John William Dunne FRAeS (2 December 1875 – 24 August 1949) was a British soldier, engineer, and philosopher. As a young man, he served in the Second Boer War. Later, he became an early leader in designing airplanes during the early 1900s. Dunne worked on creating aircraft that could stay steady on their own, many of which had a special design with no tail and wings that sloped backward. These designs helped produce the first aircraft shown to be stable. After this, he developed a new method for dry fly fishing. He then turned to philosophy, where he gained attention for his ideas about time and consciousness. His theory, called "serialism," was first explained in his 1927 book An Experiment with Time.

Biography

John William Dunne was born on 2 December 1875 in Curragh Camp, a British Army base in County Kildare, Ireland. He was the oldest son of Sir John Hart Dunne KCB (1835–1924), an Irishman, and Julia Elizabeth Dunne (née Chapman), an English woman. Although he was born in Ireland and had an Irish father, he also had an English mother. His family lived in Ireland because his father was a military officer in the British 99th (Lanarkshire) Regiment, which was stationed there at the time.

Most of Dunne’s childhood and career took place in England. When he was very young, he had a serious accident and was bedridden for several years. During this time, he became interested in philosophy. At age nine, he asked his nurse about the nature of time. At 13, he dreamed of flying in a machine that did not need steering.

When the Second Boer War began, Dunne joined the Imperial Yeomanry as a regular soldier and fought in South Africa under General Roberts. In 1900, he became seriously ill with typhoid fever and was sent home.

After recovering, he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Wiltshire Regiment on 28 August 1901. He returned to South Africa in March 1902 but fell ill again and was diagnosed with heart disease. He returned to England the next year. Much of his remaining time in the Army was spent working on aeronautical projects during sick leave.

While on sick leave in 1901, Dunne began studying flight seriously. His first model was inspired by a book by Jules Verne but did not work. He watched birds closely and believed that a safe airplane needed to be aerodynamically stable. Encouraged by H. G. Wells, whom he met in 1902, he built many small models that led to the development of a stable, tailless, swept-wing design.

After returning to England for the second time, Dunne continued studying flight. By 1906, he had created a tailless, swept-wing "arrowhead" design that was stable and became his trademark.

In June 1906, Dunne was assigned to the Army Balloon Factory in South Farnborough at the request of Colonel John Capper. Although Dunne wanted to build a monoplane, the Army required biplanes, and Capper followed this instruction.

A manned glider, the D.1, was built in secret and taken to Blair Atholl in the Scottish Highlands for testing in July 1907. Capper flew it briefly to show its stability before it crashed. It was repaired and fitted with an engine but was damaged during its first and only powered flight when the takeoff trolley went off course.

In the winter of 1907–1908, Dunne designed the Dunne-Huntington triplane and a smaller glider, the D.2, to test the design. The glider was not built, but the full-scale triplane was later built by A. K. Huntington and flown successfully from 1910.

In 1908, two new machines, the D.3 glider and the D.4 powered airplane, were brought to Blair Atholl. The glider flew well under the control of Lt. Launcelot Gibbs, but the D.4 had limited success because it was underpowered. Dunne described it as "more a hopper than a flyer."

Dunne returned to the Balloon Factory during a Government Inquiry into military aeronautics. After the inquiry, the War Office stopped all work on powered aircraft, and in the spring of 1909, Dunne left the Balloon Factory. By this time, he was also an official in the Aeronautical Society.

With financial help from friends, Dunne formed the Blair Atholl Aeroplane Syndicate to continue his experiments. He used hangar space at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey, where Short Brothers built the D.5, a biplane with a more powerful engine. On 20 December 1910, Dunne demonstrated the D.5’s stability to an audience that included Orville Wright and Griffith Brewer. He showed that the plane could fly stably even without touching the controls.

Dunne’s next design, the D.6 monoplane, was built by his former commanding officer, Col. Capper. It did not fly, but its later versions, the D.7 and D.7bis, flew successfully from 1911 to 1913. British-built examples were tested at Sheppey and Larkhill, and one was also built by the Astra company in France.

At the same time, the Dunne D.8 biplane was developed from the D.5. In 1913, Nieuport (which had taken over Astra’s business) bought an example and flew it to France. The next year, Farnborough tested the design. Production was licensed to Nieuport in France and Burgess in America, but only the Burgess-Dunne was made in large numbers.

From 1913, Dunne’s health worsened, and he retired from active flying. The Blair Atholl Syndicate was taken over by Armstrong Whitworth, and Dunne worked on a D.11. When war broke out in 1914, the project was abandoned, and Dunne moved on to other work.

In 1924, Dunne published his first book, which explained a new method for making realistic artificial flies for dry fly fishing. Meanwhile, he studied precognitive dreams, which he believed he and others had experienced. By 1927, he developed the theory of serial time, which made him famous. He published his ideas in An Experiment with Time. In 1932, the Society for Psychical Research tried to repeat his dream experiments but failed, leading to controversy. Dunne later shared his findings in a revised edition of his book.

