num_pages: 222
description: Nevil Shute Norway (17 January 1899 – 12 January 1960) was a popular British novelist and successful aeronautical engineer. He used his full name in his engineering career, and "Nevil Shute" as his pen name. Shute attended the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich but because of his stammer did not take up a commission in the Royal Flying Corps, serving in World War I as a soldier in the Suffolk Regiment. An aeronautical engineer and a pilot, he began his engineering career with de Havilland Aircraft Company and in 1924 joined Vickers Ltd., where he helped develop airships and structural geodetic frame design. Shute worked as Chief Calculator (stress engineer) on the R100 airship project for the subsidiary Airship Guarantee Company. In 1929, he was promoted to Deputy Chief Engineer of the R100 project under Sir Barnes Wallis and when Wallis left became the Chief Engineer. In 1931, with the cancellation of the R100 project, Shute teamed up with the talented de Havilland trained designer A. Hessell Tiltman to found the aircraft construction company Airspeed Ltd which produced the Envoy aircraft which as the Airspeed Oxford became the standard advanced multi-engined trainer for the RAF and British Commonwealth, with over 8,500 built. Shute was made a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. During World War II, Shute joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and joined the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development, working on secret weapons such as Panjandrum. His celebrity as a writer caused the Ministry of Information to send him to the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 and later to Burma as a correspondent. In the 1950s and 1960s he was one of the world's best-selling novelists and wrote his autobiography Slide Autobiography of an Engineer in 1954.
language: English
title: Slide Rule : The Autobiography of an Engineer
titlecomplete: Slide Rule : The Autobiography of an Engineer
genres: Business, Autobiography, Engineering, Nonfiction, Aviation, Literature, History, Memoir, Biography Memoir, Biography
ratings_count: 637
publisher: General