Barnes Wallis Sir Barnes Neville Wallis , CBE FRS , RDI , FRAeS ( 26 September 1887 – 30 October 1979 ) , was an English scientist , engineer and inventor . He is best known for inventing the bouncing bomb used by the Royal Air Force in Operation Chastise ( the " Dambusters " raid ) to attack the dams of the Ruhr Valley during World War II . The raid was the subject of the 1955 film " The Dam Busters " , in which Wallis was played by Michael Redgrave . Among his other inventions were the geodetic airframe and the earthquake bomb . Career . Barnes Wallis was born in Ripley , Derbyshire and educated at Christ ' s Hospital in Horsham , leaving school at seventeen to start work in January 1905 at Thames Engineering Works at Blackheath , southeast London . He subsequently changed his apprenticeship to J . Samuel White ' s , the shipbuilders based at Cowes on the Isle of Wight . He originally trained as a marine engineer and in 1922 he took a degree in engineering via the University of London External Programme . He left J . Samuel White ' s in 1913 when an opportunity arose for him to work on airship design and then aircraft design . He worked for Vickers - later part of Vickers - Armstrongs and latterly part of the British Aircraft Corporation until his retirement in 1971 . Aircraft design . His many achievements include the first use of geodetic ( also known as geodesic ) design in engineering and in the gasbag wiring of Vickers ' R100 in 1930 , which , at the time , was the largest airship ever designed . He also pioneered , along with John Edwin Temple , the use of light alloy and production engineering in the structural design of the R100 . Nevil Shute Norway was the chief calculator for the project , responsible for calculating the stresses on the frame . Despite a better - than - expected performance and a successful return flight to Canada in 1930 , the R100 was broken up following the crash in northern France of its " sister " ship , the R101 ( which was designed and built by a team from the Government ' s Air Ministry ) . The later destruction of the " Hindenburg " led to the abandonment of airships as a mode of mass transport . By the time of the R101 crash , Wallis had moved to the Vickers aircraft factory at the Brooklands motor circuit and aerodrome between Byfleet and Weybridge in Surrey . The pre - war aircraft designs of Rex Pierson , the Wellesley , the Wellington and the later Warwick and Windsor all employed Wallis ' s geodetic design in the fuselage and wing structures . The latter was one of the most robust airframes ever developed , and pictures of its skeleton largely shot away , but still sound enough to bring its crew home safely , are still impressive . The geodetic construction offered a light and strong airframe ( compared to conventional designs ) , with clearly defined space within for fuel tanks , payload and so on . However the technique was not easily transferred to other aircraft manufacturers , nor was Vickers able to build other designs in factories tooled for geodetic work . Bomb design . After the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe in 1939 , Wallis saw a need for strategic bombing to destroy the enemy ' s ability to wage war and he wrote a paper entitled " A Note on a Method of Attacking the Axis Powers " . Referring to the enemy ' s power supplies , he wrote ( as Axiom 3 ) : " If their destruction or paralysis can be accomplished they offer a means of rendering the enemy utterly incapable of continuing to prosecute the war " . As a means to do this , he proposed huge bombs that could concentrate their force and destroy targets which were otherwise unlikely to be affected . Wallis ' s first super - large bomb design came out at some ten tonnes , far more than any current bomber could carry . Rather than drop the idea , this led him to suggest a plane that could carry it - the " Victory Bomber " . Early in 1942 , Wallis began experimenting with skipping marbles over water tanks in his garden , leading to his April 1942 paper " Spherical Bomb — Surface Torpedo " . The idea was that a bomb could skip over the water surface , ( avoiding torpedo nets ) and sink directly next to a battleship or dam wall as a depth charge , with the surrounding water concentrating the force of the explosion on the target . A crucial innovation was the addition of backspin , which caused the bomb to trail behind the dropping aircraft ( decreasing the chance of that aircraft being damaged by the force of the explosion below ) , increased the range of the bomb , and also prevented it from moving away from the target wall as it sank . After some initial scepticism , the Air Force accepted Wallis ' s bouncing bomb , ( codenamed " Upkeep " ) , for attacks on the Möhne , Eder and Sorpe dams in the Ruhr area . The raid on these dams in May 1943 , ( Operation " Chastise " ) , was immortalised in Paul Brickhill ' s 1951 book " The Dam Busters " and the 1955 film of the same name . The Mohne and Eder dams were successfully breached , causing damage to German factories and disrupting hydro - electric power . After the success of the bouncing bomb , Wallis was able to return to his huge bombs , producing first the Tallboy ( 6 tonnes ) and then the Grand Slam ( 10 tonnes ) deep - penetration earthquake bomb s . These were not the same as the 5 - tonne " blockbuster " bomb , which was a conventional blast bomb . Although there was still no aircraft capable of lifting these bombs to their optimal release altitude , these two bombs could still be dropped from a lower height , entering the earth at supersonic speed and penetrating to a depth of 20 metres before exploding . They were used on strategic German targets such as V - 2 rocket launch sites , submarine pen s , and other reinforced structures , large civil constructions such as viaducts and bridges , as well as the German battleship " Tirpitz " . They were the forerunners of modern bunker - busting bomb s . After the war . Having been dispersed with the Design Office from Brooklands to the nearby Burhill Golf Club in Hersham , after the Vickers factory was badly bombed in September 1940 , Wallis returned to Brooklands in November 1945 as Head of the Vickers - Armstrongs Research & Development Department and was based in the former motor circuit ' s 1907 Clubhouse . Here he and his staff worked on many futuristic aerospace projects including supersonic flight and " swing - wing " technology ( later used in the Panavia Tornado and other aircraft types ) . A massive 19 , 533sq ft Stratosphere Chamber ( which was the world ' s largest facility of its type and is now under restoration at Brooklands Museum ) , was designed and built beside the Clubhouse by 1948 and became the focus for much R & D work under Wallis ' s direction in the 1950s and 1960s . Although he did not invent the concept , Wallis did much pioneering engineering work to make the swing - wing concept functional . However , despite very promising wind tunnel and model work , his designs were not adopted . His early " Wild Goose " , designed in the late 1940s , was intended to use laminar flow , but when this was shown to be unworkable , he developed the swing - wing further for the " Swallow " , designed in the mid - 1950s , which could have been developed for either military or civil applications . Both " Wild Goose " and " Swallow " were demonstrated by large ( 30 ft span ) flying scale models without tailplanes ; these trials were based at Predannack in Cornwall . " Swallow " was cancelled in the round of cuts following the Sandys Defence White Paper in 1957 , and in an attempt to gain American funding to continue the work , details of the project were passed to the USA . No such funds were made available and Wallis ' s design ideas were passed over in the UK in favour of the BAC TSR - 2 ( on which one of Wallis ' s sons worked ) and Concorde . Wallis was quite critical of both the TSR - 2 and Concorde , stating that a swing - wing design would be more appropriate . In the mid - 1960s , TSR - 2 was ignominiously scrapped in favour of the American F - 111 – which had swing wings based on Wallis ' s work which the Americans had received – although this order was also subsequently cancelled . In the 1950s , Wallis developed an experimental rocket - propelled torpedo codenamed HEYDAY . It was powered by compressed air and hydrogen peroxide , and had an unusual streamlined shape designed to maintain laminar flow over much of its length . Tests were conducted from Portland Breakwater in Dorset . The only surviving example is on display in Explosion ! Museum of Naval Firepower at Gosport . In 1955 Wallis agreed to act as a consultant to the project to build the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia . Some of the ideas he suggested are the same as or closely related to the final design , including the idea of supporting the dish at its centre , the geodetic structure of the dish and the master equatorial control system . Unhappy with the direction it had taken , Wallis left the project halfway into the design study and refused