Born in 1868, Lanchester was at the centre of the transition from steam under pressure working a piston to ignited gas propelling a piston, to ignition of an evaporation of benzine.
Sounds simple.
With an engine bolted on to heavy concrete, vibration didn’t really matter; we are after all talking of an explosion in a confined space. Once that explosion occurred aboard a vehicle on four wheels, vibrations were keenly felt.
Lanchester has seen the experiments in Germany with engines attached to carriages, or, worse, engines coupled with contraptions on fewer than four wheels. He simply could not accept them.
He had attended school with no great distinction but nonetheless gained a place at what would become part of Imperial College, London. He found the course short on practical application and so alongside attended a night class at a technical college. The Lanchester who emerged into the world of road transport was thus well equipped.
He took a job with the Forward Gas Engine Works in Saltley, Birmingham on a pittance of a wage but with the agreement that any inventions should be his. It was a good decision for he secured patents for: a Pendulum Governor, a Pendulum Accelerometer, a self starting device for gas engines. There were many more.
I write in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how Lanchester founded a company and made motor cars with engineering but not financial success..
He was a man who, faced with a problem, would work it through theoretically and then test his solution in practice. He wouldn’t leave it there, for he needed also to create the tools necessary for its manufacture. His competitors were very much trial and error men and in the case of Harry Lawson and the British Daimler company a pedlar of promises.
He was not one to confine himself to a single area of engineering. Whilst he was creating motor cars, he also explored air transport. He eschewed the crude early attempts at flight, committing himself instead to a detailed study of birds finding how they achieved seemingly effortless flight compared to the struggles of the early aviators. Rolt is of the opinion that Lanchester’s writing on flight paved the way to aeronautical engineering. Lanchester created models based on his research, one powered by elastic bands (remember?). Rolt offers a description:
‘When the weather was calm, the models carved their way through the air as if running on invisible rails. When flight was made in a gale wind, the flight path took the form of a sinuous curve without momentary suggestion of loss of equilibrium but rather with the appearance of some set and intelligent purpose.’
He published two seminal works which were received with hostility in England and France, but welcomed in Germany. It wasn’t until after his death that his work was acknowledged by the Royal Aeronautical Society in their obituary of him. He was a man far ahead of his time.
In the First World War he served for two years as President of the Junior Institution of Engineers which had been founded as the Vulcanic Society by a group of Maudsley’s apprentices. Everything is connected.
Rolt compares Lanchester with Trevithick and notes that unlike Watt neither had a Boulton as a business partner. Lanchester did receive professional acclaim towards the end of his life in 1945 but never financial reward. The diverse places from which acclaim came speaks loudly. A Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellowship and Gold medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, an honorary doctorate from the University of Birmingham and a Guggenheim Gold Medal.
Further reading:
Rolt, L.T.C., Great Engineers (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1962)
No comments:
Post a Comment