Christopher Cockerell; Briton Invented the Hovercraft

Christopher Cockerell, a British engineer who turned a couple of tin cans rigged to a vacuum cleaner into the Hovercraft, one of the century’s more eccentric modes of transportation, has died.

Cockerell, whose death Tuesday at his Southhampton home coincided with the 40th anniversary of his invention’s first launch, was 88.

Nicknamed the British Flying Saucer because it resembled a giant saucepan lid, the Hovercraft moves across land or water on a cushion of air. When it was launched on the English Channel in 1959, it was ballyhooed in the press as the preferred mode for water crossings.

The Hovercraft never fulfilled the potential that Cockerell had envisioned, however: It was noisy, unreliable and nauseated passengers in rough seas. In Britain, it has devolved from being the pride of British maritime engineering to its dinosaur, surpassed by superior craft and the Channel Tunnel.

But, as a recent Times of London article noted, it is a stubborn dinosaur that has “steadfastly refused to do the decent thing and disappear altogether,” kept alive on both sides of the Atlantic by Hovercraft hobbyists whose enthusiasm for Cockerell’s quirky machine approaches cult fervor.

Cockerell was born June 6, 1910, and was educated in private schools. He was trained in engineering at Cambridge University, then got a job with the electrical company Marconi.

He helped devise a transmission antenna for the BBC’s first television station in north London. During World War II, he participated in the development of Britain’s first radar defense system.

After the war, he left Marconi to build tourist boats in Norfolk. It was during this period that he began to contemplate the solution to an 80-year-old problem.

Sir John Thornycroft was a British engineer who in the 1870s began to test his theory that drag on a ship’s hull could be reduced if a ship had a plenum chamber--essentially an empty box, open at the bottom. He thought that if the chamber could be pumped full of air, the ship would float above the water and move faster because there would be less resistance. He could not, however, figure out how to keep the “air cushion” from escaping from under the craft.

Cockerell cast aside the plenum chamber principle, theorizing instead that if he could pump air under the vessel through a narrow slot that ran around it, the air would flow toward the vessel’s center, thus forming an external curtain that would trap the bubble of air under the hull. Cockerell believed this system, which became known as a peripheral jet, would allow the boat to hover.

To test his theory, the former electronics engineer raided his pantry for a coffee tin and a can of cat food and hooked them up to a reverse-flow vacuum that fed air into the tins through a hole in the base. He suspended the contraption over the weighing pan of a pair of kitchen scales. When he switched on the apparatus, it was buoyed off the floor on a pillow of air.

He filed for a patent in late 1955, and the next year formed Hovercraft Ltd. In 1959, he launched the first practical air cushion vehicle, the SR-N1. It had a rubber skirt that helped contain the air cushion over rough ground or water.

This prototype crossed the English Channel in June 1959. It had a top speed of 10 mph and could not negotiate waves of more than 18 inches or land obstacles higher than a foot.

Nonetheless, the successful crossing sparked interest around the world. Manufacturing began in the United States, Japan, Sweden and France, as well as in Britain. Commercial service in Britain started in the early 1960s.

Cockerell was driven nearly to bankruptcy in the early years of his struggle to build the Hovercraft. He never got rich off it--”Good God, no,” he told an interviewer recently. Nor did he achieve widespread recognition, although he was knighted in 1969.

“He was a genius, one of those people who was never really appreciated in this country,” said Gary Billings, general manager of Hovercraft America in Germantown, Wis., one of a handful of Hovercraft manufacturers in the United States.

Hovercraft enthusiasts consist of a small but fervent community in the United States. About 5,000 to 10,000 Hovercraft are in operation here, used mainly for ice and flood rescues and recreation. Hovercraft racing fans will gather in Troy, Ohio, later this month for the Hovercraft Nationals. “Star Wars” fans are flocking to fast-food outlets for toys in the shape of the Hovercraft-inspired land speeders favored by Luke Skywalker, made by Hovercraft Concepts of Miami. All have Cockerell to thank.

A somewhat dyspeptic letter writer in his later years, Cockerell once complained to the London Times that British engineers and designers were accorded such lowly status and pay that the best fled to other countries. But he was not disappointed by the Hovercraft’s progress four decades after he invented it, nor was his belief in the value of his profession shaken.