Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine by Julie Summers

of delayed-action bomb – an invention intended to spare lives but to damage property.  At any rate, Baker did not discourage Sandy although the hours he spent in the labs must have been to the detriment of his schoolwork.
    Shrewsbury School had acquired a German machine gun which had been captured by the British.  History does not relate how it was that the gun came to be at the school, but it became the focus of Sandy’s attention for a matter of many weeks.   He had heard that the equivalent British weapon had suffered some considerable numbers of very awkward stoppages.  Guns would jam and the result was that as much as half the machine gun force could be out of commission at any one time.  Sandy was given permission, presumably by Baker, to strip the gun down and study its mechanics.  He dismantled it entirely in the school workshops and spent endless hours making minute observations about the mechanisms.  It is an example of his extraordinary ability to focus on a problem and worry at it like a terrier with a rat until he found an explanation or came up with a solution. What he in fact established and what he suggested was that the different manufacturers of the ammunition were making their ammunition to a slightly different size.  This was not necessarily because they intended to but because in making 10 million rounds or 100 million rounds the dies that made the bullet cases would distend.  If the case for the bullet was too big it became a tight fit in the gun and the result would be a stoppage.  Whether or not this find was ever passed on to the War Office is not known but it encouraged him to go on and find solutions to other problems concerned with the machinery of war.
    Following his work on the German machine gun, Sandy turned his attention to aeroplanes, having heard from Hugh of some of the problems experienced by the Royal Flying Corps.  He invented, apparently from scratch, an interrupter gear which would permit a machine gun to fire through the propeller without making holes in it.  A logical and simple solution to a real problem.  He also designed a gyroscopic stabilizer for aircraft and caused a small stir by sending off beautifully worked up designs for these two inventions to the War Office in London.  The War Office had been sent many proposals during the course of the war but it was most unusual for such an accomplished design to be submitted by a fifteen-year-old school boy. Unfortunately both had been anticipated in essence by the British inventor, Sir Hiram Maxim but Sandy received most warm congratulations from the authorities and instructions to go on trying.  His ability to find solutions to problems was so wholly accepted within the family that no one considered his achievements as particularly remarkable.  When later a lot of fuss was made about his redesigning an oxygen system for the 1924 Mount Everest expedition no one was surprised that he advocated a complete rebuild of a system which had itself been designed by some of the most respected brains in the Flying Corps. 
    Despite the war family life continued in very much the same way as it had done prior to 1914.  Willie, at forty, did not enlist but he became an officer in the Birkenhead volunteer force and was awarded the rank of captain in recognition of his contribution.  In their usual generous and hospitable spirit, the Irvine family invited Dick Summers to join them on their family holiday in Summer 1917.  Thereafter he became a regular visitor and spent holidays with them every year until 1923.  The family was very kind to him and he was regarded quite quickly as simply another son or brother.  He joined in all activities with pleasure and had the added attraction of having access to a motor car which he would bring along, thus giving them all even greater freedom than they found on their bicycles.
    During the first summer term that Sandy was at Shrewsbury, 1917, in keeping with tradition, new boys were