The house is still owned by the Cockerell family

His daughter, Francis Airy, said he had been ill for several months after a fall, but had been mentally alert until the end. As quoted in The London Telegraph, Mrs. Airy said, "He was interested in the state of the world and was very worried about energy resources on the planet and the population explosion."

Cockerell had hundreds of patents to his name, including more than 50 associated with the hovercraft, which rides on a cushion of air. Since the launching of his first hovercraft, exactly 40 years before the day of his death, the technology that he made possible emerged from what seemed to be science fiction to become a common means of speedily ferrying passengers across bays and rivers around the world.

Although he received great recognition and knighthood, he consistently vented his frustration at the lack of rewards he gained. He also criticized British policies that he contended chronically thwarted technological development and discouraged inventions and inventors.

"I've enjoyed life," Cockerell said in an interview in 1996. "But it would have been nice to treat my wife to dinner once in a while." Actually, his patents for the hovercraft and other inventions did provide what he conceded was a reasonable living, but they did not make him rich.

Cockerell's penchant for tinkering was developed in the face of early rejections. His father, Sir Sydney Cockerell, curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University, was a strong figure who valued arts and letters above applied science. A collector of medieval manuscripts, Sydney Cockerell had been an assistant to the Bloomsbury polymath William Morris, was literary executor for Thomas Hardy and corresponded with Tolstoy.

He was not impressed when his only son produced crystal radio sets and motorized his mother's sewing machine. He was chagrined when Christopher, offered a choice of books as gifts, selected "The Boy Electrician" rather than a biography of Rembrandt. Once the father observed that his son was "no better than a garage hand." Despite such paternal discouragement, which slowly abated, Cockerell studied engineering at Cambridge.

In 1935, he began working on research for the Marconi Co.. Among his inventions was an aerial direction finder called "the drunken men," which in World War II brought many allied airmen safely back home.

His team at Marconi also produced the equipment that was used to identify all the German radar stations along the northern European coast, which were bombed in time for D-Day.

In 1996, Sir Christopher recalled that he had developed 36 patents at Marconi. "All I got was 10 for each (less than $50)," he said. "And mind you, some firms gave as little as 3 for the same."

He left in the early '50s and moved to Norfolk to manage a marina on the Oulton Broad. A passionate sailor, he lived in a trailer and designed cabin cruisers. It was there that he conceived the idea that even a heavy craft could be supported on a cushion of air generated by relatively small thrust. Cutting the friction between boat and water, or boat and marshland, would allow such a vessel to move swiftly. He ran a vacuum cleaner tube through an empty can of cat food that he had placed in a larger empty coffee can and when he turned the switch to reverse to blow air into the larger can, the smaller one hovered.

In 1955, he built a two-foot prototype that scooted at the end of a leash over water and land, and he obtained a patent for a vehicle that he described as "neither an airplane, nor a boat, nor a wheeled land craft." He named it a hovercraft.

There was little smooth sailing, however, as Cockerell sought to turn his idea into a commercial project. At one point he demonstrated his hovering prototype for British military officials who responded by classifying his invention as secret, effectively freezing development.

Cockerell pawned family jewelry to keep his research going, and in 1957, after he had advised government officials that the Swiss were working on hovering technologies, he was able to approach the National Research Development Corp., a government-financed agency that was supposed to promote inventions.

Two years later, the agency formed Hovercraft Development Ltd. to develop the concept for commercial use and solicit investment. Cockerell became a director and technical adviser.

Hovercraft Development licensed five companies to build hovercrafts. On June 1, 1959, a small one-person vehicle zipped across the English Channel in 20 minutes, four hours faster than conventional crossings. In the next three years, larger hovercraft built by contractors began to carry passengers.

In the mid-60s, as hovercraft began commercial service across the Channel, Cockerell found himself in disagreement with management decisions by the Research Development Corp. First he objected to a decision to license foreign companies, principally in the United States and Japan, allowing them to produce hovercraft in exchange for royalties.

That, he felt, only squandered Britain's advantage. He also opposed a directive in 1966 that fused all British hovercraft development in one amalgamated company. Saying that move hampered competition and would "stultify the hovercraft industry in Britain," Cockerell resigned from Hovercraft Development in protest.

Sir Christopher and his wife, Lady Margaret Cockerell (nee Belsham), together at home before she sadly passed away in 1996.

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In 1969 he was knighted, and the next year the British hovercraft industry dismissed him as a consultant. He continued to lecture on the technology that he developed and conducted research at his home. His wife, Elinor Belsham, whom he married in 1937, died in 1996.