Sir George White - Businessman not Pilot

Make sure your volume is on: "...it was really a different mindset I think..."

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I think one has to say that his claim to fame is not that he invented the aeroplane because he clearly didn't, but what he did was to invent to aircraft industry. He was the first person, Handley Page and Short brothers beat him in terms of founding companies to build aeroplanes in Great Britain, but the capital which the two of them had was 500 pounds each. If I recall correctly my great Grandfather started off with 25,000 and then very quickly went up to 100,000 and then 200,000 investment in the scheme. So he set up an aircraft factory which was properly organised, properly financed and properly run. Nobody else was doing that, it was really a different mindset I think, because most of the aircraft companies which subsequently became famous were founded by young men who desperately wanted to get in the air themselves and all they wanted to do actually was to build a single aeroplane and fly. My great grandfather was not doing that at all, he was building aeroplanes in numbers so that other people could fly.