Britain's Greatest Machines - S02E02: 1920s - The Engine Roaring Twenties (2.0 Stereo, 360p)

and away we go they were the machines that made Britain great fast revolutionary and sometimes downright dangerous these are the stories of our engineering masterpieces that shook the world and drive the way we live today I'm in an engine roaring decade of boom and bust an age of empire that when it started saw petrol often sold in tins from the chemists yet by the time it ended and fleets of tankers supplying thousands of garage for quartz it was a time of great contrasts when Britain's boffins created the largest flying machine the world had ever seen finding planes to map out the areas we still use today and it was a time of great speed when Britain's racing machines utterly dominated international motorsport and her bikes could even take on aircraft with a chance of winning welcome to the high-octane decade that forged the petrel centered world we live in today but itself ended in the most massive economic collapse the world has ever known welcome to the 1920s I'm at the epicenter of 1920s British motorsport the site of the first British Grand Prix numerous world speed records and so many fatal accidents it was said the medical facilities at this place consisted of a shovel this is the wonderful insanely fast Bank circuit of Brooklyn's especially built two and three-quarter mile cauldron of speed to which people poured throughout the 1920s to watch the drivers dicing with death upon the banking that loomed over everything whether you lived or died here depended on how you drove those towering walls turn a fraction too late and you'll fly over the top of the banking but get it right and the banking will slingshot you at great speed down toward the vein straight but these banks didn't just form a gladiatorial racing circuit they'd also been specially built as a vehicle testing arena where for 10 shillings an hour manufacturers could come and develop their machines making this place the hub of 1920s British Road car design but also meaning the British Road cars developed here were very much at home on the racing track none more so than those created by the man whose fabulous car I'm driving today his name was wo Bentley a train and plane engineer whose move into vehicle manufacture had resulted in massive high-tech touring cars that the French had the cheek to dub Li camión de pluie vite or the world's fastest lorries but what lorries just look at this engine for its time it was absolutely cutting-edge reflecting Bentley's experience in designing engines for fighters in there are revolutionary aluminium Pistons unlike most other cars of the day but just like the aluminium Pistons Bentley had designed and fitted to Britain's World War one fighter planes transforming their performance and copied by aircraft the world over but it's not built like a plane engine it's built like a train engine meaning it went like stink and lasted forever like the rest of his machine what you got of it a massive girded frame to hold the engine and wheels a steering wheel and a wooden box to sit on and that was it Bentley didn't do seats all bodywork you bought your car raw and had the comfy bodywork fitted elsewhere the French might have sneered at them but Bentley had the last laugh in 1923 France announced a grueling 24 hour race an extreme test of speed and endurance that has become an international motor racing classic still run to the present day and whose winners are lauded as the Great's of world motorsport L'Amour very first to enter was an ordinary British Bentley driven by Bentley salesman John Duff with W owes own test driver Frank Clements on board as mechanic unbelievably I'm driving the priceless original three litre bentley prototype that spawned their lamang car what a fantastic privilege it is for me to drive in existence absolutely magnificent and just as Duff and Clements found driving this car on a flat circuit like L'Amour rather than on Brooklyn's banks where it was developed created its own problems believe me driving an early Bentley at speed on a flat circuit was like everything else about the man and his cars a game of utter contrasts on the straights that massive high-tech engine made the car so fast it was practically unbeatable blasting it along at a staggering 98 miles an hour but once it got to a flat band it was a completely different story unlike the banked bends of Brooklyn's which guided the cars round at massive speed with little braking with flat bends you have to slow down a lot to get round them and the Bentley's were utterly useless at that as they'd been developed for Brooklands with scarcely any breaks at all all of which meant when Duff and clemont's raced away from the start line in France they were in for an interesting time sure enough the Bentley was faster than any of the other cars sprang into the lead and clocked the fastest lap of the entire race but as what breaks it had began to wear out the Bentley struggled to