When the playwright J. B. Priestley premiered his 1937 play Time and the Conways, Dunne lectured the cast about his theory of time. He later gave a television broadcast and continued working on serialism throughout his life. He wrote several books and updated An Experiment with Time frequently.

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Aircraft

Dunne designed some of the earliest practical and stable aircraft. Most of these aircraft had a unique shape, with wings that angled backward and no tail. Stability was achieved by sloping the front edge of the wings downward from the root to the tip, a design called washout. By carefully balancing the aircraft’s features, only two flight controls were needed. However, a drawback was that without a rudder, landing in crosswinds was not possible, and landings had to be made into the wind.

Aircraft designed by Dunne included:

• D.1 (1907): A biplane that was first tested as a glider. The powered version was damaged during its first flight attempt.
• D.2: A small test glider planned for the Dunne-Huntington triplane, but it was never built.
• Dunne-Huntington triplane (designed 1907–1908, flown 1910): A triplane with three wings arranged in a line, featuring a high central wing and smaller front wing. Some called it a biplane. Built by Professor A. K. Huntington based on Dunne’s design, it was the only model not using a tailless swept configuration.
• D.3 (1908): A biplane glider that flew well.
• D.4 (1908): A powered biplane that made short flights.
• D.5 (1910): A powered biplane. It was the first Dunne aircraft to fly and the first tailless aircraft to fly. After an accident, it was rebuilt as the D.8.
• D.6 (1911): A monoplane that never flew.
• D.7 (1911): A monoplane that flew well. The D.7-bis was a version of the D.7 powered by a Gnome engine.
• D.8 (1912): A biplane with several built. The D.8-bis was a Gnome-powered version of the D.8; one example flew from Eastchurch to Paris in 1913.
• D.9 (1913): A project for an unequal-span biplane or sesquiplane, never completed.
• D.10 (1913): A shorter version of the D.8. It was not successful.
• Burgess-Dunne: License-built versions of the D.8 made in the U.S. from 1913 to 1916. Both land and seaplane versions were built and used by U.S. and Canadian military air forces.

Dry fly fishing

Dunne was an interested dry fly fisherman. At the time, Halford's ideas were popular, and his flies were commonly used. However, Dunne noticed that these flies did not look like the real insects he saw while fishing. He was among the first to question Halford's methods, creating new ideas and designing dry flies that focused on how light passed through the insects when viewed from below in direct sunlight. In Dunne's flies, the hooks were painted white to reflect light, and the fibers were carefully colored and oiled to make them more transparent.

He shared his ideas and instructions for making his flies in a book titled Sunshine and the Dry Fly, published in 1924. The first part of the book explains how trout see and react to different types of prey or lures. The second part includes detailed steps for tying the flies he designed.

His work was considered very different from traditional ideas, "amounting almost to heresy." Other writers, such as Robert Hartman and Arthur Ransome, supported Dunne's ideas. Flies based on his designs were still available from Hardy Bros. as late as 1966.

Dreams and serialism

Dunne believed he had dreams that showed him events that had not yet happened. His first recorded dream of this kind happened in 1898, when he saw the time on his watch before waking up and checking it. After having many similar experiences, some very surprising, he decided to study the phenomenon scientifically. Through years of testing these dreams and states between sleep and wakefulness, both in himself and others, he claimed that the mind could see events from the past and future equally well, not just the present. He used this idea to support his new theory about time and how the mind works. His important book, An Experiment with Time (1927), describes these experiences and explains his theory of "serial time."

Dunne suggested that the way we feel time passing as a straight line is not real but a result of how our minds work. He argued that the past, present, and future are all connected in a different kind of reality, and we only see them one after another because of how we think. He also proposed that there are many layers of time dimensions, each containing conscious beings, which he called "serial time."

In books such as The Serial Universe (1934), The New Immortality (1938), Nothing Dies (1940), and Intrusions? (1955), he expanded on the idea of "serialism," explaining how it relates to physics, psychology, parapsychology, and Christian beliefs.

Dunne's theory provided a scientific way to understand ideas about consciousness that were being studied at the time. His work was widely discussed by philosophers like J. A. Gunn, C. D. Broad, and M. F. Cleugh, as well as by parapsychologist G. N. M. Tyrrell. While some people agreed with his observations about dreams and the general idea of his arguments, most disagreed with his idea of an endless series of time dimensions, calling it logically incorrect.

The ideas behind "serialism" have been and still are explored by many writers in both fiction and criticism, especially in the plays about time written by J. B. Priestley.

Published works

• Sunshine and the Dry Fly (1924)
• An Experiment with Time (1927)
• The Serial Universe (1934)
• The League of North-West Europe (1936)
• The Jumping Lions of Borneo (1937)
• The New Immortality (1938)
• An Experiment with St. George (1938), published in the United States as St George and the Witches
• Nothing Dies (1940)
• Intrusions? (1955)