maintain the level of his practical involvement. In 1948,
he moved to the Marconi research laboratories at Great
Baddow, near Chelmsford, but resigned in 1951 because
he wanted to be able to follow up his own initiatives more
freely. His wife’s inheritance from her father had been
invested in a boat-building business at Oulton Broad,
near Lowestoft, and Cockerell went to work for the company
designing motorboats. He soon became interested
in the possibility of minimizing the resistance of the
water to a boat’s progress by floating the vehicle on a
cushion of air. In December, 1955, he filed a patent for
his hovercraft design