Alliott Verdon Roe

Sir Alliott Verdon Roe 1930

Roe in the cockpit of his Roe III Triplane during his trip to the USA in September 1910 .

Sir Edwin Alliott Verdon-Roe (born April 26, 1877 in Patricroft , † January 4, 1958 in London ) was a British aviation pioneer and founder of the aviation company Avro .

Life

Edwin Alliott Roe was the fourth child of the doctor Dr. Edwin Hodson Roe and his wife Sofia, née Verdon, were born.

Alliott, as he would like to be called, was never a good student; It is said that physical education was more important to him than subjects. Nevertheless, Roe became interested in technical issues at an early age, and at the age of 13 he applied for his first patent for a carpet brush with an interchangeable brush head.

Roe left school when he was 14. He wanted to see something of the world, so in March 1892 he traveled to Canada with a friend of his father's to be trained as a surveyor.

However, due to an economic crisis, the work of a surveyor in Canada was not in demand at the time, and so Roe worked as a tree planter and later as a fisherman to earn a living. Since the economic situation did not improve in the following year either, he returned to England.

In the summer of 1893 he began training in a locomotive factory in Horwich / Lancashire , which he successfully completed after 5 years. He was then offered a job at a torpedo factory in Portsmouth , but decided to pursue a career in the navy and enrolled at King's College in London , studying marine engineering. However, he was rejected by the Navy due to poor test results.

However, his qualifications were sufficient for entry into the merchant navy, and so he became the 5th engineer on a steamship for the British and South African Royal Mail Company . His career in the merchant marine ended - temporarily interrupted by a serious malaria disease - as a third engineer. Roe later said that on one of his last voyages in 1902, he saw an albatross flying by , which inspired him to study the technique of flight.

His first flight model was based on an albatross. It did not fly, but Roe did not let that discourage him and manufactured other models of various designs, from monoplane to model with several hydrofoils, including some canards , so-called "duck wings". Some of his models showed extremely good sliding properties.

After retiring from the Merchant Navy, Roe got a job as a technician at the automobile manufacturer Brotherhood Crockers, later the Simplex company.

There he was responsible for the development of an automatic transmission, which saved his employer from buying such a system for high patent fees from the German company Mercedes-Benz , which at the time was the only one to develop such a system.

In January 1906, a letter from Roes was published in a newspaper for engineering, in which he reported on his successes with a rudder-controlled flight model and stated that he expected that, if appropriate efforts were made, the first motor-powered aircraft as early as the summer of 1906 could rise in England, whereupon the newspaper The Times countered that such a flight was not only dangerous, but also doomed to failure for technical reasons.

Roe, who had heard of the Wright brothers' successes as early as 1903 , got in touch with Wilbur Wright, who then wrote a reply to encourage Roe to pursue his goals. And so in March 1906 Roe presented several paper gliders based on Wright's construction at the Motor and Aeronautical Show in London, as well as a slightly larger model in which a Wright-like aircraft combined with Roe's development, a control via wing twist and rudder, in front.

After a brief employment as a secretary at the Aero Club in April 1906, Roe traveled to the USA to work as a designer for a Scotsman living in Denver who wanted to build a man-carrying steam-powered helicopter . But before this project was finished, Roe returned to England. By the way, the helicopter was actually built, but crashed during the first take-off and was destroyed.

In November 1906, Roe patented a steering wheel he had developed with which a flying machine could be controlled by turning it left or right and by lifting and lowering it up or down, the forerunner of stick control, which is still used in aviation today finds.

Roes flight models, now partly with rubber motor drive , became bigger and more powerful and reached altitudes of over 30 meters.

In the meantime, Roe financed his further developments by winning prizes that at the time were mostly offered by major daily newspapers for aviation services.

In January 1907, Roe publicly stated that he was busy building a "real" airplane, and in December of the same year he began the first attempts to fly his three-decker on the Brooklands automobile circuit.

Together with JA Prestwich, the designer of the JAP engines, Roe founded the JAP Avroplane Company in September 1908, but the collaboration ended shortly afterwards; Roe and Prestwich disagreed on the size of the triplane to be built.

Roe's fortune was almost exhausted, and in order to continue financing his attempts, he borrowed money from his father and younger brother Humphrey, known as HV, with whom he had been closely associated since childhood. HV was now a successful businessman; he owned the Bulls-Eye company, which made braces .

The two brothers founded the company AV Roe and Company on April 27, 1909 , which would then develop into one of the most successful aircraft manufacturers in England.

AV Roe sold its shares in Avro in 1928.

On March 27, 1929, he received the knight bachelor's knighthood due to his services to British aviation and then officially added his mother's maiden name to his surname.

Sir Alliott bought shares in the aircraft company Saunders in 1933, which later became Saunders-Roe Ltd. and was president of that company when he passed away on January 4, 1958. Roe Island in Antarctica has been named after him since 1960 .

literature

• Fathers of British Aviation No.1 - AVRoe , Airplane Monthly, March 1993, p. 29

Web links

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