Norman de Bruyne

Norman Adrian de Bruyne FRS[2] was born in Punta Arenas Chile on 8 November 1904, and baptised on 19 March 1905 at the Anglican St. James Church, by the Rev.

Norman de Bruyne was educated at Lancing and Trinity College, Cambridge from October 1923, reading Natural Sciences and obtaining a First in 1927.

On or before graduating in 1927, he climbed the side of the Great Gate to place a broken furniture leg in the right hand of the statue of Henry VIII.

A laminate of flax roving and paper soaked with liquid phenolic resin and cured under pressure was called Gordon Aerolite.

This type of reinforcement was suggested by Malcolm Gordon as a result of the publication of de Bruyne's lecture to the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1937.

As war broke out, the company began to grow and developed the strip heating process to speed the assembly of wood parts.

Morris Motors used Aerolite and strip heating to assembly Horsa gliders, as did de Havilland on the Mosquito as well as on other aircraft and in naval launches and patrol boats.

This order was a turning point for Aero Research, which spent the next five years working on a plan and financing for truly large-scale low-cost production of urea-formaldehyde resins.

In the end, Aero Research was taken over by the Swiss Ciba organisation, a large multinational group of chemical companies that wanted to expand into England.

The De Bruyne-Maas Ladybird, was a shoulder-wing monoplane with a tricycle undercarriage, and the design incorporated various items of near-bakelite construction.

This decision by De Havilland Propellers division turned out to be one of considerable importance as it led directly to the acceptance and use of structural adhesive bonding in many, if not all, aircraft from the mid-1940s to the present day.

De Bruyne's new "Redux"[7] adhesive came into wide use in aircraft, and played a big part in bringing legitimacy to the use of glue for high-stress jobs.