Mervyn Joseph Pius O'Gorman (19 December 1871 – 16 March 1958) was a British electrical and aircraft engineer. After working as an electrical engineer, he was appointed Superintendent of what became the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough in Hampshire in 1909. In 1916, following a scandal over the quality of the aircraft used by the Royal Flying Corps, he was removed from this post but continued to act in an advisory capacity. After the war he concentrated his energies on motoring issues, particularly road safety and traffic management, and played an important part in the publication of the Highway Code. He died in 1958 in Chelsea, London.
Birth and early life Mervyn Gorman was born in Brighton on 19 December 1871, the son of Edmund Anthony Gorman (1821-1912) and his third wife Margaret Eliza Barclay Crawford (1849-1899). Later in life, Mervyn readopted the O' prefix to his surname, which had been dropped by his Irish great-grandfather Thomas O'Gorman (1724–1800) after he moved to England in 1747. Sources give various addresses for Mervyn's father: East Bergholt, Suffolk; Harrogate, Yorkshire; and Monamore, County Clare, Ireland. His younger brother was Cecil Carleton Crawford O'Gorman, a mining engineer and painter who lived in Mexico. Mervyn was educated at St Edmund's College, Ware, at Downside School and at University College, Dublin, where he read classics and science.
Early career In 1891 O'Gorman went to London to study electrical engineering at the City and Guilds Central Institution. He was elected an associate member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1893, and obtained his City and Guilds diploma in 1894, his marks being amongst the best in his year. On graduating he obtained a position as an assistant engineer at the Fowler, Waring Cables Company, and was sent to take charge of the company's cable networks in Ostend and Grenoble. Back in England he assisted with the laying of 3000 volt systems in Salford, Leicester and Taunton, and took part in experiments on the use of celluloid as an insulator. He was rapidly promoted to chief engineer, and reorganised the company's factory near London before being sent to Paris in 1895 to set up a new cable factory for a French company; in 1896 he became Fowler Waring's general manager. In 1898 Fowler Waring became part of Western Electric and O'Gorman left the company and started an engineering consultancy at 66 Victoria Street, London in partnership with E. H. Cozens-Hardy. The partnership was brought to an end in October 1908 when Cozens-Hardy left London for St Helens to take a place on the board of the glass manufacturers Pilkingtons. O'Gorman was a keen motorist, being an active member of the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland, and he published a book on the subject, O'Gorman's Motoring Pocket Book, in 1904; he also wrote articles on motoring for The Times. In August 1908 at a race meeting at Brooklands, the mechanic accompanying one of the racers in the first O'Gorman Trophy race was killed in an accident after a Mercedes two-seater was taken high up on the banks to pass another car - both going at speed. The Mercedes lost control and careened across the track ejecting both occupants resulting in the death of the 21 year old mechanic.
Royal Aircraft Factory In 1909 R. B. Haldane, then Secretary of State for War, selected O'Gorman as the person who would bring his vision of order and scientific discipline to the development of military aviation. As a part of this programme, the Balloon Factory at Farnborough was to be removed from the military and placed under civilian scientific administration. In October 1909 O'Gorman was appointed as the first civilian Superintendent of the Balloon Factory. He replaced Col. John Capper, who retained his command of the Army Balloon School also located there. When O'Gorman took over the Balloon Factory, official interest was still focussed on lighter-than-air flight. Some highly secret experiments had been conducted by J. W. Dunne at Blair Atholl, and S. F. Cody had built and flown the British Army Aeroplane No 1, but all funding had been withdrawn from both of these projects in April 1909. The British Army Airship No.2 was then under construction at the Balloon Factory. The new system, under which O'Gorman reported directly to the Master-General of the Ordnance at the War Office, was intended to bypass military traditionalists, many of whom failed to see any military value in aircraft of any description. The purpose of what was to become known as the Royal Aircraft Factory was to be research, carried out in conjunction with the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington. (The title Royal Aircraft Factory is misleading since it was never the intention to mass produce aircraft; rather, research would be carried out, leading to designs which would be manufactured by private companies.) O'Gorman devised a system of categorising aircraft according to their layout. Pusher configuration aircraft with a forward elevator in addition to a rear-mounted tailplane and rudder carried on booms were designated as Farman Type, after the highly successful and widely imitated Farman III. Canard configuration aircraft became Santos Type, after Alberto Santos Dumont's 14-bis aircraft, and tractor configuration aircraft were designated Blériot Type after Louis Blériot's Type XI, a system set forth in an article entitled Some Problems in Aircraft Design published in Flight in 1911. Accordingly De Havilland's aircraft was renamed the Farman Experimental I, or F.E.1. Although the remit of the Factory did not include the actual construction of aircraft, experimental alterations were sanctioned. Under O'Gorman a system of 'repairing' aircraft by replacing the entire airframe, often changing the basic configuration of the aircraft, was instituted. A letter from Theodore Ridge, the Works Superintendent, is worth quoting in full:
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