Engines & Enterprise
by David Finlay (11 November 2008)
An old man once told me, when I was a very young man, that a certain engineering matter I had introduced into the conversation was not worth further discussion because it had not been developed by Sir Harry Ricardo. Ricardo himself would have been appalled by this attitude if he had still been alive to hear it, but it does give some idea of the esteem in which he has been held for nearly a century.
He was described as "the High Priest of the internal combustion engine", and his name lives on in Ricardo plc, the Sussex-based multinational engineering consultancy with offices in China, the Czech Republic, Germany, India, Japan, Korea and the US. Ricardo plc did not exactly have a humble start - it was formed, as Engine Patents Ltd, by a consortium led by the fabulously wealthy Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, a great admirer of Ricardo - but its recent work (including intensive studies into hybrid technology, the software which helped develop the engines of the JCB Dieselmax record car and the creation of the gearbox for the Bugatti Veyron) show how many giant leaps forward the company has made over the years.
Harry Ricardo's own life was not what you might call a rags-to-riches affair. His father, Halsey Ricardo, was a successful architect, and his other relations, by blood or marriage, include the economic theorist and MP David Ricardo, the potter Josiah Wedgewood, the evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin, the first Governor of New Zealand and a leading figure in the development of the Indian railway system. As a schoolboy he also met the artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones and the author Rudyard Kipling.
No shortage of influences there, then, but the most important turned out to be Bertram Hopkinson ("an inspiring experimentalist," Ricardo wrote later, "who took nothing for granted, had no preconceived ideas and was always ready to scrap any theory, however cherished, if the evidence warranted it"). Among other things, Hopkinson, recently appointed to the Chair of Mechanism and Applied Mechanics at Cambridge University when Ricardo went to study there in 1903, encouraged the young student to take part in a University Automobile Club motorcycle economy trial, which Ricardo won by an immense margin despite having by far the largest-engined bike in the competition.
By then Ricardo had fallen in love with the internal combustion engine, and it's easy to see why. This intricately-connected device, which converts fuel into forward motion in a way that must have seemed magical, was a new and exciting invention during his youth, and it interested him far more than the career in his grandfather's civil engineering business that had seemed to be his destiny.
In Engines & Enterprise - a revised version of a book first published in 1999 - John Reynolds explains what happened next. As well as the more recent history of his company, there is fascinating information on Ricardo's own work on such projects as the tank which, in the opinion of a German commander, secured victory for the Allies in World War I, pioneering studies (funded by Shell) into what exactly happens when you put fuel into an engine and burn it, an astonishingly powerful three-litre Vauxhall racing engine of 1921, important developments with trains and aeroplanes, and work on high-speed diesels which was still evident in engines being used in Citroen and Peugeot cars as late as 2001.
Reynolds also goes into considerable detail about Ricardo's incredible single-cylinder test engines, one of which featured a two-stroke cycle, turbocharging, direct fuel injection and stratified charge combustion (providing more power for the same fuel consumption, or better economy for the same power output) . . . in 1937!
Engines & Enterprise is a serious, academic book, and not one for the casual reader. But it is a fascinating mix of history, biography and popular engineering, and a fine tribute to one of the men who helped make the motoring world what it is today. I strongly recommend it.
Engines & Enterprise: The Life and Work of Sir Harry Ricardo, second edition, by John Reynolds, is published by Haynes at £25.00. ISBN 978 1 84425 516 0. More details at www.haynes.co.uk.
