page_title: Charles Inglis (engineer)
section_title: Return to King's College
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Inglis (engineer) / Return to King's College
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of the wreckage of the R101 airship which was probably taken not long after the crash on 4 October 1930 in Allonne, Picardie (France). Français&#160;: Photographie de l'épave du dirigeable britannique R101, photo prise sans doute peu de temps après le crash le 4 otcobre 1930 à Allonne en Picardie.
context_page_description: Sir Charles Edward Inglis, OBE, FRS was a British civil engineer. The son of a doctor, he was educated at Cheltenham College and won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he would later forge a career as an academic. Inglis spent a two-year period with the engineering firm run by John Wolfe-Barry before he returned to King's College as a lecturer. Working with Professors James Alfred Ewing and Bertram Hopkinson, he made several important studies into the effects of vibration on structures and defects on the strength of plate steel.
  Inglis served in the Royal Engineers during the First World War and invented the Inglis Bridge, a reusable steel bridging system – the precursor to the more famous Bailey bridge of the Second World War. In 1916 he was placed in charge of bridge design and supply at the War Office and, with Giffard Le Quesne Martel, pioneered the use of temporary bridges with tanks. Inglis retired from military service in 1919 and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He returned to Cambridge University after the war as a professor and head of the Engineering Department.
context_section_description: Inglis returned to Cambridge in 1918 and was appointed as the professor of Mechanism and Applied Mechanics (renamed Mechanical Sciences in 1934). On 25 March 1919, he was selected to head the Cambridge University Engineering Department as the successor of Hopkinson, who had died in an air crash the previous year. Though he made no radical changes, such as had occurred under his predecessors, under Inglis' supervision the department became the largest in the university and one of the best engineering schools in the world.  He was responsible for expanding the department to meet the increased post-war demand for engineers and for the move from its traditional home at Free School Lane.  Inglis acquired the 4-acre (1.6 ha) Scroope House on Trumpington Street for the department and constructed a 50,000-square-foot (4,600 m²) laboratory on the site by 1923, followed in 1931 by a structure containing lecture theatres and a drawing office.
  At Cambridge Inglis' students included Sir Frank Whittle (developer of the jet engine), James N. Goodier (mechanical engineer and academic), Sir Morien Morgan (called the "Father of Concorde") and Beryl Platt, Baroness Platt (Conservative peer).  He was also in contact with Russian railway engineer Yury Lomonosov and lectured to biochemist Albert Chibnall.  Despite mentoring some of the best engineers of their generation Inglis was realistic about the actual intentions of many of his students at the time.  He once told a new intake class: "Your fathers, gentlemen, have sent you to Cambridge to be educated, not to become engineers. They think, however, that reading engineering is a very good way of becoming educated. In 10 years' time, however, 90% of you will have become managers, whether of design, manufacturing, sales, research or even accounts departments in industry. The remaining 10% of you will have become successful lawyers, novelists, and things of that sort".  Undeterred, Inglis sought to give his students the broadest possible engineering education, covering all fields to prevent them becoming "cramped by premature specialisation".
  Inglis had close contacts with industry and was able to establish a professorship in aeronautical engineering and links with a nearby Air Ministry experimental flight station.  He was also successful in arranging with the War Office for Royal Engineers officers to study the Engineering Tripos at the university.  The university drew praise for the quality of its teaching during Inglis' tenure, though his department has been criticised for its "comparative neglect of original research".  From 1923, he was involved with the analysis of vibration and its effects on railway bridges, including a period spent working with Christopher Hinton during the latter's final year as a student at Cambridge.  Inglis was appointed to a sub-committee of the British government's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research Bridge Stress Committee by Ewing, who was chairman, and became responsible for almost all of the mathematics of the investigation.  Inglis derived a theory that allowed for the accurate assessment of the vibrations caused by hammer blow force imparted to the bridge by locomotives, and the committee's 1928 report included recommendations that the hammer blow force be included in bridge design calculations in the future.  During the course of this work Inglis was able to show that the increased oscillation of bridges at train speeds beyond those that corresponded with the natural frequency of the bridge was due to the influence of the locomotive's suspension – the first time that this phenomenon had been explained.  Inglis' work on bridge vibration has been described as his most important post-war research.  He followed up the work by using a harmonic series and Macaulay's method to approximate the vibration of beams of non-uniform mass distribution or bending modulus.  This work is related to the later method used by Myklestad and Prohl in the field of rotordynamics.
  Inglis was elected an Institution of Civil Engineers member in 1923 and became a member o
caption: Wreckage of the airship R101, the loss of which was investigated by Inglis in 1930
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