The success of the C.C. Synchronizing Gear undoubtedly changed the attitude of the Board of Invention and Research toward George Constantinesco, from regarding him as a pestering and tiresome inventor to indulgence and positive support. The Board had also consulted with Lord Raleigh of acoustics fame, Lord Rutherford and Mr Swinburne on various aspects of George's treatise on the transmission of power by vibrations and had received supportive comment. Lord Raleigh had visited the laboratory at Alperton in 1916 and had been most impressed with the apparently "magic" machines there working by sound waves. George maintained it was largely due to this support that the Admiralty accepted his treatise and published it at their expense soon after the war ended.

Conditions at Alperton were becoming more and more difficult for George. His laboratory established under the partnership with Walter Haddon early in 1914 shared accommodation with the Haddon Engineering Works. Space was becoming inadequate and by early 1916 insufficient time had elapsed for development of wave transmission machines to generate the expected royalties to finance further development, plus the Government had shown no interest in wave transmission inventions for war purposes. It was fortuitous that at this point in time (May 1916) Major Colley and Major Hopkinson arrived on the scene and unofficially helped George to develop his synchronizing gear. Without their intervention it is quite possible that this project would never have materialized and sonic research might have been squeezed out of existence, at least for the duration of the war.

Towards the end of 1916, the Government, having noted the wider implications of wave transmission and George's lack of funds, took him under the wing of Sir Richard Paget's Admiralty Section of the Board of Inventions and Research so providing funds to enable him to continue with his research. In the meantime the Government had placed orders with W.H. Dorman and Co. of Stafford to manufacture the C.C. Gear and various other firms were involved in development and production of parts, including A.C. Hartley, Rose Downs and Thompson Ltd of Hull. Although the C.C. Gear had been accepted in August 1916 when it was successfully tested on a B. E.2c, the first operational squadrons fitted with the gear did not appear in France until March 1917. These delays in manufacture and payment of royalties still left George in a difficult financial position. In spite of this he requested the Admiralty in January 1917 to send £3,000 due to him to the British Red Cross for relief work in Romania. This was typical of his generosity to others in need even though his own financial position was far from secure.

It was also in January 1917 that George suggested to the Government through the Air Board and against his own interest, that they buy outright his patent No. 512 on the C.C. Gear for £50,000. This to be in full settlement of the claims of the owners (Constantinesco and Haddon) in respect of past or future royalties due. It appears that this idea was not accepted on the grounds that the amount requested was excessive, although £72,000 had already been paid and another £23,000 was due, and by the end of the year another substantial sum would be due.

In the event, the Government took George fully to their bosom in April 1917 and employed him as a servant of the Crown under the Defence of the Realm Act. Under this arrangement he received a fixed salary, research and development on approved projects was funded at cost, and inventions arising from this work became the property of the Government. This improved his security if not his potential earnings from royalties, but he was happy with an agreement which enabled him to concentrate on work of national importance with, hopefully, less administrative complications. His remaining problem was the lack of facilities at Alperton compounded by an extended programme of research. A proposal to move the research and development activities to a ready made factory site at Woking had to be abandoned because of delays in negotiations with the owners. An alternative site at Guildford was also considered but found to be inadequate. Finally, in May 1918 the Admiralty was able to approve the construction of a completely new Sonic Works with 2,500m² of floor space to George's own specifications at West Drayton. Figure 12 shows a general view of the test section of the Sonic Works.

At Alperton, George had started to build up a series of experiments and demonstrations to illustrate the principles and potential applications of the transmission of power by periodic pulses and these were continued at West Drayton. The term wave transmission had been employed to describe the transmission of power by this means through liquids as demonstrated by the rock drill, the C.C. Firing Gear, and the monophase and polyphase rotary systems. However, the term did not adequately cover the wider implications of the system as applied to liquids, solids and gases, or the relationship with the properties of sound waves and alternating electric current circuits as postulated in George's treatise. It was accepted by the Admiralty that a new umbrella title was required and, with, George's agreement, Sir Richard Paget baptized this new science with the name of ''Sonics''.

