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Aviation History
1956
1956 - 0211.PDF
FLIGHT, 24 February 1956 Henson and 2 Stringfellow Their Lives and Work: R.Ae.S. Memorial Lecture at Yeovil 209 Henson's proposed "Ariel" steam carriage of 1843. IN the first Henson and Stringfellow Memorial Lecture,presented before the Yeovil Branch of the Royal Aero-nautical Society on February 16th, Dr. A. M. Ballantyne, T.D., B.Sc, Ph.D., Hon. F.C.A.I., A.F.I.A.S., A.F.R.Ae.S., and Capt. J. Laurence Pritchard, Hon. F.R.Ae.S., put forward "a new view" of the work of these two nineteenth-century aeronautical pioneers. Quotations were given from a number of previously unpublished sources, many of which had been studied by Capt. Pritchard as part of his research into the history of the Society. The paper concluded by emphasizing the importance of the work of Henson, while pointing out that the work of the two "cannot be separated, any more than that of Orville and Wilbur Wright." In the histories of the work of William Samuel Henson and John Stringfellow in this country, the paper began, the strong tendency had been to give the greater credit to Stringfellow. Part of this had been due to the fact that Henson left England in 1848 to live in America, where he died in 1888, and his name became a subsidiary one in the accounts of his and Stringfellow's work and experiments in Chard in 1843-48. John Stringfellow's reputation in aeronautical history [the paper continued] rests upon three things. One, that he designed and constructed the first engine-driven model aeroplane to make a free flight; two, that he designed and made a steam-driven model triplane capable of free flight; and, three, that he made a small steam engine widi the highest power/weight ratio of its time. This lecture is concerned with the evidence for these three claims; with Stringfellow's general approach towards solving the problem of flight; and with the interdependence of himself and William Samuel Henson. There is no known contemporary evidence, published or unpub- lished, in the possession of the Aeronautical Society, or within its present knowledge, which gives any account of the flight of Stringfellow's engine-driven model of 1848. Such an account would be weighty evidence for any assessment of Stringfellow's achievements. The first statement publicly made was in January 1869, by F. W. Brearey, hon. secretary of the Aeronautical Society, just on 21 years after the event; and the second by F. J. Stringfellow, John Stringfellow's son, at the end of 1892, 44 years after the event and 9 years after the death of his father. On these two statements are based every account written since of the 1848 flight; and part of F. J. Stringfellow's version is in fact copied from that of F. W. Brearey. More or less detailed accounts have been given of the work of Henson and Stringfellow by the Royal Aeronautical Society, the Science Museum, by J. E. Hodgson, by Pritchard and others. All these accounts are inaccurate in many particulars. All of them have drawn firm conclusions on fragmentary and doubtful evidence. All have been written without reference to certain letters of F. W. Brearey and John Stringfellow and others in the possession of the Society; and all were written before the remark- able research work of Paul Johnston, Director of the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences, into the life of Henson, was published during the second World War. t In the course of his researches Johnston discovered Henson s diary. It revealed that he was born on May 3, 1812, in Notting- ham, and left England to land in New York on May 5, 1848. There he joined his father who had settled in Newark, New Jersey. He became an American citizen in 1853 and died on March 22nd, 1888. "Henson," Johnston says, "was primarily a mechanic—and his interests were completely catholic. All his life he was continually thinking up new ideas in mechanics and in machinery. To him no mechanism was perfect. Each new device that he saw appar- ently challenged him to improve upon it. He would work inten- sively upon it for a while, then drop it—a new razor, an aeroplane, a breech-loading cannon, a method for water-proofing fabric, an ice machine, a springboard, or a device for cleaning cisterns. Toward the end of his life he became intensively interested in the mechanics of the Universe. He observed, he read, he speculated, and he wrote on astronomical matters. . . ." John Stringfellow was born on December 6, 1799, in Attercliffe, near Sheffield. His father, William Stringfellow, died on November 9, 1842, two months after W. S. Henson took out his famous patent No. 9478 for his Aerial Steam Carriage. The father not only had a great interest in science, but also in mechanics, and had a small laboratory of his own and workshop in which he made, among other things, small working models and instruments. It was from his father that John Stringfellow must have picked up his mechanical dexterity. He learnt the trade of bobbin and carriage manufacturer, and became well-known in the lace industry for his work. About 1820 he left Nottingham (where he had been apprenticed) for Chard and set up on his own account. Like his father he had wide interests and is known to have paid special attention to electrical matters, upon which he lectured, making all his own electrical apparatus. He was an excellent photographer, played a lively part in politics at the time of the passing of the Reform Bill, and served on the Chard Council from 1833 to 1847. When he first took an interest in the possibility of flight, or when he first met Henson, are dates completely unknown. In the account of his life, at the time of his funeral in Chard (an account clearly to some extent supplied by his family) the local paper, the Chard and Iltninster News, made no mention of any meeting at any time between Henson and Stringfellow. Yet it is known diat diey were working together for five years at least, and prob- ably more, in die 1840s. John Stringfellow died on December 13, 1883. . . . In the whole history of aeronautics, from 1773 to 1907, there are few instances of publicity so great as that which followed the publication of Henson's Patent Specification No. 9478 of 1842. The interest was world wide and fanciful pictures of Henson's Aerial Steam Carriage appeared in papers and weekly magazines on the Continent, in the United States and Great Britain, and in India with still more fanciful stories of the new Air Age which was opening. An examination of the Patent and its drawings makes it clear that it was not just an imaginative idea with sketches, but one such as an engineer would have put forward—without having the full data he would like to have—after study of the problem in die light of the ideas and knowledge of his day. The Society's account of 1910 states that Henson began, in 1840, experiments with gliding models and a light steam engine. After examining various sources of reference, the authors of the paper go on to submit that Henson was making his own model, at that time, without the assistance of Stringfellow. Any suggestion that the steam engine was an original design by Stringfellow, they add, must be discounted. [Cont. on p. 210
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