Slide Rule: The Autobiography of an Engineer

Nevil Shute best describes this autobiography in his own words: "Most of my adult life, perhaps all the worthwhile part of it, has been spent messing about with airplanes. For 30 years there was a period when airplanes would fly when you wanted them to, but there were still fresh things to be learned on every flight, a period when airplanes were small and so easily built that experiments were cheap and new designs could fly within six months of the first glimmer in the mind of the designer.

"T…