Frederick William Lanchester

British inventor

• Born: October 23, 1868
• Birthplace: Lewisham, London, England
• Died: March 8, 1946
• Place of death: Birmingham, England

With an intuitive genius, Lanchester designed and built the first truly British motorcar, owing nothing to previous production of a horseless carriage and little or nothing to the pioneering designs of the French and Germans whose works were copied or adapted by other British inventors. In addition, Lanchester developed, ten years before the first heavier-than-air flight, the principles of powered flight and aircraft design.

Early Life

Frederick William Lanchester was born the fourth child in a family of eight to Henry Jones Lanchester, an architect, and his wife, the former Octavia Ward, a onetime teacher, in a fashionable suburb in the south of London. Before he was six years old, the family moved some fifty miles to the south of London to the seaside town of Hove. From nursery school, Frederick was sent to a preparatory boarding school in neighboring Brighton. By this time in England, despite the provision of elementary education for all laid down in the Forster Education Act of 1870, the English middle and upper classes provided for their children in public schools (the equivalent of private schools in the United States), which usually separated children from their families except during school vacations and which trained them to rule the country and the Empire. The preparatory school was designed to socialize younger children to the lifestyle and expectations of the public school.

It quickly became clear that Frederick would not easily follow the path laid down for him. The public school curriculum was heavily slanted in favor of the classics and the new social sciences of history and geography, with huge doses of English language and literature. The architect’s son showed exceptional ability at mathematics and science but always found English difficult. At the age of fourteen, his parents sent him to Hartley College in Southampton, at that time the best place anywhere in the south of England for scientific and technical training. Within two years, Frederick won a national scholarship to study for a degree at the Normal School of Science in London (subsequently the Royal College of Science, then Imperial College, University of London).

Lanchester was a full-time student for three years. He left without taking his final examinations and therefore without any formal educational qualifications. It was not a result of failure on his part. By the end of two years, Lanchester was determined to become an engineer but became frustrated by the lack of applied engineering in the curriculum or of any course work on mechanical engineering, his chosen field. He therefore spent his last year in the library reading everything he could on mechanical engineering and his evenings at the Finsbury Technical College learning workshop practice.

At this time, 1889, the number of engineering graduates in England was extremely small compared to the number in the twentieth century and in Germany the same year. In addition, many English engineering graduates left the country for long periods to work on projects worldwide, constructing docks, harbors, and railroads. There was no official realization that industrial and technical training should be a priority. In contrast, the German government was actively engaged in sponsoring both training and research at all levels. The British perspective was that the system of apprenticeship, supplemented by evening classes at a small number of institutions such as the Finsbury Technical College after a full day’s work, was the best training of all. This extremely partial and ad hoc arrangement serves well to illustrate a lack of commitment to innovation and industry and gives one clue as to why Germany and the United States outpaced Great Britain industrially by 1900 and why Great Britain failed to respond. Within such a context, it is easy to understand why Lanchester remained unappreciated for so long.

Lanchester made his first invention while he was still a student. He developed an accelerometer to measure and record the acceleration and deceleration of a vehicle. A second invention, also created while he was still a student, was a fixture on slide rules that could be used for rapid calculations in thermodynamics. Both inventions were later further developed and manufactured.

Lanchester’s first job on leaving the Normal School was as a low-paid draftsman. This was a consequence of his lack of formal qualifications. During this time, he took out his first patent. He invented a draftsman’s tool for hatching, shading, and geometrical design.

Through the good offices of an uncle, Lanchester’s second job offered him more scope. In 1889, he began work as assistant works manager for the small firm of T. B. Barker and Company, makers of the Forward gas engine. The factory was in a very poor section of Birmingham, a large city in the English Midlands well-known for its hundreds of small manufacturing businesses. The company serviced, maintained, and manufactured Otto engines. Within one or two years, Lanchester overhauled the engine designs and constructed engines ranging from two to sixty horsepower. At the age of twenty-one, in 1890, he was made works manager. There quickly followed two important inventions. First, Lanchester developed a pendulum governor that replaced the previous centrifugal governor used in all such engines. Next, as a safety feature following a number of fatalities, he invented an engine starter. Both innovations were almost universally applied to gas engines within the next twenty years.

At twenty-three, Lanchester resigned his job to visit the United States and sell his patents. Though the trip was a financial failure, Lanchester learned much about American manufacturing methods.

