, 119, 122.5, 124.25, then 125.
28:18For a brief moment, it hit a staggering 126 miles per hour.
28:26Mallard had taken the world steam speed record, which stood at 124.5 miles an hour, and was held by the Germans.
28:36Gresley's streamlined masterpiece still holds the record to this day, making it for my money, the greatest steam loco in the world.
28:49Unfortunately, it would need a lot more than a fast train to take on the might of industrial Germany on a battlefield.
28:58And as the 30s wore on, it became increasingly evident that that was exactly what Britain would have to do.
29:051933 had seen Adolf Hitler come to power in Germany, and as he became ever more aggressive towards the countries around him,
29:13Britain began a massive rearmament programme, centred on the same mass production factories that had improved people's peaceful lives at the start of the decade.
29:24Factories that could put two million cars on the road could also produce weapons in vast quantities.
29:30Morris Motors specialised in tanks, very fast tanks.
29:39The tank had first appeared 20 years earlier in the First World War, with 28-ton monsters like this Willy Mark I.
29:49At four miles an hour, these tanks were incredibly slow, and mostly used to support soldiers on foot as they hammered away at the enemy's frontline.
29:57However, during the 1920s, Britain's experimental mechanised force came up with a different way of using tanks.
30:11Their idea was for old heavy tanks to punch a hole in the enemy's frontline,
30:15and then for new, fast tanks to race through that hole, drive deep into enemy territory, and attack headquarters and lines of communication.
30:26The British military adopted the new ideas, and in 1936, asked Morris to build them a very fast tank to carry them out.
30:33And this is it, the Cruiser 3, 15 tonnes, 2lb a gun, crew of 4, and good for 30mph off-road, making it one of the fastest tanks of its day.
30:46But what made this great machine so fast? The answer lay in one man.
30:50American J. Walter Christie, and his genius for high-speed tank design.
30:57Morris bought one of Christie's tanks, and harnessed the revolutionary ideas they found in it.
31:03Firstly, huge wheels, much bigger than on other tanks, coupled with massive horizontal suspension hidden behind the armour plating.
31:15With these two things, you could go flat out on rough ground, at 30mph, much faster than most other tanks of the day.
31:23Christie's other big speed idea was simple too. Don't just put a giant engine in your tank, put in an engine with the best power-to-weight ratio you can get your hands on.
31:36What machines use light engines with lots of power? Aircraft.
31:40So for maximum speed, use an aircraft engine in your tank.
31:44And listening to Christie, that's exactly what Morris did.
31:47Building this beautiful V12 340 horsepower Nuffield Liberty Aircraft engine for their Cruiser 3 tanks.
32:00Wouldn't it be amazing to hear this motor running?
32:03Well, believe it or not, we can, in the next fast tank that Morris built.
32:10The Crusader. It was on the drawing board in 1939.
32:13And like the Cruiser 3, it's got Christie's huge wheels.
32:18And that enormous, all-powerful, Liberty Aircraft engine.
32:24One of just a handful of Liberty engines left in the world that still run.
32:30This tank and its engine are literally priceless.
32:34Turn it over, Colin.
32:36So to help me start it, and make sure I don't do any damage, I've got two experts on the engine to help me.
32:42Again?
32:43John Pearson, and his son Colin.
32:50Health and safety wasn't exactly central to 1930s designs.
32:55Those valve rockers will have your fingers off.
32:58Turn!
33:00Oh, look at that!
33:03Yes!
33:0727 litres of V12 Liberty.
33:10One of a handful left in the world.
33:12Absolutely brilliant!
33:13Oh, well, John, what a sound!
33:27Beautiful sound, isn't it?
33:30That engine is so loud.
33:32More like a dragster than a tank.
33:33And it made the Crusader, at over 30 miles an hour, off-road, one of the fastest tanks on the battlefield.
33:40You had that 30 miles an hour speed to sort of get out of trouble.
33:45Yes, it was a very difficult target to hit when it was running.
33:48And, in fact, that was intended to be its defence, was really to keep out of the way.
33:54So, the Crusader was one of the fastest tanks around.
33:58But did that make it the greatest?
34:00Unfortunately not, as it was dangerously unreliable.
34:04The Crusader was agile, it was fast, but it was very fragile.
34:11And it would break down quite regularly.
34:13So, I suppose when it was broken down, obviously it was a sitting duck?
34:17Yes, that's right. It was just being immobile and not very thickly armoured pillboxed.
34:23Which was a worry.
34:25Because whilst Morris in Britain were building their tanks,
34:28another motor manufacturer was secretly building tanks too.
34:31Daimler-Benz in Germany.
34:40This, rather sinister machine, was one of them.
