Today in Technology History
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February 11
As we continue to celebrate the centennial of flight this year, we'll occasionally introduce you to the obscure engineers whose vital contributions to aviation history tend to get less attention than the flashier deeds of the pilots. Today, for instance, we discuss an engineer whose pioneering work in aerodynamics still shapes modern aviation.
And we mean that literally, since the work of Alexander Martin Lippisch actually changed the shape of airplanes. Lippisch was born in Munich, Germany in 1894. His lifelong interest in aviation was kindled by a boyhood experience: when he was about fourteen, he saw Orville Wright in a flying exhibition in Berlin.
Lippisch was educated at the University of Heidelberg. After catching pneumonia in the German infantry in WWI, he was reassigned to an aerial reconnaissance unit. Later in the war he took a job at an aircraft company, where he began serious work in aerodynamics. He constructed gliders and sailplanes and experimented with radical airplane designs, concluding that arrow-shaped planes would reach the highest speeds.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Lippisch introduced a number of innovations, including a series of planes without tails (the "Stork" series) that could reach impressive speeds with very small motors. His early experiments on gliders led him to design planes with blade-like triangular wings, so that he is considered the father of "delta" (that is, triangular) wing design. Many prominent civilian and military planes used today have delta wings.
During WWII, Lippisch worked for Messerschmitt, the company that built many of Nazi Germany's warplanes. His main contribution was the creation of the world's first operational rocket-powered airplane, the ME-163B. It was the fastest airplane in the world at the time, capable of attaining speeds of over 620 miles per hour -- more than 200 miles per hour faster than any plane the U.S. had at the time. (Some reports suggest the ME-163B could even exceed 700 miles per hour.)
The ME-163B was just an experimental plane, however, and never used in combat. After the war, Lippisch was one of the first of the German scientists and engineers transplanted to America by the U.S. government. He did work for the U.S. military -- helping to design the U.S. Air Force's first fighter with delta wings, the F-102A -- and he also worked for commercial plane manufacturers.
He continued to work on many aviation projects in his remaining decades. While he was most famous for designing planes that looked like they were "all wing," in his later years his biggest project was actually a wingless aircraft called the "Aerodyne" that looked like a flying fuselage. That project and several others remained unfinished when he died on February 11, 1976 at the age of 81.
Related links:
Click here to read about Lippisch's Stork and delta designs.
Lippisch also designed a remarkable experimental plane called the DM-1, which you can see pictured here and here.
Click here to see pictures of the Aerodyne models Lippisch worked on.
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