make it round the bends and it was overtaken by a slower car as night fell Duff and Clements raced on now running second they couldn't pit for more brakes but like all the other runners they had to stop every couple of hours to take on fuel and for refueling just like today's Formula One teams they had an ultra high-tech fuel rig and this is it what looks like an old milk churn full of petrol and the biggest funnel you've ever seen as the Sun came up they were still running second when disaster struck a stone punctured their fuel tank and they ran out of petrol miles from the pits there was nothing for it Duff ran the three miles back to the pits where Clements was waiting Clements borrowed a bicycle lashed a churn of fuel onto it and pedaled back to repair the car with cork and a lump of soap in the end they came in fourth it wasn't a victory but WL Bentley was completely hooked and described it as the best race he'd ever seen he and his drivers the so-called Bentley boys would be back throughout the 20s this time with decent brakes in 1924 they won by 10 miles the Bentley's unique mix of speed and strength made it unbeatable over 24 hours now it could stop they won again in 1927 1928 and most spectacularly in 1929 when they were first second third and fourth just one on the great one of the greatest racing machines ever we and it's the tribes the right pitches badly no we don't then he's a timely moment doesn't it really it's still the greatest car of all time believe me but when your room 89 years old you're entitled to conk out every now and then I would have said that was probably my bad driving actually the did but not the car motor racing in the dashing Bentley's epitomized the 20s a decade described by some as a ten year party celebrating the end of World War one Queens of the party were the flappers young women who were cutting their hair short and their dresses shorter to embrace Britain's new craze for dance and jazz halls the ex soldiers were partying - buying up as many newfangled boys toys gadgets and gizmos as they could get their hands on and while the cities partied at their centres they spread out at their edges building comfortable new suburbs for the returning troops so-called homes fit for Heroes that came complete with Long's lawns have become a national obsession following Britain's invention of the mower 90 years previously so when ATCO came up with their own must-have gadget in 1921 the first affordable motorised machine for cutting your grass gadget loving Britain went mad for it the ATCO standard and you know I think men love mowers particularly British men because of course that's where it all started you can get up in the morning and see a really messy garden out there and then you can get in the shed get out your ATCO fire up and then within an hour depending on the size of your lawn you've got a nice beautiful stripe lured instant results that's what it's all about instant results because of course the ladies never strike but what made the ATCO a great British mower probably the greatest mower of all time was that not only was it well made it was also cleverly made the engine roller and blades were simply sandwiched between two steel plates and held together with just a few bolts meaning it could be knocked out for as little as 20 pounds a month's average wages rather than the year's wages it's massively complicated predecessors cost it's sold by the millions set the shape of mowers to come and made Britain a world leader and even came delivered by specially adapted sidecar which was nice in fact most things in the 20s were delivered by sidecar there were even side cars specially adapted for delivering motorbikes however if you were buying something really big like a locomotive it would be delivered by Britain's first articulated lorries made by Britain's mould breaking truck manufacturers scam all set up in 1920 scammers lorries led the world literally the world as their machines weren't designed just to run on the smooth civilized roads of the mother country in the form of this giant six-wheeled pioneer model stamens work brilliantly in the jungles and deserts of the Empire to their great off-road capability enabling them to carry huge loads absolutely anywhere even by today's standards the pioneers go anywhere performance was brilliant but back in the 1920s it was stratospheric this is a huge lorry for goodness sake how crazy is that scam l's chief designer Oliver North had made the concept of a go anywhere lorry possible by inventing a world-beating suspension system in 1927 effectively a seesaw with wheels at either end that lets the wheels move up and down as much as four feet so they're always in contact with the ground it was so far ahead of its time it was produced right up to the end of World War two where the pioneer was used as a tank transporter the Pioneer doesn't do speed but what it does do in abundance is unstoppable 'ti it really is absolutely magnificent it's a huge Hulk of the machine