Clément Ader
Clément Agnès Ader (born April 2, 1841 in Muret near Toulouse , France ; † May 3, 1925 there ) was a French aviation pioneer and inventor.
Life
Ader was the son of François Ader and his second wife Antoinette Forthané. Ader carried out the first (uncontrolled) motorized flight in history with his Éole , which ended in a crash. He also improved telephony technology through the Aders telephone and through a further development of the carbon microphone . In 1880 Ader installed the first telephone line in Paris, and one year later he introduced the Théâtrophone, a system based on Ader's telephone for the stereophonic transmission of music performances.
During the Franco-Prussian War, Ader built one of the balloons used to break through the siege at his own expense during the siege of Paris in 1870/71.
Ader introduced the word Avion (Eng. "Airplane") in the French language. While it is sometimes mistaken for an acronym that stands for Appareil Volant Imitant les Oiseaux Naturels (Eng. "Flying apparatus that mimics natural birds"), it is probably an artificial word that Ader is freely derived from the Latin word avis (Eng. "Vogel"). When designing the Éole, Ader took the structure of the wings of bats as a model and copied it down to the last detail. The wings of his constructions collapsed on the ground in exactly the same way as bat wings.
The Éole was a cantilever flying wing monoplane, which was to be driven by a 4-cylinder steam engine of 20 hp that acted on a four-bladed propeller and was to be controlled by twisting the wings and a fabric-covered fuselage section that was pulled back like a rudder. The Éole took off on October 9, 1890, on its only flight over approximately 50 meters.
Ader was initially supported by the French government. Support was withdrawn due to a crash during the demonstration of his Éole III , which, according to the assessing officer, flew only 300 meters wide and 20 centimeters high, and his opinion that the developments Aders would end in a technical dead end. Aders Éole III was on public display in Paris around 1900. Ader published a description of his experiments in 1910.
Clément Ader died in Toulouse on May 3, 1925 at the age of 84 . The site of the Airbus aircraft plant in Toulouse Saint-Martin was named “Clément-Ader-Werk” (“L'usine Clément Ader”) in memory of Ader and the main hall for the assembly of the aircraft was named “Clément-Ader-Halle”. Also the Mount vein , a mountain in the north of the Antarctic Peninsula , bears his name.
Works
- L'aviation militaire. Service Histoire de l'armee de l'Air, Vincennes 1990, ISBN 2-904521-11-9 ( reprint of the edition of Paris, 1911).
literature
- Charles H. Gibbs-Smith: Clément Ader: his flight-claims and his place in history. HM Stat. Office, London 1968.
- Pierre Lissaraque: Clément Ader: inventeur d'avions. Toulouse 1990, ISBN 2-7089-5355-9 .
- Claude d'Abzac-Epézy: Clément Ader, Précurseur ou Prophète. In: Revue Historique des Armées. No. 3, 1991.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Charles H. Gibbs-Smith: Hops and Flights: A roll call of early powered take-offs. In: Flight . April 3, 1959, p. 468 , accessed November 28, 2015 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ader, Clément |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Ader, Clément Agnès (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French aviation pioneer and inventor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 2, 1841 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Muret |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 3, 1925 |
| Place of death | Toulouse |