Carl Dienstbach

Carl Dienstbach (born May 29, 1870 in Usingen ; † June 27, 1956 in Usingen ) was a German musician, journalist and inventor.

Life

Carl Heinrich Ludwig Dienstbach was born in Usingen as the son of the tannery owner Karl Friedrich Dienstbach from Usingen and his wife Luise , daughter of the clarinetist Gerhard Dienstbach from Weilburg .

Carl attended the school in Usingen, where physics and mathematics were taught, and then the grammar school in Weilburg, which he left without a degree, preferring to use his time to study musical composition at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main . For this course he learned to play the piano and, following the example of his grandfather, the clarinet. In the annual reports 10 (1888) to 13 (1891) of the Hoch Conservatory he is registered as a student for piano and clarinet. Studying at the Hoch Conservatory gave him and his family contacts to important personalities such as the composer Hans Pfitzner , the poet James Grun and his sister the writer Frances Grun , the publicist Paul Cossmann , the painter Hans Thoma and zu the musician Hermann Hans Wetzler .

In 1892 he completed his one-year military service in Homburg , but was unable to continue studying at the Hoch Conservatory afterwards because his father's financial situation had deteriorated. After he had made plans for the construction of an aircraft, he decided in March 1893 to comply with the request of his friend Hermann Hans Wetzler and to move to him in New York City . Another reason to emigrate was the fact that he considered the financing of the first concert by Hans Pfitzner to be too risky, with which he did not want to be associated, as can be seen from letters from his sister Lini, which are in the estate of HHWetzler.

When he arrived in New York, he immediately worked with HH Wetzler to build the aircraft, then still called an airship, and to design the engine for it. The plan was to propel the aircraft with a steam engine and a rocket was planned as a jump starter. For the construction of the engine they looked for an engineer who would help with the dimensioning of the engine, but only found a mechanic who looked after scientific equipment at the old City College in New York and was described as extremely inventive. (This mechanic could have been Gustav Weißkopf who came to America in 1893 and who worked in Boston at the Blue Hill Observatory in Boston from autumn 1894 ). The project was financed by HH Wetzler, who ran out of money by mid-1893. Since no other donor was found, the work could not be completed.

In the meantime, attention had been drawn to the fact that Otto Lilienthal was undertaking flight attempts in Germany and had published them. Carl D. therefore wrote to OL in June 1894 to ask OL's opinion. From this correspondence 10 letters are known, 5 of them published in a book by Werner Schwipps of the Otto-Lilienthal-Museum . The letters or copies of the letters are in the Otto-Lilienthal Collection in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

In an earlier book by Werner Schwipps there is also a drawing of the aircraft that Carl Dienstbach sent to Otto Lilienthal. Werner Schwipps wrote: In his first letter to Lilienthal, Dienstbach submitted an astonishing design for a propeller plane with a launch rocket. The attached hand sketch reveals that he was more of an artist than a technician, but impresses with his great imagination. A type of high-wing aircraft is sketched with a propeller in the front and a low-lying pilot's seat just above a geared landing gear. The missile is located above the pilot's head, arranged in the longitudinal axis. It should be thrown off after the launch .

Dienstbach and Wetzler tried to get US patents for both the aircraft and the engine through the law firm Hauff & Hauff, 41 Park Row, New York City . The application was made on June 23, 1893 serial no. 478,488. A technical drawing of these patent applications is in the music department of the Zurich Central Library in the estate of HH Wetzler. The drawing shows several views of the engine and a perspective drawing of the aircraft. The aircraft is more like a kind of motorized hang glider. However, more complicated than a modern hang glider because it has ailerons and vertical stabilizers.

Otto Lilienthal had advised Dienstbach to buy one of his flying machines and his book On the Art of Flying in order to practice the art of flying and he had also advised him to become a member of the German Association for the Promotion of the Ludtschiffahrt . Carl D. followed the latter advice, which led to him writing articles for magazines.

Werner Schwipps writes in his book: "As early as 1895 a report by him (Dienstbach) was included in the" Zeitschrift für Luftschiffahrt ". At the end of 1903 he was the first to know about the successes of the Wright brothers in Kitty Hawk for the" Illustrierte Aeronautischen Mitteilungen "reported. The following year he wrote just as competently about the aeronautical work of August M. Herring .

The Otto Lilienthal Museum in Anklam lists over 50 German-language articles that Dienstbach wrote up to 1910. Among them articles like: On the practical solution of the flight problem , 1895; A gunpowder engine , 1897; The Wright Brothers' powered flight , 1904; The first year of life of the practical flying machine , 1905, to name just a few.

In a biography by Claus-Christian Schuster ( Altenberg Trio Vienna ) about Hans Pfitzner you can read about him: Then there was the clarinetist Carl Dienstbach, in whose picturesque hometown Usingen in the Taunus mountains the Pfitzner friends spent many hours of fun with Carl's five siblings .

In the book Die Brüder Wright by Alfred Hildebrandt you can read: I soon went to Dayton, Ohio with a qualified aeronaut, the German engineer Karl Dienstbach, who has lived in New York for 15 years, and visited the father of the brothers, the old Anglo-American bishop Milton Wright .

He is also mentioned as a New York musician and America correspondent for the Illustrated Aeronautical Messages . In the summer months of July and August he worked in hotel orchestras in American seaside resorts as a pianist or clarinetist, otherwise as a piano teacher.

After his American knowledge had improved, he also wrote for American magazines. The first two American articles can be found in the American Aeronaut and Aerostatist 1907, then 5 articles in the American Aeronaut 1908 and one each in Aeronautics 1908 and 1909, one together with TR MacMechen in McClure's Magazine Vol. 33, 1909 and in The Century Magazine 1910, Vol. 80 together with TR MacMechen 2 longer articles, and together with Joseph A. Steinmetz an article in the Journal of the American Society for Naval Engineers , November 1914. Together with Waldemar Kaempffert an article in the book History of the World War 1919.

The Scientific American lists 47 articles by him for the period from 1910 to 1917 mostly to those with zeppelins involved. From 1916 he also wrote about 25 articles for the Popular Science Monthly until 1920 that dealt more and more with aircraft.

In 1955 he returned to his hometown Usingen where he died in hospital in 1956 at the age of 86. In the death notification that his sister Emmi sent to the American Consulate , the profession of teacher was probably referring to his activity as a piano teacher.

inventor

As an inventor, he obtained the following patents:

• Carl Dienstbach and Walter L. Fairchild, U.S. Patent 1,104,039 Flying Machine , filed April 13, 1910, patented July 21, 1914
• Carl Dienstbach, Patent DE000000483041 Control device for aircraft , filed January 5, 1922, patented September 5, 1929
• Carl Dienstbach, U.S. Patent 2,465,957 Scanning Mirror Navigational Instrument , filed September 22, 1945, patented March 29, 1949

His automatic note changer for wind instrument players , famous in family circles , was probably not patented.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from March 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Hoch's Conservatory annual reports 1878 to 1921  
2. ↑ ^{a b} http://www.zb.uzh.ch/Medien/spezialsammlungen/musik/nachlaesse/wetzler.pdf Hermann Wetzler estate directory (1870–1943) (PDF file; 636 kB)
3. ^ Werner Schwipps: Otto Lilienthal's flight technology correspondence , Otto-Lilienthal-Museum Anklam 1993.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Werner Schwipps: Lilienthal and the Americans , Deutsches Museum München 1985, ISBN 3-486-26441-9 .
5. ^ Alfred Hildebrandt: The Wright Brothers. A study of the development of the flying machine from Lilienthal to Wright. Elsner publishing house, Berlin 1909.