He is best known for inventing the bouncing bomb used by the Royal Air Force in Operation Chastise (the "Dambusters" raid) to attack the dams of the Ruhr Valley during World War II.

Despite a better-than-expected performance and a successful return flight to Canada in 1930, the R100 was broken up following the crash near Beauvais in northern France of its "sister" ship, the R101 (which was designed and built by a team from the Government's Air Ministry).

By the time of the R101 crash, Wallis had moved to the Vickers aircraft factory at the Brooklands motor circuit and aerodrome between Byfleet and Weybridge in Surrey.

The Wellington had one of the most robust airframes ever developed, and pictures of its skeleton largely shot away, but still sound enough to bring its crew home safely, are still impressive.

The geodetic construction offered a light and strong airframe (compared to conventional designs), with clearly defined space within for fuel tanks, payload and so on.

Early in 1942, Wallis began experimenting with skipping marbles over water tanks in his garden, leading to his April 1942 paper "Spherical Bomb – Surface Torpedo".

After some initial scepticism, the Air Force accepted Wallis's bouncing bomb (codenamed Upkeep) for attacks on the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams in the Ruhr area.

Although there was still no aircraft capable of lifting these two bombs to their optimal release altitude, they could be dropped from a lower height, entering the earth at supersonic speed and penetrating to a depth of 20 metres before exploding.

Following the high death toll of the aircrews involved in the Dambusters raid, he made a conscious effort never again to endanger the lives of his test pilots.

This unique structure was restored at Brooklands Museum thanks to a grant from the AIM-Biffa fund in 2013 and was officially reopened by Mary Stopes-Roe, Barnes Wallis's daughter, on 13 March 2014.

His "Wild Goose", designed in the late 1940s, was intended to use laminar flow, and alongside it he also worked on the Green Lizard cruise missile and the Heston JC.9 manned experimental aeroplane.

Both Wild Goose and Swallow were flight tested as large (30 ft span) flying scale models, based at Predannack in Cornwall.

Government funding for "Swallow" was cancelled in the round of cuts following the Sandys Defence White Paper in 1957, although Vickers continued model trials with some support from the RAE.

NASA found aerodynamic problems with the Swallow and, informed also by their work on the Bell X-5, settled for a conventional tail which would eventually lead in turn to the TFX programme and the General Dynamics F-111.

When Maurice Brennan left Vickers for Folland he worked on the FO.147, a variable-sweep development of the Gnat lightweight fighter-trainer, offering both tailed and tailless options.

Moreover, Wallis's calculations indicated, the power requirements for an underwater vessel were lower than for a comparable conventional ship and they could be made to travel at a much higher speed.

In the late 1950s, Wallis gave a lecture titled "The strength of England" at Eton College, and continued to deliver versions of the talk into the early 1970s, presenting technology and automation as a way to restore Britain's dominance.

He complained of the loss of aircraft design to the United States, and suggested that Britain could dominate air travel by developing a small supersonic airliner capable of short take-off and landing.

However, he allowed Wallis to assist Molly with her mathematics courses by correspondence, and they wrote some 250 letters, enlivening them with fictional characters such as "Duke Delta X".

His epitaph in Latin reads "Spernit Humum Fugiente Penna" (Severed from the earth with fleeting wing), a quotation from Horace Ode III.2.

He is portrayed as a British engineer in an alternate history, where the First World War does not end in 1918, and Wallis concentrates his energies on developing a machine for time travel.

In Scarlet Traces: The Great Game by Ian Edginton, he is responsible for the development of the Cavorite weapon used to win the war on Mars after the departure of Cavor.