14 Dec 06
Rolls-Royce
The Hon Charles Stewart Rolls holds the dubious honour of being the first Englishman to die in a flying accident; the tail of his Wright Flyer broke off mid-air at the Bournemouth Air Show in 1910, killing him at just 32 years old. In the decade prior to his death, however, he had been a pioneer in both motoring and aviation. The second person in Britain to obtain a pilot's licence and the first aviator to make a non-stop return journey across the English Channel, he had dabbled in ballooning as well as in setting speed records on land. His Peugeot, in which he competed in endurance events, had been the first car seen in Cambridge, and he set a speed record of 93mph in 1903 in his Mors 80hp racer.
Rolls met the talented engineer Henry Royce in 1904, and decided to provide the financial backing for Royce to design the highest quality cars in the world. The first 10hp, 15hp and 20hp cars were launched at the Paris Motor Show later that year; 30hp and the six-cylinder 40/50hp, later known as the Silver Ghost, followed before Rolls' untimely end.
Bristol Fighter
Under the leadership of Rolls' friend and company MD Claude Johnson, Henry Royce continued to head up the firm's engineering, and with World War I Rolls-Royce moved into aero engines. The Eagle V12 first flew in 1915, and the scaled-down Falcon, six-cylinder Hawk and enlarged Condor units followed. Rolls-Royce provided well over half of all the engines used by the Allied forces during the war, fitted into planes including the Bristol Fighter (Falcon); post-war, twin-engined planes such as the Handley Page 0/400 and Vickers Vimy used the Eagle, and the Condor was used in large airships. The Vimy made the first non-stop aeroplane crossing of the Atlantic in 1919.
Rolls-Royce focused back on cars again, launching the Phantom in 1925, and then buying bankrupt rival Bentley in 1930, but the Air Ministry asked Rolls-Royce if it could provide a better engine than the Curtiss D-12 fitted into the Fairey Fox light bomber. RR's answer was the Kestrel, the first of a new series of Eagle-derived units developing 550bhp-745bhp, and the supercharged Peregrine, Goshawk, X-24 Vulture and V12 Buzzard followed. The Buzzard was developed into the 36.7-litre R racing engine, which took part in numerous Schneider Trophy air races, as well as being used in George Eyston's 357.5mph Thunderbolt land speed record-breaking car, and the Griffon, which was fitted in some examples of the Spitfire fighter plane and military aircraft including the Avro Shackleton and Supermarine Spiteful. The most widely used RR engine of all, however, was the smaller 27-litre Merlin, and when World War II brought a hiatus in car production, RR created a new factory in Crewe dedicated to making this unit for the RAF. The Merlin was the engine in the legendary Spitfire and Hurricane fighters, Lancaster and Whitley bombers, and US Air Force P-51 Mustangs, and around 160,000 were made in over 50 variations.
During the war, Rolls-Royce started work on jet engines; early examples were named after British rivers: Welland, Derwent and then the production successes, the Nene (1944) and Tay (1946). Many of these were sold to the US airforce, and Pratt & Whitney built the Nene under licence. The more aerodynamic Avon followed, used in planes such as the Hawker Hunter, Martin B-57 and the Caravelle and Comet airliners, and the more efficient Conway, in the Vickers VC-10, Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8. The smaller Spey was licensed to the USAF and Navy, and RR was doing excellent business with the Americans. The Dart and Tyne gas turbine engines were sold for use in smaller and regional aircraft like the Vickers Viscount and Vanguard, and the Tyne was even used in the SRN-4 hovercraft.
As the industry took a downturn, Rolls-Royce merged with Bristol-Siddeley in 1966, but the all-new RB-211 engine brought about the company's downfall. This unit, commissioned for the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar airliner, was costly to develop, and this, coupled with a fall in demand for large luxury cars, led to RR being placed in receivership in 1971 despite emergency bail-outs from the British government.
Tornado fighter plane
This photograph is reproduced with the permission of Rolls-Royce plc, copyright © Rolls-Royce plc 2006
The company was split into two divisions: Rolls-Royce Motor Cars (including Bentley) was floated on the stock market and went on to launch the Pininfarina-designed Carmargue coupe (1975) and then the Silver Spirit (1980) before being bought by Vickers in 1990, but with a long-outdated line-up and spiralling losses, it was mostly sold out to the Volkswagen Group in 1998. VW took Bentley and the Crewe factory, while the Rolls-Royce brand name was bought by BMW, which has since established a factory in Goodwood, Sussex, and launched the all-new, state-of-the-art Phantom.
Rolls-Royce's aero division was rescued, at the prompting of Lockheed chairman Dan Haughton, by a $250 million loan from the US government to bring the RB-211 to production, and it continued under British state ownership until 1987 and privatisation under the Thatcher government. Rolls-Royce plc has since bought companies including Allison and Vickers; in 1990, it established a joint venture with BMW to make the BR 700-series turbofan engines (fitted in planes including the Boeing 717 civilian regional aircraft, Bombardier Global Express and Gulfstream V executive jets and the BAE Nimrod MR4A bomber), though this was taken into full RR ownership in 2000, and now operates as the Rolls-Royce Deutschland division. Though it has been hit by the slump in demand for civil airliners in recent years, Rolls-Royce is still one of the world's largest engine makers; as well as marine engines for commercial and naval ships, it supplies engines to both Boeing and Airbus for civil aircraft, and to the Harrier and Tornado fighter planes.
Discover our other Automobile and Aeroplane Retrospectives
