August of Parseval

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August of Parseval (1902)
August von Parseval (left) with Johann Schütte , 1929
Impact airship PL 3, Augsburg 1909
August von Parseval (2nd from right) with other pilots (1934)
Parseval Airplane at Plauer See

August von Parseval (born February 5, 1861 in Frankenthal , † February 22, 1942 in Berlin ) was a German designer and producer of airships and namesake of the Parseval airships . The spelling Parzeval or Parceval can also be found in historical documents .

Life

Parseval was the first son of the Bavarian government councilor Joseph von Parseval (1825-1887) and his wife Marie Amélie, née von Schaden (1840-1918). His grandfather was the Bavarian Major General Ferdinand von Parseval (1791-1854); the Bavarian generals Maximilian von Parseval (1823–1902), Otto von Parseval (1827–1901) and Ferdinand Jakob von Parseval (1829–1919) were his uncles.

From 1873 to 1878 he attended the page corps in Munich , which he completed with the ensign exam. In 1878 Parseval graduated from the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Munich . Then he moved to the 3rd Infantry Regiment "Prince Carl of Bavaria" . As an autodidact , he dealt with problems in aeronautics . In the garrison town of Augsburg he came into contact with August Riedinger and there he met his future partner Hans Bartsch von Sigsfeld , with whom he developed a tethered dragon balloon . This was used as an observation balloon by the military , was widely used and is therefore very successful. In 1901 Parseval took a leave of absence from military service.

In the free balloon club Augsburg he was from 1901 founding member and first chairman.

In 1901, Parseval and Sigsfeld began building a dirigible airship . After Sigsfeld's sudden death in a free balloon landing in 1902, work was interrupted until 1905.

Parseval was one of the founders of the Luftfahrzeug-Gesellschaft (LFG) in 1908 . This built the Parseval airships PL 3 1908 to PL 26 1915 in their shipyard in Bitterfeld .

Due to the developments in engine construction, a corresponding drive unit was then also available. By the end of the First World War, 22 Parseval-type airships , some of them impact and some of keel, were built. In the late twenties and early thirties, four more Kiel airships were built based on the Parseval-Naatz principle.

Parseval also turned to the development of the aircraft . In 1908 he submitted a memorandum with the draft of a flying machine to the Motor Airship Study Society (MStG). Mainly for safety reasons, he initially wanted to carry out the flight tests over a large area of ​​water, which is why he designed the machine as a seaplane . After the MStG had promised to support the project, and when the city of Plau also got involved by providing a site free of charge, Parseval had a “flying hall” built on Plauer See in autumn 1909 . There the machine was assembled.

The first flight attempts on April 14, 1910 - under the direction of chief engineer Ernst Blochmann and with Dipl.-Ing. Wilhelm Hoff as the second pilot - were unsatisfactory. Even after extensive modifications, the machine was unable to take off from the water. That is why Parseval had a run-in track built into the lake so that, similar to the first flight of the Wright brothers , the flying machine could be accelerated to take-off speed on a launch car. The first attempt on October 7, 1910 was successful and today - despite the start from land - it is recognized as the first sea flight in Germany. In a later flight, an altitude of 75 meters and a flight range of about three to four kilometers was reached. At the beginning of 1911 Parseval stopped the experiments.

Parseval now devoted himself more to theoretical teaching at the newly established chair for flight technology at the Technical University (Berlin-) Charlottenburg.

August von Parseval was buried in the Wilmersdorf cemetery.

Honors

The journeys of each “Parseval”, like the first big journeys of the zeppelins , caused a sensation. A pub in Kiel only closed in 2002, which was named "Zum Parseval" when one of these airships first visited in 1912. In his hometown Frankenthal, the square in front of the Albert-Einstein-Gymnasium is called Parsevalplatz . In 2000 the vocational school center Bitterfeld-Wolfen was given the honorary name "August von Parseval". He recalls that in addition to the construction of the Parseval airships near the vocational training center, the gas demand for hydrogen needed to lift the airships was largely covered by the electrochemical works in Bitterfeld . A street in the Rebstock-Nord-Ost development area in Frankfurt am Main is named after the aviation pioneer. From 1909 an airship port was established on the site, the forerunner of Frankfurt Airport .

literature

Web links

Commons : August von Parseval  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: August von Parseval  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Annual report from the K. Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Munich. ZDB ID 12448436 , 1877/78.
  2. ↑ J. Bleibler: Starrluftschiffprojekte in Germany 1908 to 1914. In: W. Meighörner (Ed.): Airships that were never built. Friedrichshafen 2002, p. 43.
  3. ↑ Program of the colloquium “100 Years of Sea Flight in Germany” on October 9, 2010 (PDF file; 79 kB), as viewed October 18, 2010.
  4. ↑ http://www.stvv.frankfurt.de/parlisobj/M_3_2016_AN1.pdf Annex to lecture M3 / 2016 by the Frankfurt magistrate on naming roads after aviation pioneers, accessed on March 10, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Parseval, August of
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German airship builder
DATE OF BIRTH February 5, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankenthal (Palatinate)
DATE OF DEATH February 22, 1942
Place of death Berlin