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Concept
J. W. Dunne
Summary
John William Dunne (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. Dunne worked on automatically stable aircraft, many of which were of tailless swept wing design, to achieve the first aircraft demonstrated to be stable. He later developed a new approach to dry fly fishing before turning to speculative philosophy, where he achieved some prominence and literary influence through his "serialism" theory on the nature of time and consciousness, first set out in his book An Experiment with Time.
John William Dunne was born on 2 December 1875 in Curragh Camp, a British Army establishment in County Kildare, Ireland. He was the oldest son of Irishman Sir John Hart Dunne KCB (1835–1924) and his English wife Julia Elizabeth Dunne (née Chapman). Despite being born in Ireland of an Irish father, he had an English mother and was born in Ireland only because his father was Lieutenant-Colonel of the British 99th (Lanarkshire) Regiment, who happened to be stationed there at the time.
He spent most of his childhood and subsequent career in England. At an early age he suffered a bad accident and was confined to bed for several years. During this time he became interested in philosophy. While still only nine years old he asked his nurse about the nature of time. At the age of 13 he had a dream in which he was in a flying machine that needed no steering.
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. In 1900 he was caught up in an epidemic of typhoid fever and was invalided home.
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. He fell ill again and was diagnosed with heart disease, causing him to again return home the next year.
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