Great Australians you should know: Lawrence Hargrave

Something that features greatly in this series – although not unique to our own countrymen – was a belief that inventions should not be patented, thinking it better for them to remain unencumbered and thus of greater benefit to mankind. Thus it was with Lawrence Hargrave, the man who was, effectively, the father of flight.

We claim Lawrence Hargrave as Australian, and so we might, even though he was born in Greenwich and educated at Westmoreland before coming to Sydney in 1865, aged 15 years. His father intended Lawrence to enter law but he failed his matriculation examination before taking on an apprenticeship in a shipping company’s engineering works. There he learned and developed a great skill in draughting and design.

For a while, following his apprenticeship, he embarked as ship’s engineer on a number of trips of exploration, even being shipwrecked on one occasion. A group set sail for New Guinea in 1872 on board an unseaworthy brig named Maria. She fetched up on Bramble Reef, sinking with great loss of life. Thankfully, young Hargrave was spared.

By 1879, he was employed at Sydney Observatory as an astronomical observer, a position he held for five years. His father, a judge and prudent speculator, died before Lawrence turned 30, bestowing investments that provided an income of some £1,000 a year. He retired to become a gentleman engineer and inventor.

The quietly spoken, unassertive young man was acutely perceptive. From his observations of fish, waves, snakes and the flight of birds, his thoughts turned to human flight. In an unfortunate twist, his experiments with flapping wings – in a desire to follow in the path of nature – were to hamper him somewhat for the rest of his life, but not all of his eggs were in that one basket.

He experimented with model aircraft powered by rubber bands or clockwork mechanisms, his early models all monoplanes. He investigated and tried a variety of planing surfaces, maintaining drawings and notes as he went. His work led on to methods of overcoming the weight of man and machine and how to power an aircraft heavier than air. He designed and manufactured a number of petrol and compressed air engines, including one of his great inventions, an air-driven three-cylinder rotary. Unpatented, there was later conjecture that a French manufacturer used many of its features ten years later in the design of their rotary engine that would see service in World War One.

The quiet and quietly determined Hargrave moved to Stanwell Park, south of Sydney, its dunes and beaches well suited to his flight experiments.  For much the same reason, the area is a modern day home of hang gliding. His aircraft, initially monoplanes, proved unstable and not easy to control. As tests and experimentation with airfoils developed, he began trialling box kites. On a fine, warm morning in 1894, he made his way down to the beach carrying a complex looking apparatus in which he might put the brisk breeze to use and attempt personal flight.

On that beautiful November day, using four tiered box kites utilising the curved airfoils he had so carefully designed and constructed, Lawrence Hargrave lifted off the sand, the first person ever to be raised from the ground by a heavier than air machine in a vertical take-off. Albeit tethered so he didn’t go sailing away on the wind, he achieved a height of around five metres and was pleased with the level of stability achieved. Some years later, when the Europeans began to build aeroplanes, their designs were based on Hargrave’s box kite principle. In a paper to the Royal Society, he wrote about, “…a safe means of making an ascent with a flying machine, of trying the same without any risk of accident, and descending, is now at the service of any experimenter who wishes to use it.”

But again, no patent. As an inventor, he believed all scientific advances ought to be disseminated freely. The American pioneer Oscar Chanute, full of praise for the Australian’s work, was one of those who took advantage of the new design principles. Later the very same airfoil design, capable of greater lift and stability than anything that had gone before, aided the Wright brothers to take off in their powered biplane on that famous winter day in 1903 at Kittyhawk.

In the words of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney, “While no single individual can be attributed to the invention of the aeroplane, Hargrave belonged to an elite body of scientists and researchers (along with Octave Chanute, Otto Lilienthal and Percy Sinclair Pilcher) whose experiments and inventions paved the way for the first powered, controlled flight achieved by the Wright Brothers on December 17, 1903.”

Hargrave was a pacifist, so it was doubly sad that his only son, Geoffrey, lost his life in the First World War. Beyond that, I firmly believe he would have been dismayed to think that two of his designs, the airfoil wing and the rotary engine, would play an ever increasing part in hostilities. He died of peritonitis in July 1915, succeeded by three daughters.

By the way, most Australians, if they remember Lawrence Hargrave at all, will know him from the obverse of early $20 notes that featured his face and an outline of some of his design work.