Frederick W. Lanchester

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Frederick W. Lanchester : biography

23 October 1868 – 8 March 1946

Lanchester was discouraged by the attitude to his aeronautical theory, and concentrated on automobile development for the next ten years. In 1907 he published a two-volume work, Aerial Flight, dealing with the problems of powered flight. In it, he developed a model for the vortices that occur behind wings during flight, which included the first full description of lift and drag. His book was not well received in England, but created interest in Germany where the scientist, Ludwig Prandtl mathematically confirmed the correctness of Lanchester’s vortex theory. In his second volume, he turned his attention to aircraft stability, aerodonetics, developing Lanchester’s phugoid theory which contained a description of oscillations and stalls. During this work he outlined the basic layout almost all aircraft have used since then. Lanchester’s contribution to aeronautical science was not recognised until the end of his life.

In 1909 Herbert Henry Asquith’s Royal Advisory Committee on Aeronautics was established, and Lanchester was appointed a member. Lanchester guessed correctly that aircraft would play an increasingly important part in warfare, unlike the military command, which envisioned warfare as continuing much the same way it had in the past.

Lanchester’s Power Laws

During World War I Lanchester was particularly interested in predicting the outcome of aerial battles. In 1916 he published his ideas on aerial warfare in a book entitled "Aircraft in Warfare: the Dawn of the Fourth Arm", which included a description of a series of differential equations that are known now as Lanchester’s Power Laws. The Laws described how two forces would attrit each other in combat, and demonstrated that the ability of modern weapons to operate at long ranges dramatically changed the nature of combat—a force that was twice as large had been twice as powerful in the past, but now it was four times, the square of the quotient.Lanchester F.W. "Aircraft in Warfare: the Dawn of the Fourth Arm"Lanchester F.W., Mathematics in Warfare in The World of Mathematics, Vol. 4 (1956) Ed. Newman, J.R., Simon and Schuster, 2138-2157

Lanchester’s Laws were originally applied practically in the United States to study logistics, where they developed into operations research (OR) (operational research in UK usage). OR techniques are now widely used, perhaps most so for business.

The post-war company

After the war the Company introduced the more conventional Forty engine, a rival for the Rolls-Royce 40/50 hp; it was joined in 1924 by an overhead cam six cylinder engine. In 1921 Lanchester was the first company to export left-hand drive cars. Tinted glass was also introduced on these cars for the first time. A 4440 cc straight eight engine was introduced at the 1928 Southport Rally, again with overhead cams: it proved to be the last "real" Lanchester, for in 1931 the company was acquired by B.S.A., who had also owned the Daimler Company since 1909. From then until 1956, Lanchester cars were built at the Daimler factory in Coventry as sister cars with Daimler, like R-R with Bentley [ref Lanchester Legacy trilogy].

Lanchester’s Legacy

Lanchester was respected by most fellow engineers as a genius, but he did not have the business acumen to convert his inventiveness to financial gain. Whereas James Watt had found an able business partner in Matthew Boulton, who managed business affairs, Lanchester had no such assistance. During most of his career he lacked financial backing to be able to develop his ideas and perform research, as he would have liked. He nonetheless made many contributions in many different fields. He wrote more than sixty technical papers for various institutions and organisations, and received awards from a number of bodies.

An open-air sculpture, the Lanchester Car Monument, in the Bloomsbury, Heartlands, area of Birmingham, designed by Tim Tolkien, is on the site where the Lanchester company built their first four-wheel, petrol car in 1895. It was unveiled by Frank Lanchester’s daughter, Mrs Marjorie Bingeman, and the Lanchester historian, Chris Clark at the Centenary Rally in 1995.