Life’s Work

Shortly after his return to England, Lanchester determined to design and make his own motorcar. In the 1890’s, car building and design was at a very rudimentary stage. Lanchester had seen a Daimler at the Paris Exhibition. There was also the work of Gottlieb Daimler’s fellow German Carl Benz, and of Armand Peugeot of France. Although, during the rest of the decade, other German and French companies arrived on the scene, British car manufacturers were reduced to importing, assembling, copying, or adapting Continental models. In addition, designs were based on the model of horse-drawn carriages, with the horses simply replaced by an engine and the bodywork undertaken by traditional companies of coach-builders. Finally, there was little incentive to British pioneers. An act of Parliament passed in 1865 provided that horseless vehicles should be restricted to a maximum speed of four miles per hour and be preceded at a distance of twenty yards by a man carrying a red flag. The Red Flag Act was still in effect until 1896, when the speed limit was raised to fourteen miles per hour and the red flag was discontinued. Even then, low-performance vehicles had to remain the norm if the law were to be respected.

Lanchester’s first experimental car appeared in 1895. It was completely original. His was the first motorcar to be designed and thought out as such. The first Lanchester was built around the driver, and for comfort. It was a five-seater with a single-cylinder, air-cooled engine of five horsepower. Unlike most early inventors, Lanchester used a system of electrical ignition of his own invention. Other original features included a Lanchester carburetor, his own transmission system, and an epicyclic gearbox combined with a chain drive. In February, 1896, Lanchester and his brother George took the car on its first run. While it ran smoothly, they found it underpowered, since they had to push the vehicle up hills. Following an eighteen-month period of reconstruction work, the car reappeared, this time with a twin-cylinder, air-cooled engine of eight horsepower; a special counterbalancing mechanism to achieve a balanced engine; and a new kind of worm drive replacing the chain drive. On the road in 1897, the Lanchesters drove the car at speeds of up to twenty-eight miles per hour, in an early morning foray to avoid the police. A second car, with even more original features, appeared in 1898. It was famous in its day and won a special gold medal for design and performance at trials arranged by the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland.

In 1899, the Lanchester Engine Company was founded, and this Gold Medal Phaeton was its first production model. The balancing of the engine allowed for higher piston speeds than were thought possible at the time; a splined shaft and Lanchester’s own roller bearings were introduced into the gearbox; a pedal accelerator was used for the first time; ignition was achieved through a magnetic generator; and cantilever springs at the forward end of the chassis were used for the first time. The result was a nearly smooth, noiseless glide, a great contrast to its competitors, and a high speed of twenty-eight miles per hour.

In the early years of the twentieth century, motorcar driving was still the preserve of the rich. The luxury car market was therefore the only outlet for car manufacturers. Unfortunately, most early car designers were badly undercapitalized. Lanchester was no exception. His first financial backers were the family Pughs, the successful bicycle financiers. From 1901 to 1905, the armaments company Vickers and Maxim provided money to exploit the Lanchester motor patents. As a result of cash-flow problems, however, the company went into receivership in 1904. Lanchester was forced to resign as general manager when the company was reorganized as the Lanchester Motor Company. He even failed to raise enough capital to remain a director of the company that bore his name. He finally resigned all connection with the company in 1914, remaining thereafter on the periphery of motor manufacture.

To compensate for the loss of his company, Lanchester accepted the offer in 1910 of Edward Manville, chair of the Daimler Motor Company, to become its consulting engineer. He remained in that capacity, part of a multitalented prewar team, until his dismissal in 1930 at a time when managers were desperately seeking to save the company. Ironically, Daimler was saved in large part by its acquisition of the Lanchester Motor Company in 1931, which offered it a better engine design and performance and an opportunity to move into the middle-class market that had developed since 1920.

Remarkable though Lanchester’s career in motor design was, however, it was not his only career. As early as 1890, he is said to have confided to a friend that he would like to build an engine for an aircraft. Given that no heavier-than-air machine had ever flown at that time, his friend sagely advised him to forget the idea as his reputation as a sane engineer would be ruined. While he did not build his engine, Lanchester remained deeply interested in powered flight. When he worked at the Forward engine works, he used his spare time in many experiments with model gliders launched from his bedroom window and in the meadow behind his house; he studied the flight of birds, took up shooting to examine the wings and body structure of birds, and took up fishing to study the streamlining of fish. By 1894, Lanchester had made a great discovery in aerodynamics. His vortex theory explained the lift that sustains aircraft in flight. A paper on the subject was rejected by the prestigious Royal Society and was given instead, in 1895, to the Birmingham Natural History and Philosophical Society. He could not get it published. Later expanded, Lanchester’s findings and theories were published as Aerial Flight in two volumes Aerodynamics (1907) and Aerodonetics (1908). In Great Britain, his work was ignored for many years. It was not until after World War I that English and French scientists accepted his theories. Only in Germany was Lanchester taken seriously and justly famed, an irony that would be amusing were it not so tragic for English and French fliers.

