Otto Hermann Fritzsche
Otto Hermann Fritzsche (born March 15, 1882 in Leipzig , † June 4, 1908 in Meine ) was a German officer at sea and designer of the first naval aircraft .
Life
Otto Fritzsche, the son of the Leipzig factory owner Hermann Traugott Fritzsche from his second marriage to Anna Dorothea Luise Brucker (1854-1903), attended the royal high school in his hometown from Easter 1892 to December 31, 1896 , which he left in the lower secondary school .
Since he had little inclination to become a merchant, he entered the deck officers' school of the Imperial Navy in Kiel on April 7, 1900 as a midshipman . A multitude of bon mots and anecdotes soon grew up around the young officer candidate, in whom the nonchalant sovereignty of a scion from a wealthy family was happily combined with a disarming openness and Saxon motherhood , which made him known and popular with superiors and crew alike.
His interest in and understanding of all technical innovations led him to motorsport and the construction of aircraft at an early age .
When he heard about the Wright brothers' flight attempts in 1901 , he asked his brother Karl , who was in charge of the American branch of his father's company at the time, to send him construction drawings and photos of Wright's aircraft from Chicago and began developing his own models.
After he came into possession of a considerable fortune through the untimely death of his father, he commissioned the mechanical engineering company Mordhorst in Kiel to manufacture an aircraft according to his plans in the winter of 1906. On June 28, 1908, he wanted to take part in a flight day taking place on the occasion of the Kiel Week with the monoplane he had designed .
Before that, he went to the Opel factory in Rüsselsheim to pick up the racing car he had designed and ordered, with which he drove from July 9th to 17th, 1908 on the Prinz-Heinrich-Fahrt on the Berlin-Stettin-Kiel route. Hamburg – Hanover – Cologne – Trier – Frankfurt / a. M. wanted to participate. On the way back from Rüsselsheim, his vehicle skid during an evasive maneuver in Meine and overturned. Of the four inmates, Oberleutnant zur See Otto Fritzsche and a companion, Kapitänleutnant Assmann, were thrown out of the car and fatally injured.
The funeral of the popular officer, motor sportsman and aviation pioneer took place in the family crypt on the New Johannisfriedhof in Leipzig , with great public participation .
The further development of the Fritzsche monoplane
Due to the sudden death of its designer, the Fritzsche aircraft could only be exhibited at the Flugtag in Kiel.
The aircraft had three pairs of wings with a total area of 33 m² and a 70 hp engine. The four-bladed propeller was powered by a remote shaft. For the time, the engine - Mordhorst's own design - had a very favorable ratio between weight and power: for 1 HP the weight was less than 1 kg. (...) The fuselage had 3 impellers and was 11 m long. The entire aircraft weighed 320 kg.
Otto's older brother, Karl August Fritzsche, took over the financing of the further development of the Fritzsche aircraft, for which the naval chief engineer Karl Loew (* 1869) could be won. After the installation of a 70 hp Daimler engine with 4 cylinders and the assembly of Etrich - Rumpler - wings , the aircraft was accepted at the Johannisthal airfield in the spring of 1911 .
On June 18, 1911, Karl Loew and his passenger, Kapitänleutnant Busch, took off with the Fritzsche-Etrich-Taube from Sonderburg on the island of Alsen for the first overseas flight to Kiel. This 85 km long flight, which led in sections of 60 km over the fjord landscape of the western Baltic Sea , has since been claimed by German naval aviators as the beginning of sea aviation.
The monoplane made famous by this flight was given to the Imperial Navy in the summer of 1911 by its owner, Karl August Fritzsche. In the summer of 1912, emergency floats were built for the chassis wheels at the Imperial Shipyard in Danzig , making the Fritzsche aircraft, which was given the E 1 naval code , the first aircraft in the Navy.
It was brought by sea to the German colony of Tsingtau in China , where it was to be used as a reconnaissance aircraft. During its first take-off, on July 31, 1914, the aircraft and its pilot Mullerkowski hit a mountain, and it was completely destroyed. Due to the rapid technical development, no further models of this prototype were commissioned.
literature
- Georg-Günther Freiherr von Forstner: The air pioneer Otto Fritzsche , EA Seemann, Leipzig 1941.
- Jürgen Losch: The History of the German Sea Aviators , lecture to the Military History Working Group Bonn-Rheinbach, held on August 6, 2007. Online version as PDF document
Web links
- Pictures of the Fritzsche monoplane (PDF file; 2.81 MB) on seeflieger.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ König Albert-Gymnasium (Royal High School until 1900) in Leipzig (Ed.): Student album 1880–1904 / 05 , Friedrich Gröber, Leipzig 1905.
- ↑ Jürgen Losch, p. 2
- ↑ Jürgen Losch, p. 3
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Fritzsche, Otto Hermann |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German aviation pioneer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 15, 1882 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Leipzig |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 4, 1908 |
| Place of death | My |