It followed that subdivisions of the umbrella terminology could become Hydrosonics, Thermosonics, Sonomechanics and Electrosonics, according to the medium used for the transmission of the impulses and the method adopted for the generation and reception of the Sonic energy. Then the question of the frequency used and the nature of the periodic forces involved would then fall into the categories of Infrasonic, Supersonic, Harmonic, Impulsive or Percussive applications. The basic principles, the terminology and the formulae necessary for the design of Sonic machines were summarized by George in the first volume of his Theory of Sonics, published by the Admiralty after the war.

The first basic principle of Sonics underlying the experiments and demonstrations at the Sonic Works was the considerable compressibility or elasticity of liquids and potential uses of that principle. Among these were the liquid springs and silent guns previously mentioned. Suggested applications for the liquid spring included shock absorbers, buffers, recoil springs for heavy ordnance, suspension springs for locomotives or heavy tractors and other cases involving violent shock. The silent guns also illustrated the principle that energy could be stored in the liquid under compression and, when required, be released to do work such as firing a projectile. Thus the expansion of the liquid could be used to produce the same ballistic result as an explosive charge. An alternative to this idea was to eliminate the need to produce pressure in the liquid by pumping by hand or by machine, by using a small explosive charge. The firing of the explosive charge acted on a free piston which suddenly compressed the liquid behind the projectile. This compression was possible because of the inertia of the projectile, but after a very short time the projectile left the muzzle of the gun with greater force than would be possible with the explosive acting directly on the projectile, fig. 13.

Another demonstration showed how the energy of an electric motor could be accumulated by driving a high pressure pump for only half a minute to compress the liquid sufficiently to throw a standard 75 mm projectile. This idea could also be used on heavy duty starter motors for large internal combustion engines, or to store energy for later release in stamping, punching or forging machines and other powerful presses. Such applications would dispense with the need for cumbersome hydraulic accumulators, inertia troubles, and shocks in pipes.

The second basic sonic principle was that the elasticity of liquids also allowed the propagation of energy waves in an enclosed column of liquid and that these waves could be used to transmit energy from one point to another over short or long distances in a similar manner to electricity. This phenomenon was illustrated by a series of demonstrations, with electric motors driving generators to produce the pressure waves used to drive the motors at the other end of the pipeline. Single line or monophase systems with only one piston in the generator were used to drive various tools through flexible tubing or to produce heat in a coil of tubing. One example was a riveting or chipping hammer which absorbed only 1 hp to do the same work as a pneumatic hammer which would consume more than 6 hp of compressed air. In the same category there was a demonstration of the C.C. Firing Gear which could deliver as many as 70 impulses per second with a duration of less than half a millisecond for each impulse.

Demonstrations of multiphase hydrosonic transmissions included three phase and four phase rotary systems. A small scale model of a three phase system demonstrated how a variety of motors could be driven from one generator. There was a three phase high reduction transmission and a four phase transmission suitable for marine use, fig. 3, where the high speed generator drove the low speed propeller motor at one third of the speed of the generator. In practice motors could be designed to run at any chosen ratio and could be reversed without reversing the prime mover. The idea behind this demonstration was to show that ships would be able to use high speed non-reversing turbines driving slow running propellers. Also whatever prime movers were used could be located in any convenient part of the ship without the need to be in line with the propeller motors. Other applications would include the distribution of power for factories, or independent drive for machine tools. George claimed that sonic motors for these many purposes were smaller, cheaper to make, and more efficient than electric motors of comparable power. With monophase applications George claimed they had the potential to replace all forms of compressed air machines. The slow speed motors would be suitable for driving railcars, tractors, winches, haulage machines, or heavy boring machines.

The concept of free piston internal combustion engines had occurred to George at Alperton. He continued to develop the idea at West Drayton and started to build up a demonstration, but it was never completed. His free piston engine dispensed with the need for crankshafts, connecting rods and other ancillaries. The explosions in the cylinders were used to directly produce the pulses necessary to drive the sonic motors which could be located at any desired distance from the free piston generator. George maintained that very powerful diesel engines could be produced in this way for heavy duty work such as ship propulsion. The problems of inertia and balancing difficulties in conventional engines would be largely eliminated.

