Donald Campbell
The story of Campbell's last attempt at the water speed record on Coniston Water was told in the BBC television film "Across the Lake" in 1988, with Anthony Hopkins as Campbell. Nine years earlier, Robert Hardy had played Campbell's father, Sir Malcolm Campbell, in the "BBC2 Playhouse" television drama "Speed King"; both were written by Roger Milner and produced by Innes Lloyd. In 2003, the BBC showed a documentary reconstruction of Campbell's fateful water-speed record attempt in an episode of "Days That Shook the World". It featured a mixture of modern reconstruction and original film footage. All of the original colour clips were taken from a film capturing the event, "Campbell at Coniston" by John Lomax, a local amateur filmmaker from Wallasey, England. Lomax's film won awards worldwide in the late 1960s for recording the final weeks of Campbell's life.
Donald L. Campbell
Donald Lewis Campbell (August 5, 1904 – September 1, 2002) was an American chemical engineer. He and his team of three other scientists in the same field are most known for having developed the fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) process in 1942. This process provided a more efficient method for petroleum refiners to obtain high-octane gasoline by through the conversion of crude oil. The team’s revolutionary creation is explained in US Patent No. 2,451,804, A Method of and Apparatus for Contacting Solids and Gases, and eventually transformed the way petroleum was developed. Their invention was especially important in World War II, as refiners could finally provide enough fuel for the allies’ fighter planes to battle against the Axis. For his significant contributions to the field of chemical engineering, Campbell was inducted in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1999.