Sir Bennett M. Jones

Sir Bennett Melvill Jones, CBE AFC FRS (28 January 1887 – 31 October 1975) was Francis Mond Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Cambridge from 1919 to 1952. He demonstrated the importance of streamlining in aircraft design. It had been known since the time of Aristotle, that a moving body passing through air or another fluid encounters resistance (aerodynamic drag), but Jones developed the ideas of Louis Charles Breguet into a refined theory to demonstrate emphatically the importance of drag to the performance of aircraft.

He was the eldest of the three children of Benedict Jones, a barrister, and Henrietta Cornelia Melvill, the South African widow of George William Bennett. His father served as mayor of Birkenhead. Jones was born in Rock Ferry, a suburb of Birkenhead. After attending a preparatory school in Rock Ferry, he was educated at Birkenhead School from 1898–1906. He recalled having great admiration for the headmaster who allowed him to give up cricket to give him more time to work with his father on engineering projects. He graduated with a first class honours degree from Emmanuel College, Cambridge in the mechanical sciences tripos in 1909.

After university he worked at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich in their workshop and was there until January 1911 when he joined in the Aerodynamics Department of the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington and then at Armstrong Whitworths where he worked on the design of airships until the outbreak of war in 1914. He was then seconded to the Royal Aircraft Factory, later the Royal Aircraft Establishment, where he worked on aerial gunnery until 1916 when he was transferred to the Air Armaments Experimental Station at Orfordness, which had established by Bertram Hopkinson who was then Head of the Engineering Department at Cambridge. Whilst there, Melvill learned to fly and served as a gunner for about six weeks in 1918 in a Bristol Fighter in No. 48 Squadron RAF with his younger brother, Benedict Henry Melvill Jones, as pilot. He was awarded the Air Force Cross and promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel (Benedict was killed in 1918 on an experimental flight.)

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