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1951: Arthur Clifford Hartley
Arthur Clifford Hartley (1889-1960)
66th President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers
Hartley was born in 1889 at Springbank, Hull in England. He attended Hymers College, Hull, and the Hull Municipal Technical College. From 1908 he attended the Central Technical College, Imperial College of Science and Technology. He graduated in 1910 with an Honours BSc engineering degree.
After graduation he worked in the office of the Chief Docks Engineer, North Eastern Railway, Hull. From 1912 to 1914 he was an assistant with Rose, Downs and Thompson, Ltd.
During the First World War, Hartley was commissioned in the Royal Flying Corps, where he qualified as a pilot. For much of the time he served in the Air Ministry on experimental armament work. This included one of his most significant contributions, the Constantinesco gear for synchronizing machine guns, which allowed Vickers machine guns to be fixed between the blades of tractor aircraft propellers, able to fire straight ahead. He was awarded the military OBE in 1918.
In 1924 he joined the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. Ltd., later the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. Ltd. The following year he was made Assistant Manager of the Engineering Department, and the same year Assistant Manager of the Supply Department. He was seconded to the Iraq Petroleum Co. from 1932 to 1934 for the design and development of the Kirkuk to Mediterranean desert oil pipelines. On his return to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co Ltd. he held the position of Chief Engineer, which he held until his retirement at the end of 1950
Hartley was released by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co from 1940 onwards for war work. From 1940 to 1941 he assisted with the development and production of a stabilized automatic bomb-sight. From April 1942 he worked with the Petroleum Division of the Ministry of Fuel and Power on the PLUTO project – the pipeline under the ocean which supplied fuel for the Allied invasion of France. From October 1942 until the end of the war he worked on the FIDO project, which sought a solution to the problem of poor visibility caused by fog. The solution, oil burners alongside runways, was successfully implemented at fifteen airfields, allowing more than 25000 aircraft to land safely during foggy conditions.
He was awarded the CBE in 1944, and the United States Medal of Freedom in 1946.
He was President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1951 and President of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1959, although he died only three months into his term, on 28 January 1960.
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