but the power and the reassuring beat of that giant engine in front of you is just intoxicating whilst all that power doesn't just go to two wheels like it did with most lorries of the day it goes to four which means that if one of your wheels get stuck in the rough you've still got three more to drive you along what you do have to watch is the kickback from the steering wheel if you reach a piece of undulating ground on a certain amount of it will do its own thing if you come across a very sharp undulation it will kick back at you and it could set your fingers off which would be very nice when it comes to off-roaders this is the king what a beast the giant lorry was employed all over the British Empire perfect for hauling logs out of jungles and forests where roads were few and far between but the role that made the Pioneers truly great took it to the empire's deserts where it was instrumental in forging the world we know today at the beginning of the 1920s thanks partly to one Colonel Lawrence better known as Lawrence of Arabia Britain found herself controlling over 50% of all the world's oil fields her biggest being in Iran and Iraq but that oil was untapped underground whilst back in Britain petrol was still in such short supply following World War one that it was rationed up to 1919 and often just sold in tins from the chemists for petrol engines to become the hub of everyday life as they are today a lot of new oil would have to flow into Britain and the world and that's why the pioneer found itself in the desert it's unique off-road capability made it the perfect workhorse for pipeline laying building a pipeline isn't as straightforward as you might think it was six hundred and twenty-eight miles from Britain's biggest Kirkuk oil field in Iraq to her tankers waiting on the Mediterranean coast meaning 84,000 pipes had to be hold by thus camels off-road across the desert ready to be connected together the last 55 miles presented the biggest challenge because it ran steeply downhill from the 2,000 foot high Arabian plateau all the way to the sea for the oil inside the pipes it would be like going down the crest a run making it utterly uncontrollable when it reached the other end to solve it the Pioneers had to climb to the top of the plateau with 670 specially made narrow pipes which went laid down the steepest part of the hill acted like closing off two lanes of a three-lane motorway slowing the traffic of oil down so it could be safely loaded onto the tankers it was a very ingenious use of a bottleneck the great's camel pioneer played a central role in opening up the Middle East's oil fields but as more and more of the world's oil flowed into Britain another problem reared its head how to get all that oil or rather the petrol made from it into the hands of the eager motorists chemists and tins could no longer cope which is why an institution we now take completely for granted as having always been there was born the garage forecourt with petrol pumps this is one of those very early petrol pumps she's a Gilbert and barker t8 known lovingly to motorists of the day as the fat lady she's a sturdy affair cast-iron and over seven feet tall up front in her ample bosom she's got two iron doors hiding her pumping mechanism which consists of a hand pump connected to an underground tank the attendant had to be fairly dexterous turning the handle at the rear here while at the same time craning around to read the dial there we got one of those and then again I like this fat lady the fat ladies stop singing Fat Lady's sprang up all over the place outside cafes shops and even pubs supplying an ever-growing hoard of Motor Vehicles but as the demand for petrol went through the roof another problem reared its head how on earth do you safely transport it in bulk to the petrol stations a problem solved once again Bice camel transporting liquids is an absolute nightmare as soon as you move off they start to slosh around the more you stop start and go round corners the more they flush until at some point they form a bloody great wave and that wave would be enough to tip your lorry over unless it was massively heavy only leaving you with enough power to carry a small amount of liquid luckily the boffins ATS camel came up with a solution and this is it thus camel frameless tanker sadly there seemed to be no 1920s petrol ones left but what makes this machine great is that ever since camel built their first one in 1926 whether you were transporting bitumen petrol or any other fluid this became the shape of bulk liquid transporters worldwide right up to today inside many had lots and lots of separate compartments so any waves that formed could only travel a small way and never gather enough energy to tip you over whilst outside there's no frame 'once camels tankers the wheels simply bolt onto the heavy tank minimising overall weight and maximizing the liquid you can carry genius another great british invention okay so we're coming up to a bend let's see how