Robert Esnault-Pelterie was a French aircraft designer and aerospace engineer, born in Paris in 1881 and died in Nice in 1957. He developed an early aileron control system and the joystick flight control still used in aircraft cockpits, and his REP company built monoplane designs including the REP 1 of 1907, the year he made his first powered flight. In 1913 he published a paper presenting the rocket equation and calculating the energy needed to reach the Moon and nearby planets, and his 1930 book L'Astronautique helped found the theory of space travel. He co-founded the Prix REP-Hirsch in 1928, the first prize dedicated to astronautics, and is regarded alongside Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and von Braun as a founder of modern rocketry.
Facts
FAQs
Did Robert Esnault-Pelterie invent the joystick?
He is credited with the joystick and held a patent on it, which he later enforced in court.
His Wikipedia biography credits him as the inventor of the joystick flight control and says he owned a patent on the design. It adds that the design was integrated in 1908 into the eighth design of the French aviator Louis Blériot, setting the pattern for later aircraft flight control systems. After the First World War he was involved in litigation over the patent, because many wartime aircraft had used the design, and the damages and royalties he won made him a wealthy man. The same article also calls him the inventor of the center stick aircraft control, so the credit rests on his patent and that biography rather than on a single settled first-use record.
Did Robert Esnault-Pelterie invent the aileron?
He developed an early aileron arrangement, but a patent description by M. P. W. Boulton dates from 1868.
The biography says that after he condemned the Wright brothers' wing-warping approach he developed the concept of the aileron, fitting a pair of mid-gap control surfaces in front of the wings. It describes this as a potentially initial use of ailerons of any sort, believed to pre-date all others, but it also notes an earlier patent description: British inventor M. P. W. Boulton had a patent description of ailerons approved in 1868. So his is an early working use of the idea rather than the first description of it.
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Same As
Also in Space and Astronomy Atlas: the same subject.
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Sources
1. Robert Esnault-Pelterie biography (Wikipedia)
Lead, death date
Robert Albert Charles Esnault-Pelterie (French pronunciation: [ʁɔbɛʁ albɛʁ ʃaʁl eno pɛltəʁi]; 8 November 1881-6 December 1957) was a French aircraft designer and spaceflight theorist.
Lead, first sentence
was a French aircraft designer and spaceflight theorist.
In Group: Aircraft Designers and Engineers, Lead sentence
Robert Albert Charles Esnault-Pelterie (French pronunciation: [ʁɔbɛʁ albɛʁ ʃaʁl eno pɛltəʁi]; 8 November 1881-6 December 1957) was a French aircraft designer and spaceflight theorist.
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