J. W. Dunne(1875–1949)

John William Dunne was born at the Curragh garrison in County Roscommon on 2 December 1875, elder son of General Sir John Hart Dunne of the Royal Engineers, an Anglo-Irish career officer. The household moved from garrison to garrison across the Empire; he was schooled at English Catholic schools, finishing at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire.

He took a commission in the Imperial Yeomanry, transferred to the Wiltshire Regiment, and went to South Africa on the Boer War mobilisation in 1900. The mounted-infantry service produced the recognition that became the foundation of his aeronautical work: that a steady pilot in an inherently stable flying machine could deliver more usable reconnaissance in an hour than a cavalry patrol could in a day. He was invalided home in 1902 and placed on half-pay, and turned to the theoretical and experimental work that produced the first inherently-stable aircraft of the post-Wright period.

The Dunne aircraft programme ran from 1906 to 1914. He persuaded the Army's Balloon Factory at Farnborough to fund an experimental programme on an inherent-stability principle he had worked out from the post-Wright fixed-wing instability problem: a swept-wing arrowhead monoplane with a forward centre of gravity that could be stable in all three axes. He built the experimental Dunne D.1 in 1907, first tested on the ridge above Blair Atholl, and the Dunne D.5 in 1910, the first inherently-stable powered aircraft in Europe, first flown at Eastchurch in March 1910. The Dunne D.8 was demonstrated hands-off at the 1913 Paris Air Show, the foundational demonstration of the inherent-stability principle.

The aircraft programme was wound up at the outbreak of the First World War on the standardisation of the Royal Flying Corps on conventional reconnaissance aircraft. He turned, in the 1920s, to the philosophical and popular-science writing of his second career. An Experiment with Time (1927), written at his Hampshire house, set out a theory of time, dreams and the precognitive-experience phenomenon from a dream-and-journal method he had kept since 1898.

An Experiment with Time set out the Serialism theory of time he developed further across The Serial Universe (1934), The New Immortality (1938) and Nothing Dies (1940). Its literary influence across the 1930s and 1940s was substantial: J. B. Priestley's Time and the Conways, I Have Been Here Before and An Inspector Calls run on explicit Dunne premises, T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton on Dunne-influenced time imagery, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men on the fourth-dimension premise, and Jorge Luis Borges acknowledged the foundational influence on The Garden of Forking Paths and The Aleph. He died at his Hampshire house on 24 August 1949, seventy-three years old. The Dunne name, the Leinster-midlands patronymic Ó Duinn, he carried from an Anglo-Irish Roscommon garrison family into the foundation of British inherent-aerodynamic-stability theory and the popular literature of precognitive time.