Frederick William Lanchester, 1868-1946

Abstract

Frederick William Lanchester was born in Lewisham on 28 October 1868. His father was an architect, a profession which his elder brother also followed. In his early youth his family migrated to Hove where he spent most of his childhood and became very attached to Sussex. In later life he delighted to spend most of his holidays in that county. Lanchester was educated at Hartley College, Southampton, and later both at the Royal College of Science under Professor Goodeve, whose inspiring and imaginative teaching made a very deep and lifelong impression on his young pupil, and at Finsbury Technical College where he learnt workshop practice. This latter also must have been well taught indeed for, at a very early age, he became a master of manufacturing technique and was himself a very skilled craftsman. In 1889, at the age of twenty-one, he joined the firm of the Forward Gas- Engine Co., a relatively small engineering company at Saltley, Birmingham, engaged on the manufacture of gas-engines, at first as assistant works manager and designer and the next year as works manager. He at once set himself to analyse thoroughly the performance of the gas-engines they were building and, as a result, introduced many detail improvements, which were reflected in improved economy and power output. He devised and developed what came to be known as the pendulum governor, a very simple piece of mechanism embodied in the valve gear which superseded the centrifugal governor and soon became general practice for small gas-engines. His next invention was the Lanchester engine starter. Prior to this, all gas-engines except the very largest had to be started by pulling the flywheel round, an exhausting and often a dangerous procedure. Very briefly the Lanchester starter consisted of a cylindrical chamber through which the gas, or at least some portion of the gas, passed on its way to the engine cylinder. In this chamber was provided a restricted orifice through which a small proportion of the gas and air mixture could escape and immediately above the orifice a pilot gas flame. Before starting, the chamber was, of course, full of air, and on admitting the gas, air at first, and later a mixture of gas and air, flowed out of the orifice and therefore across the pilot gas flame.