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Baden Baden-Powell
Baden Baden-Powell
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Baden Baden-Powell

Baden Fletcher Smyth Baden-Powell, FRAS FRMetS FRGS (22 May 1860 – 3 October 1937) was a military aviation pioneer, and President of the Royal Aeronautical Society from 1900 to 1907.[1]

Key Information

Family

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Baden was the youngest child of the Rev. Prof. Baden Powell, and the youngest brother of Warington Baden-Powell, George Baden-Powell, Frank Baden-Powell, Robert Baden-Powell and Agnes Baden-Powell.

His mother, Henrietta Grace nee Smyth, was a daughter of Admiral William Henry Smyth, and was the third wife of Rev. Prof. Baden Powell (the previous two having died). She was a gifted musician and artist, but when her husband died she was left with eight small children - Baden only three weeks old - and four older step-children, so she had to be "tough". Baden did not marry - his mother was quite brutal in trying to keep her children and herself as a family.[2] Baden was god-father to, among others, his brother's daughter Betty Clay nee Baden-Powell.[3]

Military

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Baden-Powell was commissioned a Lieutenant in the Scots Guards on 29 July 1882, and served with the Guards Camel Regiment in the Nile Expedition (1884–85) in Egypt and Sudan. Promotion to Captain followed on 5 February 1896, and to Major on 24 June 1899.

Baden-Powell was one of the first to see the use of aviation in a military context.[4][5] He was a military aviation pioneer, see below.

Baden-Powell served with the 1st battalion of his regiment in South Africa during the Second Boer War, and was present at the battles of Belmont (23 November 1899), Modder River (28 November 1899), and Magersfontein (11 Dec 1899). He was in the Relief Column that in May 1900 relieved the siege of Mafeking, where his elder brother was in command.[6] A month after the end of the war in late May 1902, Baden-Powell returned to Britain with his regiment in the SS Tagus.[7]

In 1915, aged 55, he was a Censor at Boulogne.[8]

Aviation and inventions

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Baden-Powell joined the army at 22; within a year he was lecturing on military uses of lighter-than-air flight. He was one of several notables expressing interest in the Aeronautical Navigation Conference at the 1893 World's Fair. In 1894, Baden-Powell made the first British military balloon flight.[9] Baden-Powell wrote an article including "What will the good citizens of London say when they see a hostile dynamite-carrying aerostat hovering over St. Paul's?" He wrote to Lord Kelvin, who replied that he had "not a molecule of faith" in flight.[citation needed]

Baden-Powell became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (elected in 1891)[10] and a Fellow and, in 1900, President of the Royal Aeronautical Society. He also wrote, "Ballooning as a Sport", published in 1907 by William Blackwood and Sons.[11]

With his sister Agnes,[12] they built and flew in their own hot-air balloons, man-carrying kites,[13] gliders and powered aircraft. He invented a twelve-foot man-carrying kite that he flew at Whitton Park, Hounslow, England,[14] and later a three-kite system that he called the Levitor.[15] He helped Marconi in Newfoundland in his efforts to transmit and receive radio messages across the Atlantic, using Baden-Powell's man-carrying kite to lift the radio aerial.[citation needed]

Baden-Powell also developed a collapsible military bicycle.[16] He obtained one of the first British patents for a television system, "An electrical method of reproducing distant scenes visually", published 19 April 1921 (GB161706).[17] And he contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica entry on 'kite-flying'.[18]

Patents

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  • Patent GB-1903-26821
  • Patent GB-1906-6443
  • Patent GB-1907-9691
  • Patent GB-1895-17683 Kites, Filed 23 September 1895
  • Patent DE-1896-88995 Kites for lifting loads

Bibliography

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Scouting

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Baden-Powell was the first who brought flying-based activities into Scouting[21] in the form of kite and model aeroplane building. He can be considered the founder of Air Scouting[21] even though he thought it was hardly feasible to have special 'Air Scouts'.[22]

Baden-Powell was President and later District Commissioner of a North London District, was District Commissioner of Sevenoaks District, Kent between 1918 and 1935, and was Headquarters Commissioner for Aviation from 1923, until his death in 1937.

Unknown President of the Aeronautical Society
1902 - 1909 		Succeeded by

Notes

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