J. W. Dunne(1875–1949)

John William Dunne was born at the Curragh garrison house at the County Roscommon barracks on 2 December 1875, elder son of General Sir John Hart Dunne, an Anglo-Irish career officer of the Royal Engineers who at the time of his elder son's birth was commanding the Curragh Royal Engineers detachment, and Julia Elizabeth Chapman, the daughter of a Coldstream Guards officer. The household was Anglo-Irish small-gentry-military: the father moved from garrison to garrison across the Empire-Indian-and-British-domestic postings of the 1870s and 1880s; the boys (John William and his brother) were boarded across the period at the English Catholic school at Beaumont College, Old Windsor, and at the English Catholic school at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire from 1888.

He left Stonyhurst at eighteen in 1893 to take a commission in the Imperial Yeomanry rather than the Sandhurst-and-regular-officer route his father had wanted for him; he served briefly in the Imperial Yeomanry through the late 1890s, transferred to the 4th-Battalion Wiltshire Regiment as a regular subaltern in 1900, and went out to South Africa in early 1900 on the Boer War mobilisation. The Boer War service through 1900-01 produced the mounted-infantry experience that he later described as the foundational episode in his subsequent aeronautical work: the recognition (in a skirmishing engagement near Bloemfontein in 1900) that a steady-hand pilot of an inherently-stable flying machine could deliver more usable reconnaissance information per hour than a mounted-cavalry patrol could deliver per day. He was invalided home in 1902 with chronic typhoid contracted on the Bloemfontein-Free-State campaign, was placed on the permanent half-pay list in 1903 at twenty-eight, and through the next four years developed the theoretical-and-experimental working that produced the first inherently-stable aircraft design in the post-Wright-Brothers period.

The Dunne aircraft programme ran from 1906 to 1914. He persuaded the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough (then the Army Balloon Factory under Colonel Sir John Capper) to fund a experimental programme on a new inherent-aerodynamic-stability principle that he had worked out from a theoretical study of the post-Wright Brothers fixed-wing-aircraft pitch-and-yaw instability problem. The senior British military aircraft of the pre-1914 period required the constant active pilot input to maintain stable flight (the Wright Flyer was inherently unstable in pitch; the Bleriot XI was inherently unstable in yaw); Dunne argued from his theoretical study that a swept-wing arrowhead-shape monoplane with a forward-set centre of gravity could be inherently stable in all three axes (pitch, yaw and roll). He built the experimental Dunne D.1 at Farnborough in 1907 (the first flight test was on the ridge above Blair Atholl in Perthshire on 26 September 1907; the aircraft glided successfully for fifty yards) and the Dunne D.5 in 1910 (the first inherently-stable powered aircraft in Europe; the first powered flight was at the Eastchurch aerodrome on the Isle of Sheppey in March 1910). He went on to build the Dunne D.7, D.8 and D.10 across the 1910 to 1913 period; the Dunne D.8 was demonstrated at the 1913 Paris Air Show with the pilot J. C. Pixton flying it hands-off across a five-minute aerial demonstration that the French aeronautical establishment recognised as the foundational demonstration of the inherent-aerodynamic-stability principle.

The small Dunne aircraft programme was wound up at the outbreak of the First World War on the Royal Flying Corps post-1914 standardisation on the B.E.2 conventional-fixed-wing reconnaissance aircraft. He was at the Farnborough establishment through the war on a consultative basis but was effectively out of the operational aircraft-design work after 1914. He turned, in the post-war 1920s period, to the philosophical-and-popular-science writing that produced the second working register of his career. *An Experiment with Time* (1927), the two-hundred-and-eighty-page volume he wrote at his Hampshire country house through the spring and summer of 1926, was the foundation popular-philosophical book of post-First-World-War British thought on time, dreams and the precognitive-experience phenomenon that he claimed to have studied from a dream-and-journal experimental method he had been keeping since 1898.

*An Experiment with Time* set out the four-volume *Serialism* theory of time that he subsequently developed across *The Serial Universe* (1934), *The New Immortality* (1938) and *Nothing Dies* (1940). The small four-volume *Serialism* metaphysical scheme posited that time is a four-dimensional small extension of the three spatial dimensions, that the conscious-observing-mind moves along the fourth dimension at a constant rate during waking life, that dreaming permits the observing-mind to range backward and forward along the fourth dimension and to perceive small future events alongside small past events (the foundational small explanation of the precognitive-dream phenomenon), and that the fully-conscious-observing-mind requires a fifth dimension along which a second-order observing-mind moves at a constant rate (and so on through an infinite regress of small higher-order observers). The metaphysics was, by the 1950s academic philosophical-consensus, scientifically untestable and metaphysically unstable; the literary-cultural impact across the 1930s and 1940s was, however, substantial. J. B. Priestley's *Time and the Conways* (1937), *I Have Been Here Before* (1937) and *An Inspector Calls* (1945) ran on small explicit Dunne-serialism premises; T. S. Eliot's *Burnt Norton* (1936) ran on small Dunne-influenced time imagery (*Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future*); Olaf Stapledon's *Last and First Men* (1930) drew on the fourth-dimension premise; Jorge Luis Borges read the *An Experiment with Time* across the 1930s in Buenos Aires and acknowledged the foundational influence on the *Garden of Forking Paths* (1941) and the *Aleph* (1949). He died at the Hampshire house at Banbury on 24 August 1949, seventy-three years old, of chronic respiratory illness traceable to the Boer War typhoid of 1902. The Dunne name in the Irish-side catalogue is the patronymic *Ó Duinn* (descendant of Donn, the brown or dark one), the foundational Leinster-Midlands surname of the medieval Uí Riagáin of Laois and Offaly; he carried the Anglo-Irish Roscommon-garrison-officer variant of it into the foundation of British inherent-aerodynamic-stability theory and the post-First-World-War popular-philosophical literature of precognitive time.