34:44The Panzer III.
34:46Secretly working on them since 1934,
34:50these were the very tanks the Germans used to invade Poland in September 1939.
34:55The invasion that started World War II.
34:57Well, it has to be said, this Panzer III sounds and feels much more like a luxury limousine compared to the Crusader.
35:06In 1939, the Germans smashed through the Polish front line, then raced on attacking headquarters and lines of communication.
35:17Mirroring the tactics pioneered by Britain's experimental mechanised force all those years before.
35:23And which the Crusader had been designed to exploit.
35:26So if we look at a Crusader versus a Panzer III, how do they compare?
35:33Well, they're surprisingly similar.
35:35They were built very much the same sort of type.
35:38Similar type of engine, although the engine in the Panzer III is only about half the size.
35:43And the big difference, I suppose, is the suspension.
35:45The Panzers lacked the giant wheels and suspension of the British Crusader, meaning the Crusader was much faster off-road.
35:55But its amazing Christie suspension gave the Crusader another advantage too.
36:01The Crusader, the crews were expected to shoot on the move because of the good suspension.
36:09Whereas the German tank would normally come to a halt before it fired.
36:16So contrary to popular belief, the Panzers were a long way from perfect.
36:22If only the ingenious high-speed fire-on-the-move Crusader had been more reliable.
36:28It might have been one of the greatest of its day.
36:32Thankfully, Britain's fastest weapon of all was the greatest of its day.
36:38A state-of-the-art war machine built right on the edge of known technology.
36:44And it would go on to save the nation during the Battle of Britain.
36:48The Spitfire, a national treasure that had had its origins right back at the start of the decade.
36:55In a little racing float plane.
36:58That little racing float plane was a world record breaker.
37:03The Supermarine S6B, designed by aerodynamic genius R.J. Mitchell, to compete for the 1931 Schneider Trophy.
37:12The Schneider Trophy was an international race for seaplanes.
37:17Tiny aircraft which, at the time, were quite literally the fastest speed machines on the planet.
37:22They were also amongst the most life-threatening, with an atrociously high death rate, thanks to the aircraft being built right on the edge of known technology.
37:33This one's at Southampton's Solent Sky Museum.
37:38And if you thought the Gresley locomotive and Dragon Rapide airliner were streamlined, you ain't seen nothing yet.
37:45The extreme streamlining is stunning, bordering on the terrifying.
37:50The float struts and the wings are really thin like knives, reducing drag.
37:53And the cockpit windscreen is tiny for the same reason.
37:58It's a cockpit built for death or glory.
38:02Turn that way.
38:04There's not even a seat.
38:06The pilot had to squeeze himself in and sit on the floor.
38:08My shoulders are kind of stuck in here at the moment.
38:14Of course, straight ahead of me, I can't see anything but the huge, huge engine.
38:21An utterly insane 2350 horsepower Rolls-Royce R-Type, which was almost impossible to stop from overheating.
38:29On its first run, it only lasted 15 minutes before disintegrating.
38:35And even when fully developed, only had a lifespan of five hours.
38:40On the 13th of September 1931, the S6B and its mad engine left its hangar on Kalshot Spit near Southampton.
38:50My model is following in its exact footsteps.
38:53That's it over there, practically unchanged after all these years.
39:00As Boothman, the pilot, accelerated, just like my model.
39:06His seaplane lurched into the air.
39:09Earlier, one of the British team's pilots had crashed and been killed during practice,
39:15decapitated by his own cockpit.
39:17But Boothman was determined to race for glory.
39:23The 1931 race took place here on the Solent, on a 50 kilometre course,
39:29taking in the Isle of Wight, West Wittering, Gosport and then on to Leap.
39:35Watched by a crowd of nearly a quarter of a million people, Boothman completed the first lap
39:40at an average speed of 343.1 miles an hour, a new Schneider record.
39:45It would take this boat roughly just under the hour to complete the course.
39:51Mitchell's S6B could fly it in five and a half minutes.
39:55The tiny windscreen made it very difficult for him to see the course.
39:59And on the sixth lap, Boothman just missed Ride Pier.
40:04On the seventh, he dived for the finishing line, and as steamers around the course sounded their sirens,
40:11captured the Schneider Trophy for Britain.
40:1316 days later, the tiny aircraft took to the skies again, this time setting a new world speed record of 407.5 miles an hour.
40:24It was the first time man had ever been over 400 miles an hour, and lessons learnt in its design would go on to save the nation during the dark days of war, in the Battle of Britain.
40:35The Battle of Britain, fought in 1940 in the skies over southern England, saw 900 British fighters desperately driving back the 4,000 aircraft of the attacking Luftwaffe.
