^* As might be expected, high panjandrums in the prewar scientific civil service took differing views of Whittle’s proposals: a man named Harry Wimperis took against the idea—“Many had burned their fingers on gas-turbine projects and I don’t suppose you will be the last,” he remarked caustically to a Power Jets investor—but Wimperis’s senior, the legendary Henry Tizard, was very much a supporter, and ultimately it was Tizard’s view that prevailed. Tizard and Wimperis famously later worked together on the invention of radar. If Wimperis was skeptical of jet propulsion, it was but a temporary aberration: he was more generally an open-minded figure, as befits a recipient of a Whitworth Scholarship at Cambridge, named for the great Victorian engineer who was central to the story of precision a hundred years before.