Catch the Wind

 

If you take the coast road from Wollongong and head north towards Sydney you will pass through a little town called Stanwell Park.  Most of the houses are clustered around the beach and there’s not much to see on the highway: just a railway station and a shabby hotel, with a few cottages built perilously close to the cliff edge.  Over the years, several of these cottages have collapsed and many of those left have been abandoned.  Overlooking the town is a coal mine, the reason that the town is there in the first place.

There’s no reason for you to stop and, if you drive on a little way you might catch sight of a memorial to one Lawrence Hargrave, a giant among the early pioneers of aviation.  The road you are driving on is now known as Lawrence Hargrave Drive. Perhaps his name doesn’t have the same recognition factor as Wilbur or Orville Wright, or even the Frenchman, Louis Bleriot, but without the inspired discoveries of Hargrave, the flights of the Wright Brothers and Bleriot would likely have taken place much later.

Lawrence Hargrave came to Australia as a young man and was apprenticed at the Australasian Steam Navigation Company.  His father was a Judge and a shrewd investor.  He was generous with his sons endowing them with long-term investments so that, at the age of 33, when his income reached 1000 pounds a year, Lawrence was able to give up work to live the life of a Gentleman Inventor. Many wealthy gentlemen, and ladies, in Victorian times avidly pursued their interest in science and the natural world and, through their work, significant advances were made.

Lawrence moved to a house in Stanwell Park where the family had an interest in the local coal mine.  He was attracted to the town because its proximity to the sea provided the wind conditions he needed to pursue his interest.  His observations of waves and the movements of fish, snakes and birds had encouraged him to become interested in exploring the possibility of flying and, at first, he thought that, if he wanted to achieve flight, he needed to duplicate the flapping motion of birds.  This wrong direction hampered his work for many years.

Initially, though, he put most of his attention to developing a new kind of engine, light-weight and powerful.  He invented a three-cylinder rotary engine which was revolutionary for its time. Hargrave, as a gentleman-inventor, did not believe in patents so all his designs were circulated freely among the community of people working in this area.  He was in regular contact with other inventors such as the Wright Brothers and Louis Bleriot who took up his ideas with enthusiasm.  Sadly, restrained by patriotism and patents, these fellow-inventors were not as free as Hargrave in sharing their designs.

Hargrave’s second great invention was the box kite.  He worked out that the box structure provided much more lift than the traditional kite and in November 1894, using an arrangement of four box kites strung together with piano wire, he was lifted from the ground to a height of 16 feet.  He was the first person in Australia to fly using a heavier-than-air machine and he demonstrated  that flight was possible and safe.  When the first European aeroplanes were built, they used the Hargrave box-kite construction.

Lawrence Hargrave never received the acclaim he deserved during his lifetime.  He could not even find an Australian institution who would display his models and, eventually, he had to send them to Munich where they were treated with the respect they deserved.  The models have now been returned to Australia and are on display at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

If you continue your journey and leave the town of Stanwell Park behind, you will begin to climb Bald Hill.  In the carpark at the top of the hill you will find the memorial to Lawrence Hargrave which was erected in 1940 but, more significantly, on almost any day when there is some breeze you will see hang gliding enthusiasts catching the wind and enjoying their sport.  On the hill above the beach where Lawrence Hargrave made his first discoveries into the nature of flight, the value of his work is being demonstrated and celebrated each day.