John Stringfellow

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John Stringfellow

John Stringfellow (* 1799 in Sheffield ; † December 13, 1883 in London ) was an English inventor and aviation pioneer of the 19th century. Stringfellow became known for his work on a steam-powered flight model and is therefore one of the first pioneers of powered flight .

Life

Stringfellow earned his living in Chard as a manufacturer of spools for the local wool industry. He shared his interest in aviation with his friend William Samuel Henson . Since there were no internal combustion engines at that time, flight tests were made with steam-powered models. After a series of failures and the subsequent emigration of Henson to the USA , Stringfellow managed a successful 40 yd (36.58 m) flight in a factory hall in June 1848 with a monoplane model (wingspan 3 m)  .

Realizing that a usable aircraft could not be built in the foreseeable future, he switched to other areas of activity. Stringfellow invented, among other things, electric batteries that were used in medical treatments. Stringfellow's work was shown at an extensive exhibition at Crystal Palace in London in 1868 and was acquired by Samuel Pierpont Langley , director of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC , in 1889 . The Stringfellow Glacier in Antarctica has been named after him since 1960 .

Web links

Stringfellows flying machine

Individual evidence

  1. ^ John Stringfellow (1799-1883) . Center for Telecommunications and Information Engineering. Retrieved April 17, 2011.
  2. ^ Percy Pilcher: Gliding , The Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, 1910, p. 39.