Professor A.W.H (Bill) Phillips with Phillip's Machine c1958-67
Extracts from ‘The Phillips Machine Project’ by Nicholas Bar, LSE Magazine, June 1988, No75, p.3
A.W. H. ‘Bill’ Phillips is known worldwide as the originator of the Phillips Curve. Less well known is the remarkable man he was personally, and his extraordinary route to academic prominence via what came to be called the Phillips Machine.
Trained as an electrical engineer in his native New Zealand in the 1930s, he caught the travel bug and took up an engineering job in the Australian outback, where he also earned money by running a cinema and hunting crocodiles. He reached London in 1938 via the Trans-Siberian railway and joined the RAF at the outbreak of war. He was captured in Java and spent most of the war in a Japanese POW camp, where he learned Chinese and some Russian from fellow prisoners.
Back in Britain he took the BSc (Econ) 1946-49, special subject sociology. He developed a great interest in economics…and like many of his generation, became very caught up with Keynesian theory. Though fascinated he found the Keynesian model hard going. With Walter Newlyn (an undergraduate contemporary, later Professor of Economics at Leeds University) to help with the economic theory, he fell back on his engineering training. He saw that money stocks could be represented as tanks of water, and monetary flows by water circulating round plastic tubes.
A.W. H. ‘Bill’ Phillips is known worldwide as the originator of the Phillips Curve. Less well known is the remarkable man he was personally, and his extraordinary route to academic prominence via what came to be called the Phillips Machine.
Trained as an electrical engineer in his native New Zealand in the 1930s, he caught the travel bug and took up an engineering job in the Australian outback, where he also earned money by running a cinema and hunting crocodiles. He reached London in 1938 via the Trans-Siberian railway and joined the RAF at the outbreak of war. He was captured in Java and spent most of the war in a Japanese POW camp, where he learned Chinese and some Russian from fellow prisoners.
Back in Britain he took the BSc (Econ) 1946-49, special subject sociology. He developed a great interest in economics…and like many of his generation, became very caught up with Keynesian theory. Though fascinated he found the Keynesian model hard going. With Walter Newlyn (an undergraduate contemporary, later Professor of Economics at Leeds University) to help with the economic theory, he fell back on his engineering training. He saw that money stocks could be represented as tanks of water, and monetary flows by water circulating round plastic tubes.
With a grant of £100 (obtained with Newlyn’s help) he spent the summer of 1949 in a garage in Croydon ‘living on air’ as James Meade was later to put it, working on a hydraulic representation of the Keynesian model.
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