Frederick W. Lanchester
Frederick William Lanchester, was an English polymath and engineer who made important contributions to automotive engineering and to aerodynamics, and co-invented the topic of operations research.
Lanchester became a pioneer British motor-car builder, a hobby which resulted in him building the first British car in 1895 and developing a successful car company.
Some of the innovations Lanchester developed have gone on to become widely adopted in the car industry.
Biography
Lanchester was born in 18 Alma Square in St John's Wood, London to Henry Jones Lanchester, an architect, and his wife Octavia, a tutor of Latin and mathematics. He was the fourth of eight children; his older brother Henry Vaughan Lanchester also became an architect; his younger sister Edith Lanchester was a socialist and suffragette; and his brothers George Herbert Lanchester and Frank joined him in forming the Lanchester Motor Company.When he was a year old, his father relocated the family to Brighton, and young Frederick attended a preparatory school and a nearby boarding school, where he did not distinguish himself. He himself, thinking back, remarked that, "it seemed that Nature was conserving his energy". However, he did succeed in winning a scholarship to the Hartley Institution, in Southampton, and after three years won another scholarship, to Kensington College, which is now part of Imperial College. He supplemented his instruction in applied engineering by attending evening classes at Finsbury Technical School. Unfortunately, he ended his education without having obtained a formal qualification.
When he completed his education in 1888, he acquired a job as a Patent Office draughtsman for £3 a week. About this time he registered a patent for an , a draughtsman's instrument for hatching, shading and other geometrical design work.
In 1919, at the age of fifty-one, Lanchester married Dorothea Cooper, the daughter of Thomas Cooper, the vicar of St Peter's Church in Field Broughton in Lancashire. The couple relocated to 41 Bedford Square, London, but in 1924 Lanchester built a house to his own design in Oxford Road, Moseley, Birmingham. The couple remained there for the rest of their life together but did not have any children.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1922, and in 1926 the Royal Aeronautical Society awarded him a fellowship and a gold medal.
In 1925 Lanchester founded a company named Lanchester Laboratories Ltd., to perform industrial research and development work. Although he developed an improved radio and gramophone speaker, he was unable to market it successfully because of the Great Depression. He continued, overworking, until in 1934 his health failed and the company was forced to close. He was diagnosed eventually with Parkinson's disease and was reportedly much grieved that this, along with cataracts in both eyes, prevented him from "doing any official job" during the Second World War.
He was awarded gold medals by the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1941 and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1945.
Although he achieved his fame by his creative brilliance as an engineer, Frederick Lanchester was a man of diverse interests, blessed with a fine singing voice. Using the pseudonym of Paul Netherton-Herries he published two volumes of poetry.
Lanchester, who had never been successful commercially, lived the remainder of his life in straitened circumstances, and it was only through charitable help that he was able to remain in his home. He died at his home, Dyott End, on 8 March 1946.
Work
Gas engines
Near the end of 1888, Lanchester went to work for the Forward Gas Engine Company of Saltley, Birmingham as assistant works manager. His contract of employment included a clause stating that any technical improvements that he made would be the intellectual property of the company. Lanchester wisely struck this out before signing. This action was prescient, for in 1889 he invented and patented a Pendulum Governor to control engine speeds, for which he received a royalty of ten shillings for each one fitted to a Forward Engine. In 1890 he patented a Pendulum Accelerometer, for recording the acceleration and braking of road and rail vehicles.After the death of the current works manager, Lanchester was promoted to his job. He then designed a new gas engine of greater size and power than any produced by the company before. The engine was a vertical one with horizontal, opposed poppet valves for inlet and exhaust. The engine had a very low compression ratio, but was very economical to operate.
In 1890 Lanchester patented a self-starting device for gas engines. He subsequently sold the rights for his invention to the Crossley Gas Engine Company for a handsome sum.
