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Some of you may have forgotten about Geoff Pyke. Always worth being reminded about Geoff Pyke. He's mainly remembered for experiments with pykrete, a sort of wood-pulp infused super ice which doesn't melt easily and is incredibly strong, and out of which he wanted to make an aircraft carrier during the war, which would be a huge, cheap floating island and almost impervious to torpedoes.

As Cabinet Magazine explains:

In late 1942, Lord Louis Mountbatten — the British military's Chief of Combined Operations — paid a visit to Winston Churchill at his official country home, Chequers. Mountbatten had with him a small parcel of great importance. A member of Churchill's staff apologized that the Prime Minister was at that moment in his bath.

"Good," said Mountbatten as he bounded up the stairs. "That's exactly where I want him to be." Mountbatten entered the steaming bathroom to find Churchill in the tub. It was generally not a wise thing to interrupt Sir Winston in his bathtub.

"I have," Mountbatten explained, "a block of a new material that I would like to put in your bath."

Mountbatten opened his parcel and dropped its contents between the Prime Minister's bare legs in the water. It was a chunk of ice.

Rather than bellow at his Chief of Combined Operations, Churchill stared at the ice intently — and so, standing by the bathtub, did Mountbatten himself. Minutes passed, and still they looked into the steaming depths of bath water before them. The ice was not melting.

The resulting project produced HMS Habbakuk (mispelling by a clerk of the biblical Habakkuk*) which sort of worked, but never got followed through on because we started winning the war.

Some other good stuff about Pyke:

- At the start of WWI he blagged his way over to Germany as a war correspondent and was imprisoned as a spy. He did some statistics on failure rates of escapes and decided a daytime run-for-it was his best bet. He escaped and the story of same was a big scoop, and he lectured about his experience.
- He set up a school, funded it via investments, he lost his money (some of the more exciteable accounts out there say that as an early futures trader, he once controlled a quarter of the world's tin supply).
- He did some private opinion polling to try to understand what Germans really thought of the Nazis. His questioners posed as golfing tourists.
- After WWII, he had the idea of powering trains with muscle-power. Twenty-thirty people on bicycle-like contraptions powering a cycle-tractor (as Wikipedia calls it - I don't know what a cyclo-tractor is). Pyke understood that this was distasteful, but the energy in sugar was similar to that in coal, and Europe had people and sugar rather than coal, so, in calorific terms...


*Habakkuk is one of the more unknown prophets.