Sir Stanley George Hooker, CBE, FRS, DPhil, BSc, FRAeS, MIMechE, FAAAS (30 September 1907 – 24 May 1984), was a mathematician and jet engine engineer. He was employed first at Rolls-Royce where he worked on the earliest designs such as the Welland and Derwent, and later at Bristol Aero Engines where he helped bring the troubled Proteus turboprop and the Olympus turbojet to market. He then designed the famous Pegasus vectored thrust turbofan used in the Hawker Siddeley Harrier. Early life Stanley George Hooker was born at Sheerness and educated at Borden Grammar School. He won a scholarship for Imperial College London to study mathematics, and in particular, hydrodynamics. He became more interested in aerodynamics, won the Busk studentship in aeronautics in 1928 and moved to Brasenose College, Oxford where he received his DPhil in this area in 1935. Rolls-Royce In late 1937, while working at the Admiralty he applied for a job at Rolls-Royce, and after being interviewed by Ernest Hives, started there in January 1938. He was permitted to study anything that caught his fancy, and soon moved into the supercharger design department. He started researching the superchargers used on the Merlin engine, and calculated that big improvements could be made to their efficiency. His recommendations were put into the production line for newer versions, notably the Merlin 45, improving its power by approximately 30%, and then the Merlin 61. The Merlin 45 was fitted into the Spitfire Mk V in October 1940, which was produced in the greatest number of any Spitfire variant. The same year the Air Ministry made a request for a turbocharged Merlin for use in the planned high altitude Wellington VI bomber. Declining the suggestion to use turbocharging, Hooker instead designed a two-stage supercharger for the engine, with the resulting two-stage-supercharged Merlin 61 being fitted into the Spitfire Mk IX, the second most-produced Spitfire variant, which entered service in July 1942. The Merlin 61 arrived in time to give the Spitfire a desperately needed advantage in rate of climb and service ceiling over the Focke-Wulf Fw 190. One major outcome of his work introduced a generalised method of predicting and comparing aircraft engine performance under flight conditions. The status of this work was summarised in an internal Rolls-Royce Report in March 1941 and made public by the Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust in 1997. In 1940, Hooker was introduced to Frank Whittle, who was setting