Walter Gordon Wilson
Walter Gordon Wilson (born April 21, 1874 in Blackrock , County Dublin , † July 1, 1957 ) was a British engineer .
Life
Wilson was a cadet on HMS Britannia. From 1894 to 1897 he attended King's College , Cambridge . From 1898 he worked together with Percy Sinclair Pilcher and Adrian Verney-Cave, later Lord Braye , on a project to build an aircraft engine. In 1899, however, Pilcher died in an air accident. As a result of this incident, Wilson no longer engaged in aircraft construction and instead turned to building a vehicle engine with a planetary gear transmission . In 1904 Wilson married. In the following years he worked for the British company Armstrong-Whitworth . During the First World War, Wilson was again active for the British Navy. In 1915 he developed the Little Willie together with the British engineer William Tritton . After the First World War, he and John Davenport Siddeley founded Gears Ltd , which manufactured vehicle transmissions.
To what extent Wilson can be seen as the inventor of the tank together with Tritton, as is assumed in England, is controversial. In 1914/1915 , Ernest Dunlop Swinton fitted a caterpillar tractor with an armored hull and in 1911 Gunther Burstyn (Austria-Hungary) designed an armored "motorized gun" with caterpillar tracks and a rotating cannon turret.
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| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wilson, Walter Gordon |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British engineer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 21, 1874 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Blackrock , Couty Dublin |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 1, 1957 |
| Place of death | United Kingdom |