He rented a small workshop next to the Forward Company's works and used this for experimental work of his own. In this workshop, he produced a small vertical single cylinder gas engine of, running at 600 rpm. This was coupled directly to a dynamo, which Lanchester used to light the company's office and part of the factory.
Petrol engines
Lanchester began to find the conflict between his job as works manager and his research work irksome. Therefore, in 1893, he resigned his job in favour of his younger brother George. At about the same time, he produced a second engine type similar in design to his previous one but operating on benzene at 800 rpm. An important part of his new engine was the revolutionary carburettor, for mixing the fuel and air correctly. His invention was known as a wick carburettor, because fuel was drawn into a series of wicks, from where it was vapourised. He patented this invention in 1905.Lanchester installed his new petrol engine in a flat-bottomed launch, which the engine drove via a stern paddle wheel. Lanchester built the launch in the garden of his home in Olton, Warwickshire. The boat was launched at Salter's slipway in Oxford in 1904, and was the first motorboat built in Britain.
Cars
Having put a petrol engine in a boat, the next logical step was to use it for road transport. Lanchester set about designing a four-wheeled vehicle to be driven by a petrol engine. He designed a new petrol engine of, with two crankshafts rotating in opposite directions, for exemplary smoothness, and air cooling by way of vanes mounted on the flywheel. There was a revolutionary epicyclic gearbox giving two forward speeds plus reverse, and which drove the rear wheels via chains. With a walnut body, it seated three, side by side. 402 ccLanchester Engine Company
In December 1899 Lanchester and his brothers created the Lanchester Engine Company in order to manufacture cars that could be sold to the public. A factory was acquired in Montgomery Street, Sparkbrook, Birmingham, known as the Armourer Works. In his new factory, Lanchester designed a new ten horsepower twin cylinder engine. He decided to use a worm drive transmission and designed a machine to cut the worm gears. He patented this machine in 1905 and it continued for 25 years to produce all of the Lanchester worm gears. He also introduced the use of splined shafts and couplings in place of keys and keyways, another innovation that he patented. The back axle had roller bearings and Lanchester designed the machines to make these. His car was designed with the engine placed between the two front seats rather than at the front, and also had a side-mounted tiller rather than a steering wheel. The transmission also included a system similar to modern disc brakes that clamped the clutch disc for braking, rather than using a separate system as in most cars. On 1 December 1902, Lanchester was awarded Patent No. 26,407 for the disc brake.The new 10 hp car appeared in 1901 and remained in production until 1905, with only minor design modifications. He became a friend of Rudyard Kipling and would send him experimental models to test. In 1905, Lanchester produced a 20 hp four-cylinder engine, and in 1906 he produced a 28 hp six-cylinder engine. Although Sir Henry Royce had already tackled the problem of crankshaft torsional oscillation and consequent vibration in straight-6 engines, Lanchester analysed the problem scientifically and invented the torsional crankshaft vibration damper as a solution to the problem of engine balance. His design, patented in 1907, used a secondary flywheel coupled to the end of the crankshaft with a viscous clutch. At around the same time Lanchester also patented a harmonic balancer to cancel out the unbalanced secondary forces in a four-cylinder engine, using two balance weights rotating at twice crankshaft speed in opposite directions.
The Lanchester Engine Company sold about 350 cars of various designs between 1900 and 1904, when they became bankrupt due to the incompetence of the board of directors. It was immediately reformed as The Lanchester Motor Company. During this period he also experimented with fuel injection, turbochargers, added steering wheels in 1907 and invented the accelerator pedal to help control engine operation, which previously would not cease if the operator had problems. He invented detachable wire wheels, bearings that were pressure-fed with oil, stamped steel pistons, piston rings, hollow connecting rods, the torsional vibration damper for 6-cylinder engines, and the harmonic balancer for 4-cylinder designs.
Eventually Lanchester became disillusioned with the activities of the company's directors, and in 1910 resigned as general manager, becoming their part-time consultant and technical adviser. His brothers, George and Frank, assumed technical and administrative responsibility for the company.