George Augustine Taylor
| George Augustine Taylor | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 1, 1872 Sydney, Australia |
| Died | January 20, 1928 (aged 55) |
| Nationality | Australian |
George Augustine Taylor (1 August 1872 – 20 January 1928) was an Australian artist, journalist, and inventor.
Taylor was born at Sydney in 1872. He began his working life articled to an architect (a Mr Hobbs). However he first became known as an artist, and was a member of the Sydney Bohemian set in the 1890s, whose doings he was afterwards to record in his Those Were the Days, a volume of reminiscences published in 1918. He contributed drawings to The Bulletin, Worker, Sunday Times, Referee, and London Punch, but later became interested in aviation and radio, and did some remarkable work in connection with them. Taylor was a member of the Dawn and Dusk Club, an association of bohemians and intellectuals that included the writer Henry Lawson. Taylor married his wife, Florence Mary Parsons in 1907.
He experimented with a motorless aeroplane (glider) and, in November 1909, constructed one of full size. He also contacted the retired inventor Lawrence Hargrave at this time. On 5 December, at Narrabeen, Sydney, Taylor flew in the glider he had designed and became the first person in Australia to fly in a heavier-than-air craft. Florence Taylor flew in her husband's glider on the same day. Much gliding had been done in America and Europe many years before this, but the principle and design of Taylor's machine appear to have anticipated the types being used in Europe more than 10 years later. In March 1910 Taylor arranged a demonstration of wireless at Heathcote for his superior officers in the army. He enlisted the aid of three civilians to perform this task, Taylor not being an inventor or radio operator himself. Messer’s Kirkby, Hannam and Wilkinson bought their own equipment with them set it up and performed the demonstrations. Taylor always used Kirkby to manufacture wireless sets and demonstrate wireless on other occasions such as at his lecture on the air age and its significance. Hannam went on to be Mawson’s wireless operator on his Antarctic expeditions. Kirkby had built the Shaw wireless works. In 1910 and 1911 he succeeded in communicating from one part of a railway train to another, and in exchanging messages between trains running at full speed. He had founded the aerial league in 1909 and was a co-founder of the Wireless Institute of New South Wales (now the Wireless Institute of Australia and Amateur Radio New South Wales) in 1910.
...
Wikipedia