40:52The most famous of those British aircraft was the Spitfire, designed like the S6B by Supermarine's speed expert, R.J. Mitchell.
41:05Luckily for Britain, Mitchell's Spitfire was an ultra-fast, state-of-the-art speed machine, just like the S6B.
41:12But unlike the S6B, of which only two were built, the Spitfire was built in vast, vast quantities. By the end of the war, 22,000.
41:21To really understand the Spitfire and how Mitchell drew on his experience with record-breaking seaplanes to create it,
41:27we really need to meet it in the raw, get under its skin as it's being built.
41:31But the last Spitfire rolled off the production line 62 years ago, so that's impossible.
41:38Or is it? Look at this.
41:40Look at this.
41:43This is the Aircraft Restoration and Historic Flying Company based at Duxford.
41:49The same place as the first Spitfire squadron.
41:51It looks like a modern Spitfire production line.
41:58But these machines are all World War II originals and are here to be rebuilt.
42:03This is absolutely amazing. It's like going through a time warp into 1939.
42:16Over here we have a Spitfire wing in bare aluminium on a jig about to be worked on.
42:21There's even an original Mark I Spitfire in here, one of the first to see action.
42:32It was shot down over Calais and fished out of the sea.
42:35And just like on Mitchell's revolutionary seaplanes, everything is made of metal.
42:44Tiny, light aluminium frames covered with high-speed metal skins that actually give the Spitfire a lot of its strength.
42:51Most other aircraft of the time were simply made of heavy wooden frames covered with canvas.
43:00Those thin wings with their strange elliptical shapes were also absolutely definitive of the Spitfire.
43:07Ultra-thin wings were a speed trick Mitchell had perfected in his Schneider racers.
43:13But why the strange shape?
43:14Well, the Air Ministry who were funding Mitchell's prototype wanted a fighter that could climb very fast to intercept enemy aircraft.
43:24But also carry machine guns to shoot them down with. Up to eight of them.
43:29Mitchell and his team worked out by making the wings elliptical, they could reduce the wings thickness and drag to a minimum.
43:37Yet still have lots of strength.
43:39And room inside for retractable undercarriage and all those machine guns.
43:44Making the Spitfire very speedy and packing a massive punch.
43:49That strange elliptical shape also worked hand in glove with something else that gave the Spitfire speed.
43:58Its heavy new engine.
44:01An engine that's become a legend.
44:04The Rolls-Royce Merlin.
44:05Just like the Rolls-Royce R-Type that had powered Mitchell's seaplane, it's a massively powerful V12 with supercharger technology.
44:16But unlike the crazy R-Type, it could run for a lot longer than just a few hours before potentially blowing up.
44:24It still needed a lot of cooling though.
44:28Mitchell had solved the mad R-Type's cooling problem in the Schneider racer by literally turning the whole aircraft into a flying radiator.
44:39A staggering 50% of the aircraft, the entire upper and lower surfaces of the wings, even the floats had hot water from the engine pumped through them to be cooled by air howling over the aircraft as it sped along.
44:52It was enough to keep the R-Type from disintegrating in the little racer.
44:56But Mitchell couldn't cover half of a fighter aircraft with radiators as they'd be far too vulnerable to bullets.
45:03So, he pumped the hot engine water through these scoops hidden under the wings instead.
45:09Air rushes into the scoops, cooling the engine's water, then exits out of the back.
45:14But here's the really clever bit. Because the air is squeezed in the scoop, it comes out of the back faster than it goes in the front, acting a bit like a ramjet.
45:27Blasting the Spitfire along, giving it even more speed.
45:31Mitchell's prototype Spitfire rolled out for its first flight on the 5th of March 1936.
45:36Well, it truly is a thing of beauty. It looks fast, even though it's just standing still. And, of course, it was fast. The original Mark 1 did 350 miles an hour.
45:47The Air Ministry were delighted by the Spitfire's performance, and ordered 310 on the 3rd of June.
45:54Ah, listen to that! Absolutely superb! Bit of smoke, a few flames, and then settling down into that fantastic even beat. Nothing could be better!
46:13They said I could have a ride, but this wasn't exactly what I had in mind.
46:18Human ballast to counter strong tailwinds on a beautifully restored machine's taxiing run. But still, an amazing experience.
46:29Tragically, Mitchell died in 1937, and never saw his masterpiece go into service.
46:35But thanks to his engineering genius, when World War II started, Britain had a truly world-beating aircraft with which to defend herself.
46:43As the 30s came to a close, there were tough times ahead. But thanks to the great changes in mass production, transport, and speed technologies which the decade had brought, Britain was much better prepared than she might have been on the road to war.
47:02The end of the war!
47:03The end of the war!
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