Eugène Godard II

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Eugène Pierre Gabriel Godard (born September 25, 1864 in Paris , † November 11, 1910 in Saint-Nicolas-de-Port ) was a French aeronautical engineer .

Life

Eugène Godard II, son of Aeronautikers Eugène Godard , saw its first free balloon flight at the age of three years with his father during the Paris World Exhibition of 1867 . After the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 , when his father built airmail balloons in series, the family settled in Nantes , where Eugène II attended the Lycée . He experienced his second flight in 1873 in Amiens with his father and Jules Verne as a guest, whose only flight was this. In 1878 he accompanied his father while testing the large tethered balloon with 25,000 cubic meters of gas by Henri Giffard in the Tuileries in Paris . In 1888, when his father retired to Brussels , Eugène II became a partner in the Grands Ateliers Aérostatiques on the Paris Champ de Mars , the most important balloon factory at the time, which was run by his cousin Louis Godard II and Gabriel Yon. He focused on tethered balloons .

In 1890 Eugène II came to Denmark as an aeronautics teacher to Edvard Rambusch , who had built up the Danish balloon troop. In 1891 he was seriously injured in Chicago when the tethered balloon he was piloting caught fire from a lightning strike . In 1892 he performed 24 balloon ascents during the day and night at the International Fair in Plovdiv , for which he received the Order of St. Alexander . In 1894 and 1895 he rose from Cairo and Alexandria and flew over the desert. The Khedive Abbas Hilmi Pascha invited him to a balloon ascent from his palace and made him Knight of the Mecidiye Order . At the Paris World Exposition in 1900 he was involved in organizing the balloon competitions in which he himself participated. In an altitude competition, he and Jacques Balsan reached an altitude of 5,560 m . In 1902 he was still piloting the Düsseldorf balloon, but from 1903 he no longer flew due to his incurable nervous disease. In the Grands Ateliers Aérostatiques he designed the airships America-I (1906), Belgique-I (1909) and Belgique-II (1910). In Saint-Nicolas-de-Port he put an end to his life by jumping from the great bridge into the Meurthe .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Philippe Foubert: Eugène Godard II (accessed December 1, 2016).
  2. ↑ a b Une famille illustrious: Les Godard (accessed on November 29, 2016).
  3. ↑ Larousse: Eugène Godard (accessed November 29, 2016).
personal data
SURNAME Godard, Eugène II
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Godard, Eugène Pierre Gabriel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French balloonist
DATE OF BIRTH September 25, 1864
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH November 11, 1910
Place of death Saint-Nicolas-de-Port