the scam 'l and our liquid lo cope with it well it's no longer going horribly wrong in my fish tank it's got lots of compartments you see just likes camels tankers look not a sloshy wave in sight by the end of the 20s scam Elle's tankers were helping supply the 60,000 petrol stations that had sprung up from nothing in the space of just 10 years the petrol centered world we know today was forming and all manner of machines were now stopping for fuel from Shara bangs to chauffeur-driven Bentley's but mostly they supplied motorcycles Britain's motorcycle industry had absolutely boomed during the 20s with one third of all the world's motorbikes being found on Britain's roads but there were motorbikes and there were motorbikes very superior motorbikes Lawrence of Arabia loved his broth superior describing it as skittish with a touch of blood in it but what was a brough superior in the 1920s it was the fastest most reliable most expensive motorcycle in the world that's all it would cost you the same as half a 1920s house and just like Britain's other great speed machine the Bentley it was developed here on the Bank circuit at Brooklands where it held the lap record right up until world war ii and ultimately in hungary took the world bike speed record to 169 point six eight miles an hour the ruffs thousand CC overhead valves state-of-the-art racing engine was so powerful the frame had to have extra bracing struts to stop it bending when the bike accelerated each one was tested to over a hundred miles an hour around Brooklyn's before it was allowed to go to its new owner the world loved them and so do I but nobody loved them more than Lawrence of Arabia he had four SS one hundreds one after the other Lawrence's success in arabia had made him an a-list celebrity but he hated being hounded by the press and by the mid 20s had changed his name and joined the airforce simply as Aircraftman te shah he loathed fame but he loved speed and nothing gave him greater pleasure than racing his brough at breakneck speed through the countryside after work nothing could catch him until one evening another speed machine appeared overhead in his memoirs he tells of what happened next the pilot pointed down the road towards Lincoln i sat hard in the saddle folded back my ears and went away after him like a dog after a hair through the plunges of the next ten seconds I clung on wedging my gloved hand on the throttle lever so that no bump should close it and spoil our speed then the bicycle wrenched sideways into three long ruts it swayed dizzily wagging its tail for 30 awful yards the bad ground was past and on the new road our flight became bird-like we seemed to whirl soundlessly between the Sun gilt stubble fields and I dared on a rise to slow imperceptibly and glanced sideways into the sky there the fighter was 200 yards and more back I slowed to ninety signaled with my hand for him to overtake over here at 'old his passenger a helmeted and goggle grin hung out of the cockpit to pass me the up year raf randy greeting the aircraft might have lost to Lawrence that day in 1926 but the 1920s as a whole were a great time for British flying machines and none more so than for this one the de Havilland gipsy moth which like a brough superior was a machine made truly great by danger but not because it was complex or state-of-the-art because it's not and that's the point it's designer Jeffrey de havilland made sure the moths engine was so simple anybody pilot could maintain it himself originally he just used scrap World War 1 engines finished off with car parts but when they started running out of scrap in 1926 Avalons engineer Frank Alfred built these brand-new but equally simple gypsy 1 engines to put in their place the airframe on the other hand or rather the wings were anything but simple just like the engine though they made the gypsy moth incredibly practical because look if I pull this pin here the wings will actually fold back meaning you didn't need a huge hangar for this aircraft you could keep it in your garage overnight this great British machine had made aviation as simple as running a family car indeed you could use it as the family car look it's even got a boot especially designed to be big enough to take the golf clubs it would cost a bit more than the average car though 750 pounds the equivalent of 34,000 pounds in today's money expensive but very cheap for a plane those who could afford it flock to buy it including the Prince of Wales who used his to fly to golfing matches landing on the fairways but the people who bought most of them with a royal aero club a national institution who were in the process of setting up flying schools all over the country flying schools for which the easy to maintain easy to storm off was perfect they bought so many that by the end of the 20s 85 out of every hundred aircraft in Britain was a moth arrow club lessons cost one pound 10 shillings a pop about 60 quid in today's money now it was said but this aircraft was so easy