Alfred Pippard

This article deals with the engineer, for the physicist Alfred Brian Pippard see Brian Pippard

Alfred John Sutton Pippard (born April 6, 1891 in Yeovil , Somerset , † November 2, 1969 in Putney (London) ) was a British aircraft and civil engineer.

biography

Pippard was the son of a carpenter. From 1908 to 1911 he studied at the Merchant Venturers School in Bristol (one of the forerunners of the university). In order to be admitted to the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) as a civil engineer, he had to demonstrate practical experience, which he did with his deceased father's friend. Since the family could not finance this, he was supported by a state grant. Among other things, he designed the steel frame for a department store in Bristol. In 1913 he finished his internship and became an engineer at a water company in Wales. In 1914 he received a master’s degree with a thesis on stone dams. During the First World War he worked as a structural engineer in aircraft construction in the Admiralty Air Department. In 1918 he became an MBE for this . He and his colleagues wrote a book about the statics of aircraft and in 1919 joined an engineering firm in the aircraft construction of Alec Ogilvie. In 1920 he received a D.Sc. Bristol University. His company investigated some aircraft accidents, but was unable to secure major aircraft contracts against the established firms.

Pippard was from 1919 lecturer at Imperial College London and from 1922 professor at University College Cardiff . With his assistant John Baker he analyzed the statics of airships ( R100 , R101 ). In 1928 he became a professor at Bristol University and in 1933 at Imperial College (his successor in Bristol was Baker). There he introduced lectures on concrete construction and soil mechanics in 1946, thereby modernizing the curriculum. In soil mechanics, he supported Alec W. Skempton and in 1939 invited Karl Terzaghi . In 1955 he became Vice Rector and in 1956 he retired. After his retirement he was visiting professor at Northwestern University and also held lectures at other US universities.

After the crash of the R 101 airship on October 5, 1930 near Beauvais , in which many friends were among the 48 dead, he withdrew from the aircraft industry and turned to civil engineering. The airship had been sent on a flight from England to Karachi by the government before the technical report from Pippard and Leonard Bairstow was available. On the maiden flight, Pippard himself had been on board with other eminent scientists and engineers such as Richard Glazebrook , Bairstow, Richard V. Southwell . This ended airship development in England.

As a civil engineer, he dealt with dams, among other things.

In 1944 he was elected to the ICE council. In 1954 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society . From 1951 he was 15 years on a committee that investigated the pollution of the Thames.

In 1966 he received honorary doctorates from Bristol and Birmingham and 1968 from Brunel University.

Fonts

• with J. Laurence Pritchard: Airplane Structures, Longmans, Green & Co., 1919, 2nd edition 1935, Archives
• Strain energy methods in stress analysis, Longmans, Green & Co., 1928, Archive

literature

• Alec Skempton : Alfred John Sutton Pippard. 1891-1969, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Volume 16, 1970, pp. 463-478.
• Karl-Eugen Kurrer : The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium , Ernst & Sohn 2018, p. 245f and p. 1044f (biography), ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9 .