John William Dunne was born on 2 December 1875 in
Curragh Camp, a British Army establishment in
County Kildare, Ireland. He was the oldest son of Irishman Sir
John Hart Dunne KCB (1835–1924) and his English wife Julia Elizabeth Dunne (née Chapman). Despite being born in Ireland of an Irish father, he had an English mother and was born in Ireland only because his father was Lieutenant-Colonel of the British 99th (Lanarkshire) Regiment, who happened to be stationed there at the time. He spent most of his childhood and subsequent career in England. At an early age he suffered a bad accident and was confined to bed for several years. During this time he became interested in philosophy. While still only nine years old he asked his nurse about the nature of time. At the age of 13 he had a dream in which he was in a flying machine that needed no steering.
Military career Following the outbreak of the
Second Boer War, Dunne volunteered for the
Imperial Yeomanry as an ordinary Trooper and fought in
South Africa under
General Roberts. In 1900 he was caught up in an epidemic of
typhoid fever and was invalided home. Recovered and commissioned as a
Second Lieutenant in the
Wiltshire Regiment on 28 August 1901, he went back to South Africa to serve a second tour in March 1902. He fell ill again and was diagnosed with heart disease, causing him to again return home the next year. Much of his remaining time in the Army would be spent on aeronautical work while on sick leave. On his return to England for the second time he resumed his study of flight and by 1906 had developed a tailless, swept-wing "arrowhead" configuration which was inherently stable and would become his trademark. At the request of
Colonel John Capper, the unit's commanding officer, in June 1906 he was assigned to the new
Army Balloon Factory in South Farnborough. Dunne wanted to construct a monoplane, but at the time the Army demanded biplanes and Capper instructed him accordingly. A manned glider, the
D.1, with provision for fitting engines and propellers, was constructed under great secrecy and, in July 1907, was taken to
Blair Atholl in the
Scottish Highlands for flight testing. On its one successful flight, Capper flew it for just long enough to demonstrate its stability before crashing into a wall. It was repaired and fitted with its powered chassis, but was damaged on its first and only attempted flight when the takeoff trolley veered off course. In the winter of 1907–1908 Dunne designed the
Dunne-Huntington triplane and a smaller glider, the D.2, to test the design. The glider was not built but the full-scale craft would eventually be built by
A. K. Huntington and flown successfully from 1910. The 1908 season at Blair Atholl saw two new machines brought up from Farnborough, the D.3 glider and the
D.4 powered aeroplane. The glider flew well at the hands of Lt. Launcelot Gibbs, while the D.4 had limited success being badly underpowered and consequently, in Dunne's words, "more a hopper than a flyer". Dunne returned to the Balloon Factory in the midst of a Government Inquiry into military aeronautics. As a result of its findings the
War Office stopped all work on powered aircraft and in the spring of 1909 Dunne left the Balloon Factory. By now, he was also an official in the
Aeronautical Society. With his friends' financial investment Dunne formed the Blair Atholl Aeroplane Syndicate to continue his experiments and took up hangar space on the
Aero Club's new flying ground at Eastchurch on the
Isle of Sheppey.
Short Brothers had a manufacturing facility there and were contracted to build the
D.5, a broadly similar biplane in which Dunne installed a more powerful 35 hp
Green engine. Following a series of increasingly successful flights, on 20 December 1910 Dunne demonstrated the inherent stability of the D.5 to an amazed audience who included two official observers,
Orville Wright and
Griffith Brewer, making it the first aeroplane to be demonstrably stable in flight. He was able to take both hands off the controls and make notes on a piece of paper. Dunne's next design, free of Army influence, was a monoplane, the
D.6, which was built by his former commanding officer, Col. Capper. It failed to fly but its derivatives, the D.7 and D.7bis, flew throughout 1911–1913. British-built examples were flown both at Sheppey and at
Larkhill on
Salisbury Plain, and one was also built by the
Astra company in France. Parallel with the monoplane work, the
Dunne D.8 biplane was developed from the D.5. In 1913 an example was bought by Nieuport (who had taken over Astra's aeroplane business) and flown across the Channel to France. The next year a much reorganised Farnborough evaluated the type. Production was licensed to both Nieuport in France and
Burgess in America, however only the Burgess-Dunne was manufactured in any quantity. From 1913, Dunne's continuing ill health forced him to retire from active flying. The Blair Atholl Syndicate was taken over by armaments conglomerate
Armstrong Whitworth and Dunne began work on a D.11. When war broke out in 1914, the project was abandoned and Dunne moved on to other work. The SPR's journal editor even prefaced his report with a disclaimer distancing the Society from his findings and Dunne gave his own version two years later in a new edition of his book. When the playwright
J. B. Priestley premiered his 1937
time play Time and the Conways, Dunne lectured the cast on his theory. He later gave a television broadcast. Dunne continued to work on serialism throughout the rest of his life and wrote several more books, as well as frequent updates to
An Experiment with Time. On 3 July 1928, at the age of 52, he married the Hon. Cicely Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, daughter of
Geoffrey Cecil Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 18th Baron Saye and Sele, and they lived for a good deal of time after that at the family seat of
Broughton Castle. They had two children and he wrote up some of his bedtime stories to them in two more books,
The Jumping Lions of Borneo and
St. George and the Witches (published in the US as
An Experiment with St. George).
Death Dunne died in
Banbury, England, on 24 August 1949, aged 73. ==Aircraft== Dunne created some of the first practical and stable aircraft. The majority were unusual in being of
tailless swept configuration. Stability was achieved by progressively rolling the leading edge down from root to tip, a feature known as
washout. Careful balance of its characteristics allowed the use of only two flight controls. A disadvantage of this was that, without a rudder, crosswind landings were not possible and the approach had to be made into the wind. Aircraft designed by Dunne included: •
D.1, 1907. Biplane, flown first as a glider, then the powered version was damaged on its first takeoff attempt. • D.2. Proposed small test glider for the
Dunne-Huntington triplane, not built. •
Dunne-Huntington triplane, designed 1907–1908, flown 1910. Triple tandem wing with high-mounted central wing and smaller fore wing, leading some to refer to it as a biplane. Constructed by Professor
A. K. Huntington to Dunne's design, the only type which was not of tailless swept configuration. • D.3, 1908. Biplane glider, flew well. •
D.4, 1908. Powered biplane, achieved short hops. •
D.5, 1910. Powered biplane. First Dunne aeroplane to fly, first tailless aeroplane to fly, stable in flight. Following an accident it was rebuilt in modified form as the D.8. •
D.6, 1911. Monoplane, never flew. •
D.7, 1911. Monoplane, flew well. The D.7-bis was a
Gnome-powered version of the D.7. •
D.8, 1912. Biplane, several built. The D.8-bis was a
Gnome-powered version of the D.8; an example flew from
Eastchurch to Paris in 1913. • D.9, 1913. Unequal-span biplane or
sesquiplane project, never completed. ==Dry fly fishing==