John William Dunne FRAeS (2 December 1875 – 24 August 1949) was a British soldier, aeronautical engineer and philosopher.

As a young man he fought in the Second Boer War, before becoming a pioneering aeroplane designer in the early years of the 20th century.

John William Dunne was born on 2 December 1875 in Curragh Camp, a British Army establishment in County Kildare, Ireland.

[4] Following the outbreak of the Second Boer War, Dunne volunteered for the Imperial Yeomanry as an ordinary Trooper and fought in South Africa under General Roberts.

Recovered and commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Wiltshire Regiment on 28 August 1901, he went back to South Africa to serve a second tour in March 1902.

Encouraged among others by H. G. Wells, whom he befriended in 1902, he made a great number of small test models which eventually led to the development of a stable tailless swept wing configuration.

[7] On his return to England for the second time he resumed his study of flight and by 1906 had developed a tailless, swept-wing "arrowhead" configuration which was inherently stable and would become his trademark.

At the request of Colonel John Capper, the unit's commanding officer, in June 1906 he was assigned to the new Army Balloon Factory in South Farnborough.

A manned glider, the D.1, with provision for fitting engines and propellers, was constructed under great secrecy and, in July 1907, was taken to Blair Atholl in the Scottish Highlands for flight testing.

The glider flew well at the hands of Lt. Launcelot Gibbs, while the D.4 had limited success being badly underpowered and consequently, in Dunne's words, "more a hopper than a flyer".

As a result of its findings the War Office stopped all work on powered aircraft and in the spring of 1909 Dunne left the Balloon Factory.

With his friends' financial investment Dunne formed the Blair Atholl Aeroplane Syndicate to continue his experiments and took up hangar space on the Aero Club's new flying ground at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey.

Short Brothers had a manufacturing facility there and were contracted to build the D.5, a broadly similar biplane in which Dunne installed a more powerful 35 hp Green engine.

In 1932 the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) tried to replicate his experimental results on dream precognition, but their investigator Theodore Besterman failed amid some controversy.

[13] The SPR's journal editor even prefaced his report with a disclaimer distancing the Society from his findings and Dunne gave his own version two years later in a new edition of his book.

Dunne continued to work on serialism throughout the rest of his life and wrote several more books, as well as frequent updates to An Experiment with Time.

He argued that past, present and future were continuous in a higher-dimensional reality and we only experience them sequentially because of our mental perception of them.

[26][27][28][29] While some accepted his dream observations and the general thrust of his arguments, the majority rejected his infinite regress as logically flawed.

The ideas underlying Serialism were, and continue to be, explored by many literary figures in works of both fiction and criticism, most notably in the time plays of J.