Barnes Wallis

Barnes Wallis was an English engineer and inventor, born in 1887 and died in 1979, who worked for the Vickers company from 1913 until his retirement in 1971. He pioneered geodetic airframe construction, a lattice-like structural technique that produced light, strong aircraft frames, applying it first to airships including the R100 and later to the Vickers Wellington bomber. He is best known for inventing the bouncing bomb used by the Royal Air Force in the May 1943 Operation Chastise raid on German dams in the Ruhr Valley, later commemorated as the Dambusters raid, and he went on to develop the very large deep-penetration Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs, forerunners of later bunker-busting weapons, before working on early swing-wing aircraft research after the war.