Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer is the partial autobiography

Autobiography

An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

 of the British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 novelist Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute Norway was a popular British-Australian novelist and a successful aeronautical engineer. He used his full name in his engineering career, and 'Nevil Shute' as his pen name, in order to protect his engineering career from any potential negative publicity in connection with his novels.-...

. It was first published in 1954. Slide Rule concentrates on Nevil Shute's work in aerospace, ending in 1938 when he left the industry.

The book begins with details of Shute's childhood and upbringing, his school years, events in the Easter 1916 Dublin Rising

Easter Rising

The Easter Rising was an insurrection staged in Ireland during Easter Week, 1916. The Rising was mounted by Irish republicans with the aims of ending British rule in Ireland and establishing the Irish Republic at a time when the British Empire was heavily engaged in the First World War...

, where his father was Secretary to the Post Office, and service during World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

. Shute came into contact with airplanes during his time as a student at Oxford

Oxford

The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...

, where in his holiday periods he worked at the de Havilland

De Havilland

The de Havilland Aircraft Company was a British aviation manufacturer founded in 1920 when Airco, of which Geoffrey de Havilland had been chief designer, was sold to BSA by the owner George Holt Thomas. De Havilland then set up a company under his name in September of that year at Stag Lane...

 aircraft factory.

The remainder of the book is divided into two parts. The first part is about Shute's experiences working on the R100

R100

HM Airship R100 was a privately designed and built rigid airship made as part of a two-ship competition to develop new techniques for a projected larger commercial airship for use on British empire routes...

 airship project at Vickers

Vickers

Vickers was a famous name in British engineering that existed through many companies from 1828 until 1999.-Early history:Vickers was formed in Sheffield as a steel foundry by the miller Edward Vickers and his father-in-law George Naylor in 1828. Naylor was a partner in the foundry Naylor &...

. The R100 project was the private counterpart to the Air Ministry

Air Ministry

The Air Ministry was a department of the British Government with the responsibility of managing the affairs of the Royal Air Force, that existed from 1918 to 1964...

's R101

R101

R101 was one of a pair of British rigid airship completed in 1929 as part of a British government programme to develop civil airships capable of service on long-distance routes within the British Empire. It was designed and built by an Air Ministry-appointed team and was effectively in competition...

, in a competition designed as part of the Imperial Airship Scheme

Imperial Airship Scheme

The British Imperial Airship Scheme was a project to improve communication with the far corners of the British Empire by establishing air routes using airships...

 to find an airship capable of flying the Empire routes to India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

, as well as transatlantic flights to Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

.

Shute worked on the R100 project as Chief Calculator, the person responsible for overseeing all the stress engineering calculations needed to design the airship. He was also present on the airship's maiden voyage to Canada in 1930. He recounts the experience of a mid-air repair of a rudder over the North Atlantic, and of being caught in an up-draft over a thunderhead

Cumulonimbus cloud

Cumulonimbus is a towering vertical cloud that is very tall, dense, and involved in thunderstorms and other inclement weather. Cumulonimbus originates from Latin: Cumulus "Heap" and nimbus "rain". It is a result of atmospheric instability. These clouds can form alone, in clusters, or along a cold...

 over Canada.

The R100 design was the project on which he mentions using a slide rule

Slide rule

The slide rule, also known colloquially as a slipstick, is a mechanical analog computer. The slide rule is used primarily for multiplication and division, and also for functions such as roots, logarithms and trigonometry, but is not normally used for addition or subtraction.Slide rules come in a...

, a Fuller cylindrical model; he only mentions the term slide rule once in the book.

The final part of the book is about Shute's experiences in co-founding and managing Airspeed Ltd between 1931 and 1938. During this time, there was little business and much difficulty. As Shute tells it, the first time the company made a profit was in 1938, the year he resigned as a director.

Shute then spent the war as a reluctantly commissioned naval officer working for the "Wheezers and
Dodgers" (the British Admiralty's Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development

Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development

The Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development , known colloquially as the Wheezers and Dodgers, was a department of the Admiralty responsible for the development of various unconventional weapons during World War II...

) with time off to write a few novels, before becoming disillusioned by the post war UK government and emigrating to Australia. There his considerable success as a best selling author kept him busy until his death from a heart attack in 1960, so he never got around to writing his planned follow up to Slide Rule (which had the working title of Set Square). Much later, American Julian Smith wrote a comprehensive and somewhat controversial biography, which is currently in print.