Aviation pioneer, inventor, explorer and astronomer,
Lawrence Hargrave was born in Greenwich in the United Kingdom on 29
January 1850. When Hargrave was six years old, his father and elder
brother sailed for Australia, while Lawrence remained in England with
his mother and younger brother and sister.
In 1865, at the age of 15, Hargrave joined his
father in Sydney. He was destined for a career in law, but was offered
a trip to the Gulf of Carpenteria, and travelled to Somerset on the
tip of Cape York, the Torres Strait Islands and the Albert River,
and circumnavigated the Australian continent.
Hargrave's intended law career was scuttled when
he failed his matriculation examination, and instead he was apprenticed
as an engineer to the Australian Steam Navigation Company, where over
the next five years he acquired the practical and design skills that
were to prove invaluable later. His interest in exploration had been
roused by his expedition around Australia and the gold-rush atmosphere
of the time, and in 1872 Hargrave sailed for New Guinea with a group
of prospectors. Their ship was wrecked off the Queensland coast, with
great loss of life, and it was not until three years later that Hargrave
joined another expedition. This time he made it to New Guinea, and
spent three months exploring and making detailed notes and drawings
of Papuan homes and technological devices.
Soon after his return, Hargrave was off on another
expedition, charting the Fly River and its tributary, the Stickland.
On this expedition, he held the post of ship's engineer, and demonstrated
the powers of observation, resourcefulness and mechanical skills that
were characteristic of him. Following this expedition, Hargrave was
elected a member of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1877.
After working in the foundaries of Chapman and
Co., Hargrave spent five years, from 1879, as an astronomical observer
at the Sydney Observatory.
Here he observed the transit of Mercury in 1881, made observations
of the Krakatoa eruption, assisted in the measurement of double stars,
and designed and built adding machines for use in astronomical calculations.
Hargrave's father had made a number of shrewd land
purchases, and provided well for his sons, such that by 1883 Lawrence
was able to cease paid employment to concentrate on inventions.
From his observations of waves and the movements
of fish, snakes and birds, Hargrave had become interested in flight.
His first experiments concentrated on the means of propulsion, and
his aim was to imitate the flapping of birds' wings. After experiments
with monoplanes powered by clockwork or rubber bands, Hargrave began
to consider the possibilities of a machine that could carry the weight
of a human body.
In 1889, Hargrave built one of his great inventions,
a compressed air rotary engine, which was to remain in use in military
aircraft for many years. Hargrave then began the investigations that
were to result in his second great invention, the box kite. This was
to have substantial impact on the development of the aeroplane.
In 1894, the American engineer, Octave Chanute,
wrote that "If there be one man more than another who deserves
to succeed in flying, that man is Mister Lawrence Hargrave of Sydney".
Chanute devoted a chapter to Hargrave's aeronautical work in his book,
Progress in Flying Machines. This book, together with his correspondence
with the Wright brothers, gave the latter access to Hargrave's research,
although they were not to admit to any influences.
Research had convinced Hargrave that cellular or
box kites had better lift and stability than monoplanes. In his box
kite invention, Hargrave developed three crucial aeronautical concepts:
the cellular box kite wing, the curved wing surface, and the thick
leading wing edge (aerofoil). Finally, on 12 November 1894, Hargrave
made his debut flight in a construction of four linked kites attached
to the ground by piano wire: he flew 4.8 metres above the beach at
Stanwell Park, NSW.
In later years, the US Weather Bureau was to use
the box kite for meterological observations, and it was also to be
used for military observations. The most significant consequence of
Hargrave's invention, however, was that, owing to its remarkable stability,
it was to form the basis of the first generation of European aeroplanes.
The first public flight in Europe, by Alberto Santos-Dumont in France
in 1906, utilised a machine consisting of Hargrave box kites, and
when Gabriel Voisin built the first commercially-available aircraft,
he called them "Hargraves". Hargrave also received a Bavarian
award in recognition of his pioneering aeronautical achievements,
but, always opposed to the use of flying machines for war, he returned
this award at the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
Hargrave was a passionate advocate of freedom of
communication within the scientific community, and an equally passionate
adversary of the patenting system, preferring his inventions to be
available for the benefit of all. On these accounts, he published
all his theoretical work and the results of his experiments in the
Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales.
Lawrence Hargrave continued his experiments on
flying machines, including flying boats, but was stymied by a lack
of skilled engineers, shortage of money, and the solitary nature of
his work. He did, however, become the first Vice-President of the
NSW Section of the Aerial League of Australia in 1909, and in the
same year his models were accepted by the Bavarian government for
display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
In July 1915, two months after the death of his
only son, Geoffrey, at Gallipoli, Hargrave died of peritonitis in
Sydney. During his lifetime, he had often felt isolated and unrecognised,
but today you can view his surviving aeronautical models in Sydney's
Powerhouse Museum, his name
is commemorated in many places, an opera (Lawrence Hargrave Flying
Alone) has been based on his life, and for many years his face
adorned our $20 paper banknote ñ the same one that we used to pay
our airport departure tax.
Reference: Australian Dictionary of Biography
(Amirah Inglis) Vol. 7, pp196-198
