Yeah, well, there's a
curious line up here,
but there is a story behind
each one, the Whittle jet engine.
And next we got the Mini
and then the Moulten bicycle
and the Citroen Maserati.
People at the Royal College
were designing the casings of things
they were only concerned with design.
I saw that design
should be part of engineering
as part of the whole process.
It shouldn't be something
that you do at the end
to make something look good
in order to sell it.
I was quite unusual
in thinking like that.
It was a very exciting time of change.
When I was realising
that design was engineering,
and it's one and the same thing.
there were wonderful examples around.
There were, of course,
things like the Harrier Jump
Jet, out of the window there,
it’s really interesting.
I mean, not only is it the first,
I think it's the only vertical
takeoff aircraft,
that actually works.
It's right by our entrance
hall, the missiles
pointing away from the entrance hall.
And then of course, there was the Mini,
which wasn't an obviously styled car.
The how it looks was done
By Issigonis the engineer
who did the engineering.
I mean, it's a triumph of space
because it's 10 foot long.
The brief was make it 10 foot long
and four feet wide,
and however high it is, four feet high.
And to do that,
he had to put the engine at
the front and transverse
engine and transverse gearbox
driving both the front wheels.
Yes, I mean, Issigonis
I think he was given
ten thousand engineers to design it,
He said I don't want ten thousand
I want two thousand.
He he came with a prototype
to show Jeremy Fry down at his house
and this pocket here,
he had a whole row of Gordon's gin’s bottles
That was his tipple,
and he said, look
you know, you can get 40 Gordon gin
bottles in the pocket.
It came out in the late,
very late fifties. Nineteen fifty nine.
I think it came out
and my mother bought one
in the early sixties.
It looked incredibly different.
I mean, there'd be no car
like this before.
I mean, it drove brilliantly.
It was impossibly
small, yet huge inside.
It's a good car,
so it's not too small.
Alex Moulten did the suspension
That's the hydrolysed unit there.
Very nice.
And that actually
brings me onto his bicycle,
which is similar.
And again, you know,
no one had done a bike
like this before.
So when this came out
in the sixties,
he put very small wheels on it
and you have to pump the
wheels up very hard.
The only problem with small wheels
is that you're more
susceptible to bumps.
You really feel the bumps.
So he overcame that
by having a suspension,
that suspension there,
And suspension unit here.
Its quite an interesting bike
because it's the,
it has a central frame,
but then a wheel,
the rear wheel is on one frame
and the front wheels
are on the front forks,
totally unlike a conventional bike.
Now this is Citreon Maserati.
It was really unusual at the time
because people weren't
making aerodynamic cars
starting from the front.
It had swivelling headlights.
I think that one swivelled
It's done by string around some pulleys
working off the steering column,
and it was the first car to do that.
I mean, you can see it’s styling is
still pretty flashy,
so quite contemporary,
but let's get inside it.
See that's a good old Maserati engine.
I don't know if you noticed
I didn't slow down for that speed bump,
you don't have to slow down
for speed bumps,
it just doesn't notice them
because it has
hydro-pneumatic suspension.
It's so good that when you
when you hit a bump or something,
you just don't feel it.
Now here we got the Whittle jet engine,
the oldest running
jet engine in the world.
Frank Whittle was extraordinary as he
had this extraordinary vision
about what he wanted a jet engine for.
But also, he got everything
right first time.
I mean, it's not. I mean,
no one does that, but Whittle did it.
And our engineers rebuild
the fuel system to
Whittle’s original drawings,
and it works perfectly.
So here we are. running at about 5000 RPM.
And it will go up to 20,000
But because it’s an antique
we’re not going to run it at that sort of speed.
But it started first time.
How many cars did that at the time?
You can hear the power,
the power of it, you know, that’s air noise
it’s just this huge fan,
a turbine turning round.
It's amazing.
Only one moving part.
You realise that
these are engineering icons
that famous British inventions
and breakthroughs
inventing, engineering, designing
and art are inseparable
and it brings life to the place.