In the early 1950s, Britain led the world in jet engines.
The best of these was the Rolls Royce Nene, the most powerful jet engine yet developed.
The Russians didn’t have a jet engine for their air force.
The cold war was just beginning.
They wanted an engine like the Rolls Royce Nene.
But it had taken Sir Frank Whittle a decade to design and build it.
They didn’t have that long to catch up with the west.
Russia’s top aero-engineers asked Stalin to buy a Rolls Royce Nene.
Stalin said “What sort of idiot would sell us his secrets?”
But the Russians asked anyway.
And, as luck would have it, just such an idiot was the Minister of Trade.
Sir Stafford Cripps.
He had been Ambassador to Russia during the war.
He sold the Russians the Rolls Royce Nene, plus blueprints, on the agreement that they would manufacture them under licence.
This deal was worth £207 million (over £9 billion today).
But of course the money was never paid.
Because the Russians never manufactured them under licence.
They simply reverse-engineered the Rolls Royce Nene.
In other words, they took it apart, worked out how it ran, and built their own engine.
This engine then powered the MiG 15, the first fighter capable of 1,000 kph.
It could fly higher and faster than anything the USA or Britain had.
The British Chief of Air Staff said “The Russians have achieved a lead of at least four years over us”.
Eventually, around 15,000 MiG 15s were produced.
In the Korean War, MiG 15 pilots shot down hundreds of allied aircraft.
In fact, just 3 soviet pilots got 58 kills between them.
All thanks to Sir Stafford Cripps.
Like the Russians, I’m a big fan of reverse engineering.
That’s how I always learned.
Whether anyone wanted to teach me or not.
I’d study what they did and take it apart.
Over the ten years I worked for, and with, John Webster that’s exactly what I did.
“Why did John think of that and I didn’t?”
“Why did John put that music with that picture?”
“Where did he get that animation technique from?”
“How did he come up with that sound effect?”
“Where did he find that voice?”
“Why did he carry on thinking when I would have stopped?”
“How did he rewrite that brief?”
“Why didn’t he do a conventional strapline?”
“Why didn’t he mention all the product points?”
Like the Russians, I was convinced if I took apart what John had made I could work out how to make it too.
Which bit went where?
Where did it come from?
How did it fit?
Of course I never did learn everything John knew, because John was intuitive.
Out thinking John was like trying to nail a jelly to a wall.
But I did learn a lot by trying.
I learned a lot about being creative by developing that muscle.
By reverse engineering solutions I admired.
Good post Dave, so true this. I read somewhere recently (apologies that I can’t remember where) about an old copywriter who used to copy all of the best ads out of the awards (one show I think?) annual each year, write them out in his notebook by hand, to try to unpick them and learn from them. There’s very little of this kind of learning around in advertising, possibly because of the mistaken notion that the only good is ‘new’.
I agree Vic.
If we want to build on what went before we need to learn what went before.
otherwise we’re just making the same mistakes they made all over again.
http://ex-blank-page.blogspot.ro/2014/07/370.html
Wrong link, sorry. 🙂
http://styled-comments.blogspot.ro/2014/07/370.html
Anca,
What I found was that John used to do the same as me: reverse-engineer the work of the people he respected to understand how they thought.
He told me learned about how music worked with film by de-constructing the way Kubrick did it.
He learned witty visual humour by unpacking how Jaques Tati did it.
He learned comedy by unpacking Laurel & Hardy.
Not to copy them.
But to learn from the principals they applied.
I think the great people always learn from the people who went before them.
Picasso did that with Velasquez.
Michelangelo and Da Vinci did it with Greek and Roman sculpture.
No surprise, Dave. That’s how he LEARNED, but that’s not how he was DOING what he was doing – you can’t deconstruct what you’re ABOUT to do. He trained his mind to spot/encourage/provoke happy accidents, non-traditional combinations, “optical illusions” of all churches. And that’s probably what you’ve done, too.
Absolutely agree Anca: “When preparation meets opportunity”