Lanchester, Frederick William

(b. Lewisham, England, 28 October 1868; d. Birmingham, England, 8 March 1946)

engineer.

F. W. Lanchester, inentor, designer, and automotive engineer, was the son of Henry Jones Lanchester, an architect, and Octavia Ward. Educated at the Hartley Institute, Southampton, and at the Normal School of Science, LAnchester started work with Messrs. T. B. Barker, Birmingham, a manufacturing company. In 1899, five years after construction of the first ALnchester motor car began, the Lanchester Motor Company was formed with LAnchester as chief engineeer and general manger. From 1904 to 1914 he served as the company’s consulting engineer; from 1909 to 1929 he was consultant ot the Daimler Company and teh Birmingham Small Arms Company; and from 1928 to 1930 he was consulting engineer on Diesel engines for William Beardmore’s, the manufacturing firm.

In 1894, Lanchester gave a talk before the Birmingham Ntural History and Philosophical Society in which he said to have stated his vortex theory of sustentation (lift). In 1897 a revised version of this paper (neither text exists) was rejected by both the Royal Society and the Physical society. He was silent until 1907 when he published Aerodynamics, as volume I of Aerial Flight; volume II, Aerodonetics followed in 1908.

This cavalier neglect by learned societies of an important concept is explainable only in the light of the low state of the theory and practice of hydrodynamics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition, Lanchester’s insistence on using his own terminology—“aerodonetics” for “aeronautics—rather than that in common usage, and the novelty of his insights impeded the comprehension of his work. Lanchester’s book had so considerable an influence on other investigators, however, that he merits a leading place, along with W. M. Kutta, Nikolai Zhukovsky, Ludwig Prandtl, Carl Runge, George H. Bryan, and Theodor von Karmán, in the history of hte aeronautical sciences. Among his other works, Aircraft in War (1916), became a basic source for the development of the new science of operations analysis during World War II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For information on Lanchester's life and work, see “Frederick William Lanchester,” in Teh Daniel Guggenheim Medal for Achievement in Aeronautics (New York, 1936): “Dr. F. W. Lanchester; Death of a British Pioneer in aerodynamic Aerofoil Theory,” in Flight, 49 , no. 1942 (14 Mar. 1946) 266; Raffaele Giacomelli, “In Memoria de Wilbur e Orville Wright, XII. —La Controversia sugli esperimenti di laboratorio dei fratelli Wright,” in Aerotenica, 29 (1949), 105–107; P. W. Kingsford, F. W. Lanchester,” sec. 2 (4) in J. E. Allen, “Looking Ahead in Aeronautics,” in Aeronautical Journal, 72 no. 685 (1968), 6–7.

Marvin W. Mc Farland