Short Brothers

The business began in 1897, when Eustace Short bought a second-hand coal-gas balloon and set about making them with his brother Oswald. A visit to the Paris Exposition of 1900, where they saw Édouard Surcouf's truly spherical balloons, gave them the technique; by 1902 they were selling balloons, built at Hove above the acoustic laboratory of a third brother, Horace. A contract in 1905 for three balloons for the British Indian Army opened the doors of the Aero Club: Charles Rolls ordered a large one to compete in the 1906 Gordon Bennett Cup, and other members followed. The decisive turn came in 1908, with reports of the Wright brothers' demonstrations at Le Mans: Oswald persuaded Horace to leave his job with Charles Parsons, and that November the three registered their partnership as Short Brothers. Two orders arrived at once, a glider for Rolls and an aeroplane for Francis McClean, and the firm secured the British rights to build copies of the Wright design. In February 1909 it put up a workshop on the marshland at Leysdown on the Isle of Sheppey and immediately began an initial batch of six aircraft — making it the first company in the world to undertake volume production of an aircraft design. The Dunne D.5, the first tailless aeroplane, was also built there under contract. In 1910 the Royal Aero Club and Shorts moved to Eastchurch, where the first naval air service pilots were trained on Short S.27 biplanes, and in 1911 the firm produced the Triple Twin, one of the world's first genuinely successful twin-engined aircraft.

Shorts' output expanded through the First World War around naval seaplanes. The most notable was the Short Admiralty Type 184: on 15 August 1915, during the Gallipoli campaign, one of them flew from HMS Ben-my-Chree and became the first aircraft in history to attack a ship with a live torpedo, hitting a Turkish supply vessel in the Dardanelles. More than nine hundred were produced, many under licence by other manufacturers, making it the company's most numerous aircraft before the Second World War. The need for premises with direct access to the sea led to the purchase in 1913 of a plot beside the river Medway at Borstal, near Rochester, where the Seaplane Works were built with a long concrete slipway able to launch aircraft even at low tide. In 1916 the Admiralty ordered two large airships and lent the company the money to buy land at Cardington in Bedfordshire; balloons and dirigibles were concentrated there while aeroplanes stayed on Sheppey and at Rochester. The company was renamed Short Brothers (Rochester and Bedford) Ltd. in 1919, but the nationalisation of that same year ended the brothers' involvement with the Cardington works, which became the Royal Airship Works. The name of the housing estate they built for their employees, Shortstown, still recalls the episode.

The immediate postwar years were hard on the whole British industry, and Shorts got through them without laying anyone off by building lightweight bus and tram bodies. Then came its finest period: through the 1920s and 1930s the flying boat was the natural aircraft for long-range routes, since it did not depend on suitable airfields existing, and the company specialised in them to the point of building a testing tank in 1924 for hull and float design. It designed the floats for the British seaplanes entered in the 1925 Schneider Trophy and fitted out the aircraft in which Alan Cobham flew to Australia and surveyed Africa. From its drawing office came the Singapore, the Calcutta that Imperial Airways put into service in 1928 on Mediterranean coastal routes, the larger Kent and finally the Empire, commissioned off the drawing board by Imperial Airways for the Empire Airmail scheme, the first of which was launched in 1936; in 1937 an Empire flew the first westbound transatlantic service, from Foynes to Newfoundland. A year after that first Empire, the firm won the contract for the Sunderland, the military maritime patrol version, which German submarine crews learned to dread. In 1933 it opened a factory at Rochester Airport for its landplanes, closed Eastchurch in 1934 and bought the engine maker Pobjoy the same year.

In 1936 the Air Ministry established a new factory at Belfast and created Short & Harland Ltd., owned equally with the Harland and Wolff shipyard; its first products were batches of Bristol Bombays and Handley Page Hereford bombers. The Second World War struck the company at both ends: the Luftwaffe bombed Rochester and, during Easter week of 1941, Belfast and its aircraft factory suffered the worst single air raid the United Kingdom had seen outside London. Shorts answered by dispersing production to satellite factories and delivered both the Sunderland and the four-engined Stirling bomber, essentially a land-based Sunderland. In 1943 the government nationalised the company; Oswald Short, who had resigned the chairmanship that January, stayed on as honorary life president. By 1947 the other factories had closed and work was concentrated in Belfast, where the offices followed in 1948; that same year the Rochester company had merged with Short and Harland to form Short Brothers and Harland Limited. The 1950s brought intense research — the SC1 vertical take-off aircraft, the SB5, the Sherpa, the standby Sperrin bomber — and contract work: the firm built a batch of Canberras for English Electric, the first of which flew in 1952, and set up a Britannia line after the Bristol Aeroplane Company took a stake in it in 1954. It then found a niche of its own in freight: the slab-sided Skyvan with its generous rear door, the heavy-lift SC.5 Belfast that flew in 1964 and, in the 1970s, the 330 and 360 series for the feederliner market. The company reverted to the name Short Brothers in 1977, became a public limited company in 1984 and was sold to Bombardier in 1989. Three decades later, in 2020, its aerostructures activities passed to Spirit AeroSystems, and after that company's assets were divided between Boeing and Airbus, the Belfast plant has traded since December 2025 as Short Brothers – A Boeing Company.