Paul Haenlein
Paul Haenlein ( born October 17, 1835 in Mainz, † January 27, 1905 in Mainz ) was a German inventor and pioneer of airships.
Life
Paul Haenlein was the son of the Mainz ship captain Johann Baptist Haenlein and his wife Wilhelmine, born Poirez. The family since 1764, operated a fish export business. After connecting the secondary school and a broken model carpentry apprenticeship, he learned mechanical engineering at the company party. Subsequently, he studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Karlsruhe. As a mechanical engineer, he worked until 1861 at the Cologne Maschinenbau AG in Bayenthal and then moved to Stockholm. In 1864 he got a job as a machine designer in London. During this time he developed the idea of a gas engine driven, thereby dirigible. The force required gas should be taken from the balloon envelope. On April 1, 1865 he received a patent on this invention.
1868 Haenlein returned back to Mainz and began to build a scale model of his airship. With a length of tens of meters, the balloon body having a diameter of more than two meters. Haenlein presented the model of the Mainz public on October 5, 1871 in the fruit hall before. Although the demonstration was successful, he was not able to find private funding for the construction of a large airship.
He had more success in Vienna with a second model. After two demonstrations in the large ball room of the Vienna Hofburg and in Sofiensäle Haenlein could set up a company " for the purpose of execution of a large passenger-carrying balloon " with the help of the Lower Austrian trade association. 1872, the 50 meter long airship Aeolus was built. The casing was made of Reithofferplatz in Wimpassing. Because Haenlein received no town gas for balloon filling in Wiener Neustadt, the first test of the airship took place in Brno on 13 December 1872. The coal gas used to fill but turned out to be too heavy. After Haenlein had unceremoniously the large cooling water reservoir replaced by an emergency cooler, the airship rose to a height of up to 20 meters. Loosely held by soldiers on ropes, it reached a speed of 18 km / h more than any airship before, and was thus controllable even against the wind. To a further development of the airship did not happen because Haenlein could find no further funds under the Vienna founder crash of 1873 and the company dissolved.
Haenlein was hired shortly thereafter by Maschinenfabrik Sulzer in Winterthur, Switzerland as a machine designer. In 1878 he moved to Maschinenfabrik Friedrich von Martini in Frauenfeld, where he was twenty years worked. As in Berlin in 1881 the German Association was founded to promote the airship with the aim " to bring possibility of producing dirigible airships for general information and to promote the organization of contributions necessary for their construction funds " which Haenlein kicked him in the same year with. His hope of being able to procure on the club means to continue his work, was not fulfilled. On his return to Mainz, he summed up his ideas in 1904 to the airship together in the brochure about the current stage of the dirigible.
Haenlein died in 1905 at the age of 69 years at the former St. Vincenz- Hospital Mainz. His grave is located on the main Mainz cemetery.
Performance
Haenleins merit is to have the first to recognize the potential of the internal combustion engine for the air shipping. He himself said in 1882:
His idea to incorporate parts of the carrier gas as power gas for the engine was at least tentatively taken up 60 years later, for example, the LZ 129
Writings (selection )
- Paul Haenlein: The dirigible in case of war. In: journal of the Association for the promotion of aeronautics 4, 1885, pp. 174-177
- Paul Haenlein: About the current stage of the dirigible. Grethlein, Leipzig 1904