to fly it only took eight lessons to get your licence let's just see how true that was shall we this is Nigel Reid he's going to try and teach me the 1920s basics where we go around a gypsy man absolute your vendor site betray fails down below just making it absolutely amazing you can do that in one of these fantastic yeah I can never go taking mistake like you allowed that I'm just applying a bit of pressure to the control stick and already the moths rolling gently to the left okay it's amazing just how forgiving and simple this thing is to fly just mad Viteri I feel I'm flying this machine spike psychic exciting the Boers like this I think for myself private pilot's license will be a good cleaner they're unbelievably in the 1920s a solo lap of the airfield was pretty much all you had to do to get your flying license that and one other thing engine failure was a very common event back in the 20s so in your test you had to switch off your engine to simulate engine failure and show you could glide down and land in a little circle on the grass one of the things that made them off great was that if the engine did fail it was very easy to repair which meant it wasn't just the machine choice for the 1920s flying schools but also for the aerial Explorer a new breed of aviator in a desert and get going again with a blower hammer and a bit of straight people like Mary Bailey who learned to fly in a moth then promptly flew it to South Africa and back via the Congo and the Sahara Amy Johnson who flew hers to Australia and forerunner of them all de Havilland's chief test pilot Alan Cobham in May 1925 Cobham flew the first morph ever made to Zurich and back in a single day just to show what the aircraft was capable of then in November he set out in the moths forerunner the de Havilland 50 to try to find commercial air routes to the far-flung corners of the British Empire places that in many cases had never seen a plane before Africa the Middle East Asia and Australia he created routes to them all and was immediately knighted on his return in 1926 when he landed on the Thames in front of a million cheering fans Kluber and is both flying successes like a new Johnson with the Pathfinders of modern air travel within just a few years of Cobbins flights international airlines like Britain's Imperial Airways were following in his footsteps flying what have gone on to become the long-haul air routes we now take completely for granted fly there read the Imperial Airways advertising poster and helped by Jeffrey de Havilland's little pioneering aeroplanes we now can the new airliners would mean a lot more business for the rapidly expanding oil industry but they weren't going to have it all their own way they had competition from machines that Germans had perfected during World War one machines that relied on hydrogen rather than petrol to keep them aloft and machines which unlike the new airliners that only had a very short range could stay airborne for days crossing oceans and continents whilst carrying ten times the passengers of any era plane in infinitely greater comfort airships they seemed the perfect vehicles for linking the vastness of the British Empire so in the 1920s Britain began building passenger airships of her own the biggest of all taking shape in this immense 800 footlong hangar at Coddington the r101 here twenty-seven miles of Steel were being attached to 136 feet high 30 sided polygons to create a hollow steel cigar the length of two football pitches a cigar the 700 strong work force were filling with 16 giant gas bags each one having more volume than four Olympic sized swimming pools it was to be the largest flying machine in the world the r101 was so big it only just fitted in this enormous space there were literally only a few feet to spare so how could something that big possibly fly and how did you drive it let me show you inside my airship just as in the r101 r16 gas bags filled with hydrogen just enough hydrogen to lift the airship off the ground and hover no more than that it's effectively weightless like a ship floating on the sea and just like a ship if you give it a push it'll head off in the direction you're pushing it in which is where the r101 giant engines came in pushing the ship along unlike the sea though the airs three-dimensional so to let the r101 go up and down it had giant steel fins each the length of three gypsy moths fitted to its stern move the fins and behaving just like a submarine it'll rise and fall but it's much more complicated than an airborne submarine because the hydrogen inside misbehaves as it heats up in the sunlight it makes the nose or tail go up and down all by themselves all of which meant that the utterly enormous r101 was as complicated to drive as it was to build it needed a massive crew of 42 just like a huge ship and the similarities with a huge ship didn't stop there look at what they were building on the inside welcome to the lounge complete with tables and chairs a writing desk and some