Slide Rule Quotes

“Round the next corner and in the next street Adventure lies in wait for you. Oh, who can tell what you may meet Round the next corner and in the next street! Could life be anything but sweet When all is hazardous and new? Round the next corner and in the next street Adventure lies in wait for you. That”
― Nevil Shute, Slide Rule

“engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound;”
― Nevil Shute, Slide Rule

“I would divide the senior executives of the engineering world into two categories, the starters and the runners, the men with a creative instinct who can start a new venture and the men who can run it to make it show a profit.... I was a starter and useless as a runner.”
― Nevil Shute, Slide Rule

“reversing arms, and in the moving collapse that follows on the only order in the army that is not given in a tone of command—“Rest on your arms reversed.” The Dead March still brings back memories to me of pleasant excursions through Kent”
― Nevil Shute, Slide Rule

“The directors of a private or public limited company have little to fear if the enterprise fails, provided they have been honest and truthful and have done their best; their personal liability in such a case, I think, is limited to about ten pounds.”
― Nevil Shute, Slide Rule

“It was not till 1933 that the Douglas D.C.1 astonished the aeronautical world with its revolutionary design based on the new controllable propeller, the retractable undercarriage, and the new conception of the use of flaps. I doubt if any serious technician forecast the commercial use of aeroplanes to cross the Atlantic till that machine appeared,”
― Nevil Shute, Slide Rule

“In the middle of the night, at about two in the morning, the myriad lights of a city showed up ahead of us where Montreal should have been, but in the black sky above these lights, suspended in the night, we saw an enormous fiery cross. I stared at it in consternation till somebody voiced my secret thoughts, and said, “That’s not Montreal. That’s the New Jerusalem. This is it, boys.” We discovered later that Montreal, being a Roman Catholic city, has a great cross made of steel girders erected on the top of Mount Royal; this is picked out in electric lights. That night it brought a healthy laugh among a lot of very tired men.”
― Nevil Shute, Slide Rule

“Teddy was a combination flying suit used only in airships; it was made of Teddy Bear fleece inside and out.”
― Nevil Shute, Slide Rule

“On taking up my new job I spent many hours in reading old reports and records to find out what had been done in the field of airship calculations before, and when I came on the report of the R.38 accident enquiry I sat stunned, unable to believe the words that I was reading. I had come from the”
― Nevil Shute, Slide Rule

“pilots for the Royal Air Force on Renault Avros, a somewhat unusual version of the well known Avro 504 trainer which was probably dictated by the fact that rotary engines were going out of use and henceforward training had to be upon machines with stationary engines. My flying had to be conducted with the strictest economy, for my parents were selling capital to”
― Nevil Shute, Slide Rule

“The D.H.34 was still a single engined biplane powered by one Napier Lion engine, but the trend of development towards the modern aircraft was beginning to appear. Two pilots were seated side by side in an open cockpit behind the engine and in front of the top wing; behind them the full gap fuselage accommodated a cabin for eight passengers and, I think, a toilet. This was a bigger aeroplane even than the D.H.18; I forget its fully loaded weight but it was probably about 8000 lbs. It stalled at the incredibly high speed of 61 m.p.h., so that its introduction”
― Nevil Shute, Slide Rule

“Santos-Dumont Demoiselle, the Antoinette, and best of all, the Blériot XI that had flown the English Channel. For ten days I browsed in this wonderland with a mounting score of guilt and lies building up that I seemed powerless to do anything about. In the day time I could forget my crimes in studying the run of the wires from the cloche to the wings that controlled the wing warping on the Blériot, or trying to puzzle out how the engine of the Antoinette managed to run without a carburettor.”
― Nevil Shute, Slide Rule