British Spitfire - Engineers excel again

This coming weekend the spitfire will celebrates the 75th Anniversary of its first flight at Southampton Airport, this is a great piece of British engineering. RJ Mitchell was the designer and it was built by various companies around the south, in fact I started my career at Vickers Medical in Basingstoke where they made baby incubators, the incubator canopies where made of perspex and during the war they manufactured the canopies for the Spitfires. The Final development and assembly of the first spitfire was done at Hursley park where IBM have their labs. It can show you how events and missions can link very unrelated organisations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._J._Mitchell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarine_Spitfire

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarine

The Spitfire has a Rolls Royce Merlin engine (27 litre V12 engine) which a very distinctive tone, a few years ago there was a flight past  of 5 spitfires in formation, the sound of the engine was outstanding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Merlin

Where to Begin? and where will it end?

It has always been my view that Blogging is really a one way conversation about loosely coupled topics, I am beginning to think that I have reached a point where I can see the benefit, this is it I'm here and ready to write.

Lets start with me, I consider myself to be an Engineer, this is a noble profession and we should be proud of our heritage, we have built the modern world in less than 200 years. Often our work is taken for granted and not really understood, hopefully we can find the solutions to the modern day problems, sure the scientists might argue that they make the great discoveries but it is the army of Engineers that make it happen everyday.

I have worked for many companies, principally in Electrical & Electronic disciplines, but for 20+ years (has really been that long) in IT as both a customer and Service provider. I am sure I will spend more time Blogging about that in the future, although I will not write specifically about my employer, I will comment on the industry, technology and general gadgetry.

One of the key things I want to share is my car and its journey from a collection of component parts to an animated machine, I believe this a compensation for working in IT and service industries, where you do not produce a physical thing, I like to head to workshop and make, break, mend or modify something..... its the Engineer in me.

Til next time