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Slide Rule (Vintage International) by [Nevil Shute]

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Nevil Shute

Slide Rule (Vintage International) Kindle Edition

by Nevil Shute (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Nevil Shute was a pioneer in the world of flying long before he began to write the stories that made him a bestselling novelist. This autobiography charts Shute’s path from childhood to his career as a gifted aeronautical engineer working at the forefront of the technological experimentation of the 1920s and 30s. The inspiration for many of the themes and concerns of Shutes novels can be found in this enjoyable and enlightening memoir.

Print length

240 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

July 23, 2010
File size

538 KB
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Complete Series

Vintage International (20 Book Series)

Nevil Shute

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“The best, most thrilling and most interesting story ever written about an engineer.” —The Detroit News

“A novelist of intelligent and engaging quality, deservedly popular…. Nevil Shute was, in brief, the sort of novelist who genuinely touches the imagination and feeling.” —The Times (London)

From the Publisher

8 1-hour cassettes --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003WUYP3I
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (July 23, 2010)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 23, 2010
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 538 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #305,330 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #809 in Literary Short Stories
- #1,307 in British & Irish Literary Fiction
- #1,616 in Action & Adventure Literary Fiction

Customer Reviews:
198 ratings

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4 star		28%
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Top reviews from the United States

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Fun, but funny

Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2019

Verified Purchase

Nevile Shute is known today for "On the Beach," even though he wrote a fair handful of other novels. But,before taking his only paycheck as a writer, he worked as an aeronautical engineer and entrepreneur.

Starting with a perfunctory recount of early early life and education, Shute dives deeply and fast into his career in aviation engineering. Learning to fly was informal in the pre-WWI era ("C'mon, hop in and I'll show you.")

Long story short, Shute pursued a career in hydrogen-lofted airships (pre-WWI and pre-Hindenberg, it seemed like a good idea). After that, he pursued, created, headed, and eventually had to let go of a life in pre-WWII aviation. It started when each individual plane was made to order. Think open cockpit, biplane, wooden struts, and everything a modern airliner isn't.

But they didn't even have airlines then. So, as Shute details his advancement through the 19-teens, twenties, and thirties, it reads like an autobiography of an hands-on engineer advancing from unpaid apprentice to executive in charge of an thousand-man fabrication plant, to golden-parachute ouster when his company, "Airspeed", had to go totally corporate. The rogues needed to bring it to life just could not be tolerated in the company's adulthood.

So, if you want to know Shute's inner lifer as writer, you'll find scant clues. Although he'd been writing while working as engineer, making a living as writer really started once the board kicked him out of the C-suite. There ends the story as this book tells it. But Shute kept writing, and kept his publisher well-endowed, and caught the odd movie right here and there.

Read this as a very telling history of the 1910-1940 era of crazy aircraft industry development, with Shute armpit-deep in the craziness. Don't read it as autobiography in any sense that "biography" led you to expect. Quirky and not for everyone, I like it. And it gives me a lot more context for the pseudonymous Shute's incredible fiction.
-- wiredweird

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

JCAL

A intimate snapshot of UK aviation during the interwar period.

Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2016

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This is a fine companion volume to the book "Airspeed Aircraft" by H A Taylor. There is also a great description of the R100/R101 debacle written at time when there was still some sensitivity about the program.
One other aspect was the number of famous UK aviation personalities and their roles interwoven throughout the book provides a contemporary account that will not be necessarily seen in other published accounts of the people or their companies. A good example would be the story of Alan Cobham.

Highly recommended for anyone who has an interest in UK aviation during the interwar period.

5 people found this helpful

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Steve

An amazing Renaissance man

Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2018

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An amazing Renaissance man. I first discovered him in the old movie, "On The Beach".
His book "A Town Like Alice" motivated me to find the movie (5 hrs!).
But one of my most favorite books is Shute's "Trustee from the Toolroom", which motivated me to find out more about him.
"Slide Rule" (ah, hes, I have a few of those, too!) was an enjoyable snapshot of his early education and career.
I especially enjoyed his elaborate descriptions of the early Airships, and their construction (and destruction).
I found this a riveting read, not as dry as some autobiographies I've read.
An incredible man, who could write enthralling stories. He died much too soon.

2 people found this helpful

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Paul A. Martin

An engineer's take on the rise of commercial aircraft

Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2016

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This is an autobiography of the years Shute (in his "tech world" real name Norwell) spent designing, building, and selling aircraft. Great time slice of the days when aircraft were still novel, when being able to make an emergency landing in a farmer's field was part of the safety planning.

Also shows the roots of his strong views on the hazards of excessive government involvement in research and development -- he sees that the incentives for the people doing the development are skewed to supporting political goals instead of engineering or scientific ones, and shows how this led to a tragic end for the British dirigible project.

2 people found this helpful

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Dan

A great look at airships

Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2012

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.
Nevil Shute's autobiography runs from his birth in 1899 to just before World War II. Although the book was published after the war, it does not detail any of his further life. He lived until 1960.

