Gaetano Arturo Crocco

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gaetano Arturo Crocco (born October 26, 1877 in Naples , † January 19, 1968 in Rome ) was an Italian aviation and rocket pioneer . An asteroid and a lunar crater were named after him.

Life

Crocco was the son of a Neapolitan engineer. He spent his childhood and youth in Palermo , where his mother came from. After graduating from high school , he completed an undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics at the University of Palermo . In 1897 he continued his education at the Artillery and Engineering Technical College in Turin continues and was in 1900 as a first lieutenant in the engineering corps of the army adopted. In 1902 the military sent him to the University of Liège in Belgium for advanced training , which he graduated as the best. He turned down an offer for a position at Westinghouse Electric Corporation and returned to Italy, where he initially received an order from the Navy .

Shortly afterwards, Crocco took an interest in aviation. By 1905 he wrote twelve scientific papers on aerodynamics . With the pioneer officer Ottavio Ricaldoni he built an airship in 1907 , which in the following year first flew over Lake Bracciano and then over Rome. This was followed by more than 30 blimps, of which a large part in the First World War was used. During the war he developed special fuses for artillery shells and anti-aircraft guns and, together with Alessandro Guidoni, the first gyro-controlled bomb .

In 1908, Crocco and Vito Volterra founded the Istituto Centrale Aeronautico , which later became the Italian development center for aeronautical technology in Guidonia Montecelio . By 1914, Crocco had built three wind tunnels , one of which was designed for speeds of up to 200 km / h. In 1920 he retired from active military service as a colonel and moved to the Ministry of Economics as general director and department head for industry . In 1926 he became a lecturer in aeronautical engineering at the University of Rome . There he worked first on solid rocket engines , then on liquid rockets and also on other types of propulsion. Reactivated as a general in 1928 , he took over the technical department of the newly established aviation ministry . In the following year he received the chair of general aeronautical engineering as a university professor in Rome . He planned the military development center for aviation technology in Guidonia Montecelio , which opened in 1936 and was named after the aviation pioneer Alessandro Guidoni who had died there. From 1936 to 1945 and from 1948 to 1952 Crocco was Dean of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Rome. In recent years at the university, he worked mainly in the fields of astronomy and rocket development. He was succeeded by Luigi Broglio . It was mainly thanks to Crocco and Broglio that Italy was one of the first countries after the Soviet Union and the United States to deploy a satellite in space in the 1960s .

Crocco applied for a total of over 50 patents and published almost 200 scientific papers. He was a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei , the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and numerous other scientific academies at home and abroad. In 1951 he founded the Italian Missile Company. Crocco was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in Alamogordo , New Mexico . The asteroid (10606) Crocco and a crater on the moon are named after him.

Gaetano Arturo Crocco was married to Baroness Bice Patti del Piraino, with whom he had seven children, including Luigi Crocco , who became an aerospace engineer, and a professor in Rome and Princeton .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Crocco, Gaetano Arturo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian aviation pioneer and aerospace engineer
DATE OF BIRTH October 26, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Naples
DATE OF DEATH 19th January 1968
Place of death Rome