Lawrence Hargrave

Lawrence Hargrave about 1890

Lawrence Hargrave (born January 29, 1850 in Greenwich , England , † July 14, 1915 in Sydney , Australia ) was a British-Australian engineer , astronomer , explorer , inventor and aviation pioneer . As the first person in Australia , he took off in 1894 with a flying machine that was heavier than air.

Childhood and years of discovery

The second son of Ann and John Fletcher Hargrave was born in England. His father emigrated to Australia with two other sons in 1857 to pursue his career as a lawyer. The rest of the family moved to Kent , and Lawrence was sent to boarding school in northern England. He was also scheduled to study law and received appropriate instruction. In 1865 his father brought him to Australia, where, with his father's consent, he set out on a circumnavigation of Australia on the Ellesmere . In 1867, Lawrence failed his university entrance exam and began an apprenticeship as an engineer with the Australasian Steam Navigation Company. This was completed in 1872, and he was hired on various expeditions to New Guinea and the Gulf of Papua . After a short stay in Sydney, he took part in Luigi Maria d'Albertis' expedition on the Fly in 1876 . In 1877 he was accepted into the Royal Society . In 1878 he married Margaret Preston. From 1878 to 1883 he was employed as an astronomer at the Sydney Observatory and carried out research with Henry Chamberlain Russell.

Inventions and aviation

Hargrave (left) and Swain at the demonstration of their flying machine at Stanwell Park in November 1894

The prosperity and extensive land ownership of his father as Attorney General for New South Wales allowed Hargrave to devote himself to his inventiveness undisturbed from 1883 onwards. He built mechanically operated model aircraft and constructed ornithopters . Between 1887 and 1889 he built the first rotary engine that he intended to use in airplanes. The principle was later to power the majority of aircraft by the First World War, but Hargrave's rotary engines proved too inefficient, and in 1892 he gave up after the eighteenth attempt. Hargrave then carried out pioneering studies on wings and flow behavior, which he was inspired to do by Octave Chanute , with whom he corresponded. In 1893 he began to invent the box kite , which he consistently developed further. On November 12th, 1894 he made his first flight in Stanwell Park , which had very good wind conditions, where he lifted himself 5 meters above the ground attached to four box kites. This led Abbott Lawrence Rotch to carry out meteorological observations with this box kite for the first time. The weather kite became the most important tool in the study of the free atmosphere until it was replaced by the radiosonde in the 1930s .

Hargrave was of the opinion that inventions should benefit mankind and opposed patents . He carefully documented his inventions and sent plans and sketches to befriended aviation pioneers. However, it is unclear how much his colleagues were influenced by his work. In Australia he received little recognition for his inventions, which made him increasingly bitter. The efforts of aviation pioneers in America revived his inventive will in 1903, but his limited financial reserves and his health did not allow greater efforts. He has offered his models worldwide since 1900, but received few replies. In 1909 over a hundred models were found in the Deutsches Museum in Munich . That year, Hargrave was also elected vice president of the Aerial League of Australia, and he corresponded with inventor and entrepreneur George Augustine Taylor , who had presented a glider.

In 1914, in protest against the First World War, he returned his Bavarian awards that had been given to him for his pioneering work. After an appendectomy , Hargrave died of peritonitis in July 1915 .

Hargrave and his wife fathered a total of seven children, one of whom a boy and four girls survived early childhood. His son died shortly before his father in May 1915 in the Battle of Gallipoli . After his death, his wife Ann sold his property and moved to England with their daughters.

Appreciations

The Deutsches Museum returned 25 Hargraves flying machines to Australia after the Second World War; the rest had been destroyed in bombing raids.

Hargrave's portrait graced the Australian $ 20 bill between 1966 and 1992 .

Herbert Flugelman dedicated a winged sculpture to him, which stands on a memorial on Mount Keira near Wollongong .

Today a coastal road with his name runs through Stanwell Park, Hargrave's experimental area, and there is also a memorial, the Lawrence Hargrave Memorial.

On May 1, 2003, the asteroid (11777) Hargrave, discovered in 1977, was named after him. He has been namesake for Hargrave Hill , a hill in the Antarctic, since 1960 .

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Biography (English)

Web links

Commons : Lawrence Hargrave  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• R. Greig-Smith: Lawrence Hargrave, 1850-1915. In: Monthly Weather Review , 46, 1918, p. 27. doi : 10.1175 / 1520-0493 (1918) 46 <27a: LH> 2.0.CO; 2 ( PDF ). Obituary