A third sonic application was the possibility of propagating powerful concentrated sound waves through the air or water for signalling or detection purposes. There was a demonstration of a sonic generator driven by an electric motor which could vibrate a diaphragm in the medium range of 500 to 1,500 cycles per second and produce 1 to 3 hp of sound beamed by a horn. Following on from this idea George maintained that the same principle could be applied to the production and propagation of high frequency sound up to twenty thousand cycles per second or more, fig. 14.

A significant development at the Sonic Works on the application of sonic principles, initiated at the request of the Admiralty, was George's invention of a system to improve the performance of diesel engines and reduce their noise level for use in submarines. This work was a follow-on of the principles applied in the C.C. Gear for aeroplanes. The system could consist of a single or polyphase generator (corresponding to the number of cylinders in the engine) which could transmit percussive waves, at pressures of several hundred atmospheres, through the liquid fuel in the pipelines to the injectors with pressures of hundreds of atmospheres. This would inject a very fine spray of fuel directly into the combustion chamber. Figure 15 shows the first test prototype.

This system was successfully applied to a 600 hp six cylinder diesel engine direct from the drawings as George was certain from the results of tests with the prototype that it would work with any engine. Even the exhaust and inlet valves were actuated by sonic impulses which dispensed with the need for springs. Although George patented this invention in March 1918 (No. 133,719) he did not receive royalties on it under the terms of his agreement with the Admiralty. The Lords Commissioners approved the patent being sealed as secret for the duration of the war and assigned it to the Admiralty under the provisions of Section 30 of the Patents and Designs Act, 1907. It was not long before the German firm of Bosch, followed by other manufacturers, started to produce fuel injection systems for Diesel engines of the type in common use today. George maintained that manufacturers had accepted the general plan disclosed in his patent, but the simple sonic generators he used had been replaced by hydraulic pumps which required costly precision of manufacture. He contended that pumps would be limited to producing up to 2,000 injections per minute, but with sonic generators he had obtained over 12,000 pulses per minute. This latter investigation was made as part of the development of the high frequency free-piston diesel engines, which had to be abandoned for lack of funds.

Early in 1919, after the end of the war, the Government started to take stock of expenditure on research programmes and the usual cuts had to be implemented across the board. In March 1919 there were warning signs that the axe would fall on the Sonic Works at West Drayton. Instructions from the Admiralty meant that staff would have to be reduced and that much of the work dear to George's heart would have to be suspended or abandoned. In order to help with funding the Admiralty allowed George to take in work for private individuals at cost plus 200%. George knew that this was only a temporary solution, and that it was only a matter of time before the Sonic Works would have to be closed down completely.

Disillusioned with the lack of interest and support for his work, George left for a series of short visits to Romania in October 1919. His work for the British Government had aroused the interest of the Italians and the Romanians and he was invited to give lectures on his work. By special invitation of King Ferdinand of Romania, he delivered lectures on Sonics to the Romanian Academy of Science in November. On June 10th 1920 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Romanian Academy (similar to the Royal Society in England). The enthusiasm aroused by his lectures prompted a group of financiers to suggest that George should transfer all his activities to Romania. A company was formed to develop his inventions under the name of Industria Sonica, but the idea had to be abandoned because of the post-war financial crash in Romania.

When George returned to England from his first visit in December the Sonic Works had been dismantled and was to be taken over by the Admiralty as their Engineering Laboratory. George was now on his own and had to find new premises. He located an open shed at Slough which he restored to house equipment but there were no facilities for research. He established an office at 7 Grosvenor Gardens and later a works at 130 Wilton Road, London, and also some laboratory and drawing office facilities at "Carmen Sylva'', his house in Weybridge. The house was named after Queen Elizabeth of Romania (1843-1916) well known for her literary works, and whom George much admired. This was the cradle for the growth of George's next major inventions in the field of transmissions for vehicles of transport.