Frederick W. Lanchester

Frederick William Lanchester (1868 to 1946) was an English polymath and engineer who made important contributions to automotive engineering and aerodynamics and who is credited as a co-inventor of operations research. He built the first British four-wheeled petrol car, completed in 1895, and with his brothers George and Frank formed the Lanchester Engine Company in 1899, reformed as the Lanchester Motor Company after the first firm went bankrupt in 1904. His car designs introduced ideas that later became widely adopted in the industry, among them the disc brake patented in 1902, the torsional crankshaft vibration damper and pressure-fed bearings. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1922. Although admired for his engineering brilliance, he was never commercially successful and lived his last years in straitened circumstances, dying at his home in Birmingham in 1946.