John Stringfellow was born at Attercliffe, Sheffield, England in 1799 and so started a lifelong obsession with flight which paved the way for what was to help others in their reach for the stars. He grew up to become a precision engineer specialising in the production of carriages and bobbins for the lace making industry in Nottingham where he now lived. This was about the time that the Luddite movement was active and started breaking up the machines that they thought were taking their jobs. So the factory in which John Stringfellow worked moved to the town of Chard in Somerset and he was asked to set up the machinery for a new factory; he was thirty years old and the year was 1829. stringfellow Henson John Stringfellow William Henson He continued to make his way in business and become a parish councillor. He found time to observe the flight of birds in more detail and took particular interest in the rook. In 1835 John and a friend William Samuel Henson, with the same interest in flight found their exploits being recorded by a Margaret Banfield. In their first experiments based on the flight of birds John and William discovered that it took a rook one foot of wing span to lift half a pound of weight at twenty miles per hour to hold it in the air. With this knowledge it was not long before John had constructed a light weight steam engine to rotate a propeller which could be slung underneath an aeroframe made of silk, cane and string. Stringfellow’s engineering skill was so good that he was able to construct a steam engine weighing only twelve ounces, with a paper thin copper boiler, which he sent to London by post for his friend Henson to see. The first model that Stringfellow and Henson tried to fly on Barlow Down had a twenty foot wing span, but their efforts at evading the sightseers by holding their test flights early in the morning had a detrimental effect for the dew wetted the cloth and increased the weight of the plane to prevent it from taking off. Henson gave up and went back to London to pursue his other interests including patenting many inventions and the proposed start of an airline company. Undaunted Stringfellow continued his experiments and took to holding his trials inside a silk mill as it gave greater stability with wind and moisture. In 1848 he flew a ten feet wing span plane held on a wire for stability until it was released by a spring to rise into the air at ten to twelve miles per hour. The wire was used as an aid to keep the plane flying in a straight line because he was having difficulty controlling the direction of the plane using only the tail plane. Interest in aeronautics was so great that the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain was formed in 1866. On the 13th of December, 1868 when John was sixty eight he and his son Fred were invited to London to show their triplane at The Crystal Palace exhibition. The plane was flown indoors from a wire at twenty miles per hour in front of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Sunderland. This was twenty years before the Wright brothers made the first manned powered flight. John Stringfellow died in 1883.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 04:50:17 +0000
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