Christopher Cockerell

Sir Christopher Sydney Cockerell (1910 to 1999) was an English engineer best known as the inventor of the hovercraft. Born in Cambridge, the son of the museum curator Sir Sydney Cockerell, he studied mechanical engineering at Peterhouse and worked for W. H. Allen and then for the Marconi Company, where he led a research team and worked on radar. After the war he bought a small Norfolk boat hire firm, Ripplecraft, and began to ask how a craft could go faster. He reasoned that if air were channelled as a narrow jet around the perimeter of the craft, the moving curtain would hold a cushion of pressure under it and lift the whole craft clear of the water, removing drag. He tested the idea with a vacuum cleaner and two tin cans, filed his first patent in 1955, and the government and the National Research Development Corporation backed the SR.N1, which crossed the English Channel on 25 July 1959. He was knighted and received an honorary doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1971.