A YouTube video by a member of the engineering team that salvaged and restored Donald Campbell’s jet boat Bluebird from Lake Coniston explores why the boat’s recent return to that lake proved a bit of a damp squib.
The back story is that his team worked on the boat they had found and salvaged for many years, to restore it to the same condition as it was in for its final fatal speed record attempt in 1967. This included sourcing a new engine as similar to the destroyed original as possible, which owing to unavailability involved getting part of a similar engine, and building the rest so that it would fit into the existing hull and fittings without damage to the original structure.
Many other such fixes were necessary, partly to accommodate this new engine’s peculiarities. The many problems encountered over the course of the rebuild taught them the particular needs of this one-off engineering artefact, including its quirks and how to handle them in operation. During its active life the boat underwent much development and modification over its twelve-year existence, so the team were “thinking Campbell’s team’s thoughts after them” as well as finding their own solutions to new problems, and complying with higher safety standards.
The net result was that Bluebird worked more or less “out of the box” when it ran on Loch Fad in 2018 up to speeds of 150mph. But disagreements between the restoration team and the museum in Coniston, over who had ownership of the project, resulted in litigation won by the latter. The owner of the replacement engine (developed for jet fighters and consequently sophisticated and hard to handle) refused to let the inexperienced museum team use it, for safety reasons as well as, perhaps, pique. So it had to be removed by the original team before transfer to Coniston, which essentially meant reducing Bluebird to inoperable condition again.
The engineer making the video contends that the new team’s substitution of a Folland Gnat trainer engine (necessitating butchering parts of the original boat’s structure to make it fit) was bound to lead to failure, which indeed it did. In his view, since the new team lacked the intimate knowledge gained over years of restoration work and testing, they simply underestimated the complexities involved.
What stimulated my interest for this post was a metaphor that the engineer employs at the following point in the video, the relevant part being up to about 26 minutes 30 seconds:
That very much reminded me of Stuart Burgess’s book Ultimate Engineering, whose message I covered here. Burgess gives many examples of the difference between his own design-engineering approach to biological structures and functions, and that of evolutionary biologists.
The latter will tend to say that the evolutionary task of, say, producing a long necked giraffe from a short necked one is pretty simple. The individuals with longer necks tend to survive better when food is short, and given ten thousand generations or so, hey presto! The job is done. The adaptational just-so story doesn’t work anyway, as I argued here twelve years ago. But thei hand-waving lack of detail shows they are equivalent to an inexperienced engineering team saying, “How hard can it be just to shove a new engine in Bluebird and get it to plane?”
Burgess, however, having (like the Bluebird salvage team) had to understand, from the ground up, the integration of all the systems required for a giraffe to work, would argue that natural selection is simply too crude a tool to handle such complexity. This is not a contradiction of evolutionary biology, which recognises the severe limitations of mutation and selection by calling evolution a “tinkerer” or a “bodger.” What evolutionary biologists lack is the knowledge that the results are not, in fact, “bodges,” but astonishingly integrated biological systems. Someone other than a blind watchmaker has actualised the kind of in-depth systems engineering knowledge gained by the original Bluebird team.
So a cow is not simply a grass-eating box on hooves, and transplanting its liver into a human is not going to help the recipient, whose physiology is totally different. The video is, of course, considering the cow as a Folland Gnat trainer. But in fact, compared to a cow, even Bluebird K7 is a crude bodge.
