University of Bristol

Abstract

THE Department of Aeronautical Engineering in the University of Bristol was founded in 1945, when the Bristol Aeroplane Company generously presented the University with funds sufficient for the endowment of a Chair, to be known as the Sir George White Chair of Aeronautical Engineering. This was the fourth aeronautical Chair to be founded in Great Britain, having been preceded some quarter of a century earlier by the Mond Chair at Cambridge and the Zaharoff Chair at Imperial College, and a decade earlier by the Wakefield Chair, subsequently abolished, at University College, Hull. In addition, before 1945, a number of universities and colleges—in particular, Queen Mary College1—had offered courses with an aeronautical content, but not in independent departments headed by a professor. The present writer was appointed to the new Chair at Bristol in the summer of 1945; but owing to his commitments at the Royal Aircraft Establishment was not able to take up the appointment until January 1946. Meanwhile the first students, to a total of five, had been recruited and, in October 1945, had begun their general engineering studies in other departments of the Faculty of Engineering.