paintings on the walls go up those steps and through that door you'll find yourself and one of the promenade decks where you can relax on a deck chair while you watch the world drift by below you through these massive windows these stunning rooms were one of the things that made the r101 great no aeroplane or indeed airship had anything like it and the accommodation didn't stop there unbelievably for a machine full of hydrogen there was even a smoking room yes a smoking room passengers could retire here after dinner for a leisurely cigar safe in the knowledge that the floor was covered in steel and the roof lined with asbestos which was handy because when hydrogen and flames mix this happens and there was an awful lot of hydrogen on board this ship enough to fill 52 Olympic swimming pools so how did airships get their hands on that much with the 20s as well as developing roadside petrol pumps developing air side hydrogen pumps - well actually they were very big hydrogen pumps fed by gas plants at airship refueling stations all over the British Empire carding Tain's hydrogen plant now in ruins was on the hill next to it with an array of pipes running down under the walls into the shed ready to fill and lift the giant airship but even going at full chat it still took 19 days for the hydrogen from the plant going through these pipes to fill our 101 it was only then in 1929 that the boffins who'd been building the airship in here for three years suddenly realized they had a problem a very big problem when the r101 was inflated with hydrogen it was found to be massively overweight to get her into the air at all her gas bags had to be inflated so much they rubbed against the steel cigar frame and even then on her test flights she could only just stay in the air not helped by numerous leaks and her outer cover repeatedly tearing r101 had gone from being a great piece of British engineering to a great big accident waiting to happen there was only one thing for it drag her back into the giant shed cut her in half add 45 more feet and another 4 Olympic swimming pools worth of gas bag and replaced the entire cover after working flat out for two months so she'd be ready for her first commercial flight as advertised the work was completed in September 1930 and the biggest flying machine in the world now a staggering 777 feet long was pulled back out of the shed by 400 workers on the 4th of October she took off with 54 people on board heading for India she followed the same aerial route as I am crossing the channel at Hastings at around 2 a.m. she flew into heavy rain and things started to go horribly wrong it seems the old cover on the front end of the airship hadn't been fully replaced leading to it ripping away with the rain then soaking the gasbag beneath this would have caused the hydrogen to cool down reducing the lift in the airships nose resulting in a steep slow dive just really trying to get her level again but eight minutes past two she plowed into the ground just down there Beauvais entrust her hydrogen ignited and she blew up killing 48 of the 54 people on board Britain's airship programme was cancelled immediately with her remaining airships broken up for scrap a few years later with a tragic destruction of Germany's Hindenburg the rest of the world gave up on airships to their great range passenger capacity and comfort simply outweighed by their vulnerability to fiery disaster and with their demise hydrogen ceased to be a major fuel for the 20th century leaving petrol to reign supreme nowhere more so than at a racing circuit 130 miles from where the r101 crashed lamorne 1930 where wo Bentley's cars were once again coming in first and second but this was to be that's one song because with the end of the 20s came the biggest economic crash the world had ever seen and with it the ten year party of roaring machines dancing Queens and adventurous dreams came to an abrupt end leaving a very nasty hangover many of the cutting-edge high-tech companies founded at the start of the decade simply went to the wall Bentley motors were one of them bankrupt by 1931 sadly many of the people who created the Roaring Twenties went the same way just a year after his 1930 victory at l'amour Bentley driver Glenn Kidston was killed when his de Havilland moth broke up over Africa Clive Dunphy another of WS lemon drivers died when his Bentley went over the banking at Brooklands in 1932 and in 1935 Lawrence of Arabia was fatally injured at the controls of his beloved brough superior when he swerved to avoid a boy on a bicycle these great british pioneers however did leave a legacy the machines and infrastructures they forged in the engine roaring 1920s formed the very foundations of the modern petrol centered world we know today petrol and petrol heads were here to stay you

Channel: eirik1231

Views: 307,484

Rating: 4.741529 out of 5

Keywords: Chris Barrie

Id: dYK6eydYBXM

Length: 47min 24sec (2844 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 09 2013