Toward the end of his most outstandingly creative period in 1901, Lanchester was a big man in appearance, of heavy build, with strong features framed by a thick, dark beard. He was as commanding personally as he was physically. He was not one to minimize his own achievements and was often intolerant of people whose minds did not work as quickly as his own. He could be cruelly sarcastic. He loved opera and classical music; he sang; he even wrote and published a book of poetry. He was married in 1919 to Dorothea Cooper, a clergyman’s daughter. They had no children. Lanchester died penniless at the age of seventy-seven on March 8, 1946, at his home in Birmingham.

Significance

Lanchester was an intuitive genius. His work was rarely appreciated when it first appeared precisely because he was so original and innovative. Though he is now called by many modern writers the founder of the British motorcar, the remarkable technique and performance of his machines did not lead to widespread recognition. His pioneering aeronautical work suffered an even worse fate. It was ignored in his home country for twenty-five years. Only then did his Aerial Flight become the textbook for aircraft designers, as it had already years before in Germany. Lanchester has yet to be accorded that renown he is due. For a brief while, a new university was named for him in Coventry, the center of the British car industry. By the 1980’s, it had altered its name to the Coventry Polytechnic.

The lack of recognition embittered Lanchester even though appreciation eventually did come. In 1919, Birmingham University awarded him an honorary degree. In 1922, he was finally elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He was made an honorary fellow of the Institutions of Mechanical Engineers and Automobile Engineers. In 1926, Lanchester was made an honorary fellow and awarded the gold medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society. In 1931 came the Daniel Guggenheim gold medal. Lanchester in 1941 was recognized by the Institution of Civil Engineers with its Alfred Ewing gold medal, and, finally, in 1945, came the James Watt international medal, the highest award of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

In his lifetime, Lanchester took out more than four hundred patents for his inventions. Most remarkable of all, Lanchester rarely received financial backing and worked alone with few resources.

Bibliography

Baldwin, Nick. “Lanchester’s Legacy.” Automotive Engineer 26, no. 9 (September, 2001): 112. Provides an overview of Lanchester’s automotive innovations.

Church, Roy. Herbert Austin: The British Motor Car Industry to 1941. London: Europa, 1979. An interesting examination of one of Lanchester’s more successful rivals. Shows well the early trials and tribulations of the British car industry and is particularly good on the interwar period. The introduction provides a stimulating polemic on the subject of British hatred for industry, machines, technology, and those associated with them, especially self-made businessmen.

Kingsford, P. W. Engineers, Inventors, and Workers. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964. A well-written small book covering many aspects of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain based mainly on short biographical sections making up each chapter. Chapter 11 contains an interesting and informative section on Lanchester.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. F. W. Lanchester: The Life of an Engineer. London: Edward Arnold, 1960. The standard, as well as the only, biography of Lanchester. Enormously informative.

Lanchester, George. “F. W. Lanchester, L.L.D., F.R.S., His Life and Work.” Newcomen Society Transactions 30 (1957). A retrospective vindication of the great inventor by his brother and associate.

Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969. One of the standard accounts of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. It discusses well the kinds of handicaps faced by Lanchester, the context within which he worked, and the attitudes that surrounded him. The author criticizes Great Britain for its lack of regard for entrepreneurial spirit during this time.

Penrose, Harald. British Aviation: The Great War and Armistice, 1915-1919. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969. Good on Lanchester mainly through omission. It shows that the founder of the vortex theory of flight was largely ignored by aircraft designers and military planners.

Phelpot, Fenella. “Mechanical Artist.” Professional Engineering 19, no. 4 (February 2, 2006): 47. Profile of Lanchester that also examines the first all-British gasoline-driven car and his other engineering innovations.

Rolt, R. T. C. Victorian Engineering. London: Allen Lane, 1970. Excellent for the context out of which Lanchester emerged. Chapter 10 deals with the inventor and the book contains photographs of Lanchester and his car.

Thomas, D., and T. Donnelly. The Motor Car Industry in Coventry Since the 1890’s. London: Croom Helm, 1985. Interesting on this city in the early period of car design and manufacture. Good on Lanchester’s association with Daimler and the problems all car makers faced.