to accept his £1 , 000 consultant ' s fee . In the 1960s , Wallis also proposed using large cargo submarine s to transport oil and other goods , thus avoiding surface weather conditions . Moreover , Wallis ' s calculations indicated , the power requirements for an underwater vessel were lower than for a comparable conventional ship and they could be made to travel at a much higher speed . He also proposed a novel hull structure which would have allowed greater depths to be reached , and the use of gas turbine engines in a submarine , using liquid oxygen . In the end , nothing came of Wallis ' s submarine ideas . During the 1960s and into his retirement , he developed ideas for an " all - speed " aircraft , capable of efficient flight at all speed ranges from subsonic to hypersonic . The story described in " The Dam Busters " reflected the difficulties Wallis often faced in persuading those in authority or who controlled funding sources to support his ideas . Following the terrible death toll of the aircrews involved in the Dambusters raid , he made a conscious effort never again to endanger the lives of his test pilots . His designs were extensively tested in model form , and consequently he became a pioneer in the remote control of aircraft . Wallis became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1945 and was knight ed in 1968 . He was awarded the sum of £10 , 000 for his war work from the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors . His grief at the loss of so many airmen in the dams raid was such that Wallis donated the entire sum to Christ ' s Hospital School in 1951 to allow them to set up the RAF Foundationers ' Trust , allowing the children of RAF personnel killed or injured in action to attend the school . Personal . In April 1922 , Wallis met his cousin - in - law , Molly Bloxam , at a family tea party . She was only 17 and he was 35 , and her father forbade them from courting . However , he allowed Wallis to assist Molly with her mathematics courses by correspondence , and they wrote some 250 letters , enlivening them with fictional characters such as " Duke Delta X " . The letters gradually became personal , and Wallis proposed marriage on her 20th birthday . They married on 23 April 1925 , and remained so for 54 years until his death in 1979 . For 49 years , from 1930 until his death , Wallis lived with his family in Effingham , Surrey and he is now buried at the local St . Lawrence Church together with his wife . His epitaph in Latin reads " Spernit Humum Fugiente Penna " ( " Severed from the earth with fleeting wing " ) . They had four children – Barnes ( 1926 - 2008 ) , Mary ( b . 1927 ) , Elisabeth ( b . 1933 ) and Christopher ( 1935 - 2006 ) – and also adopted Molly ' s sister ' s children when their parents were killed in an air raid . His daughter Mary Eyre Wallis later married Harry Stopes - Roe , a son of Marie Stopes . His son Christopher Loudon Wallis , was instrumental in the restoration of the watermill and its building on the Stanway Estate near Cheltenham , Gloucestershire . Fiction . Wallis appears as a fictionalized character in Stephen Baxter ' s " The Time Ships " , the authorised sequel to " The Time Machine " . He is portrayed as a British engineer in an alternate history , where the First World War does not end in 1918 , and Wallis concentrates his energies on developing a machine for time travel . As a consequence , it is the Germans who develop the bouncing bomb . In " " , he is said to have developed the Cavorite weapon used to win the war on Mars after the suicide of Cavor . Archives . 105 boxes of papers of Barnes Wallis are held by the Science Museum at Wroughton near Swindon . The papers comprise design notes , photographs , calculations , correspondence and reports relating to Wallis ' s work on airships , including the R100 ; geodetic construction of aircraft ; the bouncing bomb and deep penetration bombs ; the " Wild Goose " and " Swallow " swing - wing aircraft ; hypersonic aircraft designs and various outside contracts . Two boxes of records , containing copies of key aeronautical papers written between 1940 and 1958 , are held at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge . Other Barnes Wallis papers are also held at Brooklands Museum , the Imperial War Museum , London , Newark Air Museum and the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon , Trinity College , Cambridge and Bristol , Leeds and Oxford universities . The RAF Museum also has a reconstruction of his post - war office at Brooklands .