The account is divided into three parts: his youth, his involvement with the airship R100 and its competition with the R101, and his subsequent founding of Airspeed, an aircraft manufacturer.

The British government paid for 2 competing airships in the 1920s--one (the R100) built by a private company (in which Shute played a large part) and one (the R101) built by a government ministry. The crash of the government airship in 1930 ended the experiment. Shute's account of the duo has been alleged to be biased but is nonetheless riveting.

Although he was a best selling novelist, very little detail of this side of his life is recounted.

Sadly, the book is extremely overpriced, restricting the number of people who can enjoy this limited but exciting account of his life.

4 people found this helpful

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CINDY TOBIAS

Good engineering and a great true story

Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2014

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An engineer's view of early commercial flight, with a cautionary tale of why private enterprise succeeds better than government sponsorship. The competition between the R. 100 and R. 101 airships should be read by everyone interested in research and development, as it seems to involve everything that can go wrong with a government project, and kill people. The commercial effort succeeded, but was found to be less practical than airplanes. The gentle and fair presentation is more convincing than a modern gotcha style.

3 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Rhysyn

Good interesting book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 17, 2020

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This is the autobiography of a man who not only was a successful author but also an aeronautical engineer and one of a group that founded an aircraft manufacturing company. It is of its time but very interesting.

2 people found this helpful

Dianne

An engineer as well as an author

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 17, 2020

Verified Purchase

I've lost my original printed copy. For those who remember Nevil Shute the author (A town like Alice is one of his best known) you may not be aware that he was also an engineer who worked on airships and planes including building for the King's flight. An excellent and interesting autobiography.

2 people found this helpful

G C W S Wheeler

Only account of building and serving on airships I know of.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 11, 2014

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Slide Rule is an autobiography, but the part that almost everyone will buy it for is the account of the building of the R100 airship in competition with the R101. These were the largest of their generation, vastly larger than the A380 and 747 jets of today. You get a real impression of the excitement of meeting the engineering challenges and developing novel solutions.

It then goes on to talk about the demonstration flight from the UK to Canada and back, and again, you get a sense of the sheer scale of the thing, when Shute talks about taking the walk-way over the top of the airship while in flight, climbing over the sleeping bodies of men taking the sun. He also talks about in-flight repairs of the fabric panels of the control surfaces.

Shortly after this flight, all UK airship development was permanently stopped due to the fatal crash of the R101, which he analyses. As so few people worked on airships, there is very little material which gives a human perspective on them, and this is probably the only one easily available.

5 people found this helpful

Dr. R. Brandon

A Fascinating Insight into Airship Design and Aeronautical Engineering

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 6, 2010

Verified Purchase

This autobiography by Nevil Shute Norway, better known to readers or film goers of stories such as 'A Town Like Alice' or 'On the Beach' as Nevil Shute, covers the early part of his life from 1899 to 1938 when he left the aircraft manufacturer Airspeed Ltd.
The book covers his period of education and his time at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied Engineering Science. Then perhaps follows the most intriguing section of the book which is Shute's time working for Barnes Wallis at Vickers on the construction of the R100 airship. The R100 was built at Howden, a small town between Hull and York, during the 1920s. This was a period when it was envisaged that long haul travel would be the province of airships and that planes would be confined to relatively short trips, no plane having yet crossed the Atlantic East to West. The R100 was a commercial enterprise, however, the R101 was designed and built by the Air Ministry at the giant hangars at Cardington, in Bedfordshire. An original order for six airships to traverse the Empire had been placed by the Conservative government but was cancelled by the incoming Labour administration of Ramsay MacDonald and turned into a two ship competition between private and public enterprise. This pernicious arrangement was to lead to the disaster at Beauvais on the 5th October 1930 and the death of the prime architect of this exercise the Secretary of State for Air, Baron Thomson of Cardington, and 47 other people when the R101 crashed and burst into flames. Shute has many interesting insights into the building of the airships and the effect of this peculiar government inspired organisational arrangement, he pulls no punches.
Shute was subsequently involved in the founding of the aircraft manufacturing company Airspeed Ltd. and its slow and painful growth into a major aeronautical business. The most famous plane produced by this company was the much respected twin-engine Airspeed Oxford on which pilots for Bomber Command were trained. The author has much to say about how companies are created and grown and the different skills required when companies become large, the 'starters' and 'runners' of industry.
Shute makes some comments on his writing and his success with publication of his novels and the subsequent sale of the film rights to two of his early books, however, this is by no means a literary biography. The book is well written and I would think hold a special fascination for those interested in airship history and the tragic saga of the R101.

11 people found this helpful

Leopard

Easily readable and very approachable writing style

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 14, 2016

Verified Purchase

Well worth the price and time to read this, anyone who has ever worked on a contract for a government or large corporation will recognise a fair bit of whats going on here and the way a smaller, more nimble, organisation can run rings round them.

Easily readable and very approachable writing style, yes you buy this for the R100/R101 story, but do read on, the stuff that follows is just as worth the read.

5 people found this helpful