Henry Tizard

"The secret of science", Tizard once said, "is to ask the right question, and it is the choice of problem more than anything else that marks the man of genius in the scientific world". His chosen problem became aeronautics. At the outbreak of World War I, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Royal Garrison Artillery on 17 October 1914, in which his training methods were famously bizarre. He later transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, where he became an experimental equipment officer and learned to fly planes after his eyesight improved. He acted as his own test pilot for making aerodynamic observations. When his superior Bertram Hopkinson was moved to the Ministry of Munitions, Tizard went with him. When Hopkinson died in 1918, Tizard took over his post. Tizard served in the Royal Air Force from 1918 to 1919, ending the war at the rank of temporary lieutenant colonel

After the end of the war, he was made Reader in Chemical Thermodynamics at Oxford University, where he experimented in the composition of fuel trying to find compounds which were resistant to freezing and less volatile, devising the concept of "toluene numbers", now referred to as octane ratings. After that work (largely for Shell), he took up again a government post in 1920 as Assistant Secretary to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.[1] His successes in that post (and after promotion to permanent secretary on 1 June 1927)[2] included the establishment of the post of the Chemical Research Laboratory in Teddington, the appointment of Harry Wimperis as Director of Scientific Research to the Air Force and finally the decision to leave to become the President and Rector of Imperial College London in 1929, a position he held until 1942, when he was elected President of Magdalen College, Oxford.

In 1935, the development of radar in the United Kingdom was started by Tizard's Aeronautical Research Committee (and Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, which he chaired since 1933) doing the first experimental work at Orfordness, near Ipswich, before moving to the nearby Bawdsey Research Station (BRS) in 1936.[3] In 1938, Tizard persuaded Mark Oliphant at Birmingham University to drop some of his nuclear research and concentrate on development of an improved source of short-wave radiation. This led to the invention by John Turton Randall and Harry Boot of the cavity magnetron, a major advance in radar technology, which in turn provided the basis for airborne interceptors using radar.[4]

In September 1940, after a top-secret landmark conference with Winston Churchill—at which his opposition to R.V. Jones' view that the Germans had established a system of radio-beam bombing aids (Battle of the Beams) over the UK had been overruled—Tizard led what became known as the Tizard Mission to the United States. This introduced to the US—among other things—the newly invented resonant-cavity magnetron (and other British radar developments), the Whittle gas turbine, and the British Tube Alloys (nuclear weapons) project.[5]

In 1946, Tizard remained in the defence establishment, chairing the Defence Research Policy Committee. He also chaired the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy from 1947 to 1952. In 1948, Tizard returned to the Ministry of Defence as Chief Scientific Adviser, a post he held until 1952. The Ministry of Defence's Nick Pope states that:

The Ministry of Defence’s UFO Project has its roots in a study commissioned in 1950 by the MOD's then Chief Scientific Adviser, the great radar scientist Sir Henry Tizard. As a result of his insistence that UFO sightings should not be dismissed without some form of proper scientific study, the department set up arguably the most marvellously-named committee in the history of the civil service, the Flying Saucer Working Party (FSWP).[6]

Tizard had followed the official debate about ghost rockets with interest and was intrigued by the increasing media coverage of UFO sightings in the United Kingdom, America and other parts of the world. Using his authority as Chief Scientific Adviser at the MOD he decided that the subject should not be dismissed without proper, official investigation. Accordingly, he agreed that a small Directorate of Scientific Intelligence/Joint Technical Intelligence Committee (DSI/JTIC) working party should be set up to investigate the phenomenon. This was dubbed the Flying Saucer Working Party. The DSI/JTIC minutes recording this historic development read as follows:

The Chairman said that Sir Henry Tizard felt that reports of flying saucers ought not to be dismissed without some investigation and he had, therefore, agreed that a small DSI/JTIC Working Party should be set up under the chairmanship of Mr Turney to investigate future reports.

After discussion, it was agreed that the members of the Working Party should be representatives from DSI1, ADNI(Tech), MI10 and ADI(Tech). It was also agreed that it would probably be necessary at some time to consult the Meteorological Department and ORS Fighter Command, but that these two bodies should not at present be asked to nominate representatives.

One of the most controversial meetings that Tizard had to attend in his capacity as chair of the Defence Research Policy Committee would emerge only many years later with the declassification of CIA documents: a meeting on 1 June 1951 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, between Tizard, Omond Solandt (chairman of Defence Research and Development Canada) and representatives of the CIA to discuss "brainwashing".[7]